Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Amendment (Fair Indexation) Bill 2010. I will speak to this amendment and the whole bill. It is a great honour to stand here in support of this bill. Fair indexation for military super­annuation is something that Family First has been campaigning on for some time now. I rose here in the parliament to speak on this issue in November 2009, and I later raised it with the former minister, Alan Griffin, as well. Last year I began a petition on my website calling on the government to fix the unfair indexation of military superannuation. In just a matter of days it attracted thousands of signatures, highlighting how many people feel strongly about this matter. It is an issue that I have followed closely because it is something I care about deeply.

Last year I travelled to Afghanistan to see firsthand our diggers in action and witnessed the tough conditions they are forced to endure on a daily basis. Service in the Australian Defence Force is no ordinary job. It is a unique service which deserves special recognition. It is unique because, when you sign up to the ADF, you give the state or the nation the authority to send you overseas into a role where your life is potentially at risk 24/7. We send our soldiers into dangerous places on orders that will put them in harm's way. We ask our soldiers to follow through with their orders, even when they know that this may mean they will never see their family or loved ones again. It is an incredible situation to put yourself in, and it takes incredible people to do this. Given these circumstances and the uniqueness of this, we as a society have the obligation to give them our full support and respect.

Unfortunately, when it comes to retirement and death benefits, governments, both Liberal and Labor, have not honoured this obligation in the way I think we should. The current arrangements for indexing of these retirement and death benefits are inadequate and put our military pensioners further behind community income standards. This bill seeks to rectify this inequality through a fairer indexation regime. At the moment, the Defence Force and super­annuation pensions are only indexed to CPI, which is not always the best and most appropriate index. Even the Australian Bureau of Statistics has said that 'the CPI is not a purchasing power or cost-of-living measure'.'

The CPI is just a measure of changes in the price of a basket of goods and services and should not be used as the only measure to index the military pensions of our former servicemen and servicewomen. This is an outdated way to index pension payments because, at the moment, the true value of those military pensions is falling compared to the rising incomes of the general popu­lation. Even the government has admitted that the CPI is not an appropriate measure for indexing the pension, and has reformed other government pensions which were previously indexed to CPI. These include the age pension, the wife pension, the disability support pension, the widows pension, the parenting payment, the carer payment, the service pension, the partners service pension, the income support pension and the war widows pension. With all these, the govern­ment has already recognised that CPI is not the best indexation measure.

In the 2008 budget, the government recognised that many seniors were concerned that their cost of living may rise faster than the consumer price index. To address this concern, the government announced:

… the Government will guarantee that the Age Pension will increase in line with the higher of the consumer price index, increases in male total average weekly earnings or the living cost index for age pensioner households. These arrangements will ensure that the Age Pension keeps pace with increases in prices and improvements in community living standards.

I believe that our veterans should have their superannuation treated in a similar way. Their military pension payments must be linked to the average wage so that they do not slip below a certain percentage of any increase in the average wage. This method of indexation makes a lot more sense, and it is ridiculous that the government has not been prepared to budge on this issue. The current indexation arrangements have meant that military superannuation pensions are 35 per cent lower than they would have been if they had been linked to wage based indexation such as male total average weekly earnings 20 years ago. This gap of 35 per cent works out to be an enormous amount of money and would make a real difference to veterans. Not changing it not only seriously erodes the standard of living of people relying on these payments but also sends a terrible message: that this is the way that government treats those people who have given their all for Australia.

This bill is about giving a fair go to those Australians who have put their lives on the line. Here is a key question: why should politicians have their superannuation payments indexed more generously than our veterans? Why should Federal Court judges have their pensions payments indexed to the increases in judicial salaries but military personnel have their payments linked only to the CPI? Why should veterans be worse off compared to others? How does this possibly make any sense?