Chris Pearce (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question today is to the Prime Minister. When will the Prime Minister deliver on his promise to provide financial relief to the thousands of struggling pensioners in my electorate of Aston, whom he assured would be paying less for petrol and less for groceries under a Rudd government?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. On the government’s approach to pensions, as I indicated to the House yesterday, in the budget we brought in three measures. The first was a one-off bonus of $500, which the previous government had done for the previous three years but not for the previous eight years that they were in office. That is the first point. The second was that we increased the utilities allowance for pensioners from $107 per year to $500 per year and made that permanent. That was never done by the previous government and there was no commitment for them to do so into the future. The third thing we did was to increase the telephone allowance from some $80-plus per year to some $130-plus per year. The honourable member asks the question: when will the government deliver assistance to pensioners? Through the budget, we delivered those measures and, consistent with the recommendation that his own party supported in the Senate, we will, through the Harmer inquiry, reach a conclusion on long-term reform for all categories of pensioners.

This morning—and I use this as an illustration in response to the honourable member’s question—I was in Western Sydney. With reference to the question of pensioners, the proposal on pensions put forward by the Liberal Party would have excluded some 12,000 pensioners in the electorate of the honourable member for Werriwa. That would have been 5,277 age pensioner couples, nearly 5,000 disabled pensioners and 1,500 carers. This goes to why we in the government, looking at long-term pension reform, are going through every single category of pension rather than leaving any one category out.