Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate the goodwill that the minister brings to this subject and I do not for a second deny the importance of the matters that she has been discussing, but I do think I need to put it on the record again in this House that ministerial statements of this nature verge on abuse of the parliament. Ministerial statements are supposed to announce new policy; they are not supposed to re-announce old policy. They certainly should not be an opportunity for a government to engage in self-congratulation over something that was announced many, many months ago. The government’s new practice of bunging on several statements after question time is clearly a deliberate device to delay the matter of public importance debate and, in so doing, to deny opposition members of parliament the opportunity to get on the news bulletins on the subject of their political choice for the day.

Let me make it very clear, dealing specifically with the substance of this statement, that there is only one reason for the changes which the minister has re-announced today. Brendan Nelson, the member for Bradfield, forced the government to make these changes. By proposing a $30-a-week increase in the single age pension in the middle of last year, he made it inevitable that the government would follow suit. The pensioners of Australia have one person above all others to thank for the changes which the minister has yet again specified today; namely, the retiring member for Bradfield. This is a significant achievement—one of many significant achievements that the member for Bradfield has. It is to his credit that it is an achievement that he was able to bring about from opposition.

Not for one second do I begrudge the pensioners of Australia, particularly the single age pensioners of Australia, this increase in their money. But it is one thing to make this promise when the budget surplus was thought, when Dr Nelson did this, to be in the order of $20 billion. It is quite another to deliver on this commitment with a budget deficit in the order of $30 billion, as it was when the government finally made the commitment. The pensioners of Australia thoroughly deserve this money, let me make that crystal clear, but the extra $3 billion a year plus that these changes will cost when fully implemented will have to be paid for every year into the future, and there is certainly no provision whatsoever in this budget for the kinds of savings measures, extra revenue measures and additional productivity measures that our country will need in order to make these additional payments as affordable as they should be. In fact, far from giving us the kind of productive economy that would make these extra payments easily affordable, the government has gone backwards by re-regulating the labour market and by proposing a giant carbon tax that would cascade through every aspect of our economy.

Let me say this: paying pensioners more is not a reform; it is just a change. Paying single pensioners 66 per cent of the married rate is a structural change. It is still not a reform, although it is a structural change, but again let me say that it is one that has been forced on this government by Dr Brendan Nelson, the member for Bradfield. The only real reform in the package that has been re-announced today is the government’s decision to raise the pension age, by slow steps, from 65 to 67. I am not for a second saying that that is bad policy. It is good policy. It is such good policy that I have said that the government should go further faster. But it would only have been a courageous reform, as opposed to a rather sneaky by-the-back-door reform, if the government had had the guts to say that that was its policy before the election rather than springing it, as it has done, on the general public after the election.

Let me deal briefly, in conclusion, with the minister’s charge—and it is the standard line from members opposite. I thought the minister was better than that. I did not think the minister was quite such a slave to focus groups and to the Leader of the House’s edicts as to come in here and repeat the mantra. Nevertheless, I was wrong. She is lesser than I thought. So she has come in here and repeated the mantra about years of neglect. Let me remind her and the House that the real income of pensioners increased by 20 per cent—by more than two per cent a year—over the life of the Howard government. In addition to that, there were one-off bonuses paid to most categories of pensioner and there was a utilities allowance paid to pensioners for the first time. It was thanks to the good economic management of the Howard government that these increases were made possible. It is true that in the year or so before these changes the government has announced today came into being pensioners were under more pressure. And do you know why? It is because for the first time in 12 years wages rapidly exceeded the cost of living. Pensioners did so well under the Howard government because the growth of wages was so far in advance of the cost of living.

In conclusion, I welcome these changes very sincerely, but I do regret the other changes that the government has made that will make these changes so difficult to afford on an ongoing basis in the years to come. The highest duty of a compassionate and decent society is to make ample provision for the least fortunate, for those who are least able to look after themselves, and I regret that the poor economic management of this government will make it harder in the years to come to give the pensioners of this country the better life that they deserve.

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