Milton Dick (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Oh, we've just heard, 'The tide is turning.' Let me guess: the Prime Minister's got his mojo back; the Treasurer's got his mojo back. Every second week: 'We've got the mojo back'—we hear that time and time again. We heard that the Batman by-election was the test. We heard that the budget was the test. But do you know what? Time and time again we're seeing the government not understanding what Middle Australia needs.

The coalition government has done nothing over the past five years other than axe funding and support for seniors, pensioners, those who are vulnerable in my community. It's a long rap sheet. And many of the cuts in this budget still hang around the 2014 horror budget. We know that they tried to cut pension indexation—a cut that would have meant pensioners would be forced to live on $80 a week less within 10 years. That unfair cut would have ripped out $23 billion from the pockets of pensioners—from every single pensioner in Australia. We know that they axed the $900 seniors supplement to self-funded retirees receiving the Commonwealth seniors health card and that they tried to reset deeming rate thresholds—a cut that would've affected 500,000 part pensioners. We know that in 2015 the Liberals did a shonky deal with the Greens to cut the pension to around 370,000 pensioners by as much as $12,000 a year by changing the pension assets test. And in 2016 the government tried to cut the pension to around 190,000 pensioners as a plan to limit overseas travel for pensioners to six weeks. Further to this, the government still wants to make pensioners born overseas wait longer to get the age pension, by increasing the residency requirements from 10 to 15 years.

Legislation has been before the House for the past four years to increase the pension age to 70, meaning that Australia would have an older pension age than the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. This would mean that, for the first four years alone, around 375,000 Australians would have to wait longer before they could access the pension—a $3.6 billion hit to the retirement income of Australians. And, of course, the government is still trying to axe the energy supplement to two million Australians, including around 400,000 age pensioners—a cut of $14.10 per fortnight to single pensioners, worth $365 a year, and a cut of $21.20 a fortnight to couple pensioners, making them around $550 a year worse off. I know that, if you're living in a $50 million Point Piper mansion, clinking glasses of champagne on Sydney Harbour, that's not a lot of money to you. That's a round of drinks—it's less than a glass of Cristal for the Prime Minister. But what this also means is that, for pensioners—

Government members interjecting—

That's right, and the members of the government are defending the cut, time and time again. Whenever we talk about a fair go for pensioners—

Government members interjecting—

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