Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

And the Lebanese in McMahon—many communities throughout Australia will benefit from this. It recognises that the pensioners who travel overseas for short periods still have ongoing costs in Australia, such as their energy bills and their phone and internet bills, and around 92,000 pensioners a year will benefit from this extension.

At the same time, the measure ensures that the pension supplement is better targeted. The basic amount of the pension supplement was originally designed to compensate pensioners for GST costs. It's currently the only supplement assistance that is paid indefinitely while the recipient is overseas. But pensioners who are outside of Australia for a long term or who leave permanently are not incurring Australian GST related costs in the same way as someone who is living here. So, under this proposal, the pension supplement will cease after 12 weeks whilst someone is temporarily overseas or departs and chooses to go overseas permanently. This is a measure that doesn't affect a person's eligibility for the pension or change how the base pension is calculated. The base pension will continue to increase twice a year with indexation. But it's a measure that ensures that the supplement is better targeted and provides better support for people who are travelling overseas for those short periods of time.

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