Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

People who have worked hard all of their lives to make our country great deserve dignity and respect in their retirement. When this government was elected, I would never have dreamed in my wildest dreams that it would have been as consistently harsh as it has been towards pensioners and self-funded retirees. In just 2½ years, the Abbott-Turnbull government has attacked pensioners almost every week and certainly, substantially, through two budgets.

First of all, they tried to cut the age pension by $80 a week over a decade. They attacked part-pensioners by changing the assets tests and cutting the incomes of 330,000 part-pensioners. Half of all new retirees will be affected over the next 10 years. They have slashed pensioner concessions by $1.3 billion, and, of course, they have announced their intention to lift the age pension age to 70. Just in this past week, they have passed legislation that cuts the period for which pensioners can travel overseas and receive their full pension from 26 weeks to just six weeks. This is a callous attack on pensioners by the Turnbull government. It will particularly hurt tens of thousands of migrant pensioners who have left family or fled conflicts. These people have spent years working hard and paying their taxes, and once again they are in the gun from the Abbott-Turnbull government.

But the most vicious attack on pensioners is still to come, because the government have not yet ruled out a GST, which will have a fundamental impact on people on low and fixed incomes—up to $4,000 a year, on people who are the most vulnerable in our community. Pensioners deserve much, much better than this. Essentially, the government are quite happy to allow some of the largest and most respected companies in our country, multinational corporations, to easily evade their taxes, and then they turn around and say to pensioners and self-funded retirees, 'We'll make up the difference, because these people haven't paid their tax, by thumping you with a 15 per cent GST on everything you buy and consume.'

The GST is fundamentally regressive. Lying behind this whole approach is the intention of the Liberals to make our tax system much more regressive and much more unfair because they are not prepared to make the people pay who can afford it, because they believe in the survival-of-the-fittest mentality. We heard this just yesterday from the tax commissioner: the extent to which some of the largest companies are evading their responsibilities. And today the Business Council had the gall to say: 'Oh, look, don't look to our members to pay their fair share of tax. Why don't you just put a 15 per cent tax on self-funded retirees and pensioners to make up the difference?' (Time expired)