Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Of course we know that the pension isn't a welfare payment. The pension is a payment that goes to hardworking Australians—Australians who have often spent their entire lives in jobs that aren't high paying; in jobs that are physically demanding; in jobs that mean they haven't been the Australians that have been able to invest in three, four or five investment properties; in jobs that mean these Australians have toiled day after day to earn enough money to bring up their children to try to give them a better opportunity in life than they had. These are the Australians that are on the age pension. These are the Australians that deserve a government and deserve members of parliament who are always on their side. It is fundamentally disappointing that they don't have such a government right now.

This legislation, the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Portability Extensions) Bill 2021, is needed, and it's supported by Labor because we understand that there are Australian pensioners who are stuck overseas because of the pandemic, because the borders rightly had to be shut, but also because this Morrison government has fundamentally failed in the vaccination rollout, in building fit-for-purpose national quarantine and in the Prime Minister's promise to bring all Australians who wanted to come home by Christmas of last year. So it's with no joy that we rise to have to support this legislation to support Australian pensioners, many of whom have been failed by the government's botched response to its fundamental duties to Australians during this pandemic: the vaccine rollout, the quarantine and the fact that, if you're an Australian citizen with an Australian passport, that should mean something. That should mean that, when you are stranded in another country, your government does everything in its power to get you home, which is not what this government has done.

We know that this government, over the long eight years—it likes to pretend, by the way, that somehow this is a government that is new and fresh and isn't to blame for things that happened over the last eight years. It's not a new and fresh government; it's been in power for eight long years, and we know that over those years this government has tried time and time again to attack Australia's age pensioners, to cut their pension.

Last time Labor was in government, we increased the age pension by $30 a week. We understand working Australians and we understand their needs in retirement. This is a government that understands the words 'working Australians' because it likes to use them, but it doesn't understand their needs and it certainly doesn't understand their needs in retirement. If it did, it wouldn't have needed the opposition to catch the government out last year on the pension freeze for 2½ million pensioners. It wouldn't need the opposition, community members and pensioners themselves to raise their voices time and time again to fight against this government's pension freeze—a freeze that took effect in September. Pensioners had to wait for the October budget before knowing whether they were going to get any kind of relief. And then the relief in the form of the two one-off payments, whilst better than nothing, led to so many members of my community contacting me to say: 'This feels like a slap in the face. This feels like a token amount of money to shut us up because they realised there was a political problem because they weren't supporting 2½ million hardworking Australians who deserve a retirement in dignity.'

We know this is a government that, in the end, views people who receive support from the government—be it unemployment benefits, be it the disability support pension, be it single-parent pensions, be it the age pension—as people who are welfare recipients, as the leaners not the lifters, as the people they look down on and say, 'Well, we're here to help you,' from above, but not the people they live with and understand and really are there to help. How do we know this? We know this because this is a government that introduced a cashless welfare card for some of the most disadvantaged people in our community, because this government thinks it knows better than Australians about how to spend their money. How do we know this is a government that wants to control how hardworking Australians in their retirement spend their pensions? We know it not because Labor says it but because the minister responsible for the aged-care pension, for social services, said it herself. Last year the responsible minister was interviewed by the media and was asked: 'Are you going to roll out the cashless welfare card nationally?' Her answer was that this is a conversation we need to have about the card. She said, 'Well, initially, we thought it was to control people's gambling and whether or not they could drink alcohol and smoke. But now we know it's a wonderful budgeting tool for those people who are on low incomes.' It's a budgeting tool enforced upon them by the government, whether they like it or not. And we know that this government's plan, if they ever get the opportunity, is to roll out the cashless welfare card to pensioners across this country, because the responsible minister said it was 'a broader application for the whole community'.

So, members of my community, every time you hear this government say that any suggestion they want to roll out the cashless welfare card to pensioners is nothing but a scare campaign, remember that the responsible minister talked about this card and its use as being something that would have 'a broader application for the whole community because it's a universal platform'. On behalf of my community, where one in five people are on a pension—disability support, age pension, single-parent pension—in this very chamber last year, on 7 December, not so very long ago, I put this challenge to the minister:

Will the minister say, once and for all, that it is not this government's intention to tell people on pensions, family tax benefits, single mothers supports, carers supports and disability supports how they can and can't spend their money?

The minister didn't respond. Not only did the minister not rule it out, the minister couldn't find words to respond—nor did any minister representing the minister find words to respond—because that's their plan, because we know that this is a government that's spoken to the big four banks and given them money to have a task force to set up the technology. They've spoken to supermarkets and Australia Post about the technology and about their plan to extend the draconian legislation. I asked on 7 December:

Will the minister stand up in this place today and rule out extending the cashless welfare card to other recipients of government allowances?

The answer was resounding silence, because the answer is yes; it could be extended.

Members of my community and Australians across this nation, I can tell you this: a federal Labor government would scrap the cashless welfare card. I will not give up fighting this plan to extend it to age pensioners, because I'm on your side and because Labor is on your side. We all know whose side this government is on, and it's not yours.

The final issue I want to raise before I finish my contribution in terms of pensions and portability is that there is clearly an emerging issue for Australian residents who are also Irish citizens and who receive part of a pension via the Irish system and part via the Australian system. I've had two couples contact me and my office, Thomas and Ursula, and Michael and Joan, who since the UK left the European Union are finding that their Irish pension is now subject to significant bank charges every month. It's so significant, in fact, that Michael and Joan are effectively losing half of one of their pensions every year because of these bank charges. From the investigations that my office has undertaken, it's a result of Brexit. It's a result of banking now being done through the European Union, and charges being levied, but no-one knows whether they're being levied by European, Irish or Australian banks. But these couples are now losing significant amounts of their pensions. It's a serious issue, in that, if it's affecting Irish Australians in my electorate, it's affecting Irish Australians across the country, and it's an issue that this government should be looking at and looking at immediately because, again, these are hardworking Australians who are living on a low income via pensions and they cannot afford to lose even $10 a month through bank fees.

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