Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before the election, the Prime Minister promised that there would be no change to pensions. He said on SBS news on 6 September 2013:

No cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.

In my area all the National Party candidates ran around saying the same thing—no cuts to pensions. We all now know that the Prime Minister's promises stand for nothing, and in regional Australia the National Party's promises stand for nothing and they cannot be trusted.

In their very first budget, the government launched an unprecedented attack on the pension, with cuts to pension indexation, cuts to pensioner concessions, cuts to deeming thresholds for part-pensioners and an increase in the retirement age to 70. Labor calls on the government to drop these cruel cuts, because pensioners never voted for a cut to their pension. They never voted for this. In my electorate there are 20,520 people on the age pension who will have their pension cut by this cruel Liberal-National government. They never voted for these cuts to indexation which will leave them as much as $80 a week worse off. They never voted for any of these cuts, and they do not want them. Make no mistake: Labor will fight these changes every day until the next federal election.

This Saturday at the New South Wales election, pensioners in my electorate on the North Coast of New South Wales will have a chance to tell the Liberal and National parties that they never voted for a cut to their pension. They should put the National Party last to send a strong message about these pension cuts.