The Australian Greens welcome any proposal that provides additional support for age pensioners and other income support recipients, but urge the Government to undertake systematic reform that lifts the rate of all income support payments above the poverty line.
As Australian Greens spokesperson on Social Services, Senator Janet Rice, said in her speech on the bill:
This bill fits within a framework of needing to increase people's wellbeing right across the board. The Australian Greens believe that a socially just, democratic and sustainable society should be underpinned by a guaranteed liveable income, complemented by the provision of universal social services. We believe that everyone should have enough to live on and essential services to enable them to fully participate in society. That is why we want to see the development and adoption of a comprehensive suite of tools to measure poverty across the range of communities in Australia, including a national definition of poverty and ultimately the eradication of poverty in Australia. We can choose to eradicate poverty in Australia. A key step in that process would be the reform of our income support system in its entirety to ensure a guaranteed liveable income for all.
This bill goes nowhere near a guaranteed liveable income, and the government's version of it falls even further short. But it does include a number of measures to better support pensioners, making it easier for pensioners to earn more before their pension is reduced. The changes in this bill would also make it easier for people to keep their pensioner concession card when they earn above the income threshold in a 12-week period. The questions this bill is addressing—how to balance the income test and ensure that we're providing support for everyone who needs it—are really important questions. In reflecting on the measures in this bill I am of course very conscious that the Greens were actually the only party in the last election with a clear proposal to provide earlier access to the age pension. As we said at the time, lowering the eligibility age will expand access to the pension for hundreds of thousands of older Australians who are currently living in poverty and will provide a well-deserved earlier retirement with guaranteed income support for people who have worked their entire lives on low wages in order to take care of their families.
Since the Rudd government's 2009 increase to the pension age from 65 to 67, Liberal and Labor have been failing low-income older Australians. Across the country, thousands of older Australians who are approaching retirement age have limited capacity to continue working or have been excluded from the labour market entirely. Thousands more are in physically demanding minimum-wage jobs, forced to keep working an additional two years because of successive Labor and Liberal governments failing to give them the support they need. So we need to be doing more than just enabling pensioners who are able to work to increase the hours that they can work. In particular, we need to be supporting people who, at the end of their working life, having worked hard all their life, don't have to be literally breaking their backs in manual labour, as many of them are—whether it's working in hospitals, whether it's doing heavy lifting—just to survive.
Of course, the measure that we took to the last election of reducing the age that people could access the pension was in addition to our proposal to increase the rate of payments to all recipients to $88 a day, so that people on JobSeeker, people on pensions, people on youth allowance and people on the disability support pension would all receive an income payment above the poverty line, so that nobody was languishing in poverty. We also wanted to remove compulsory obligations—those largely pointless tasks and hoops and forms and meetings that people on income support have to subject themselves to in order to receive income support. As an aside, there is increasing evidence that some people—more people—are actively choosing to not access income support. That's not because they don't need it. They are choosing to try and survive with no income at all because of these so-called mutual obligation processes that are proposed …
… as well as reforms that benefit pensioners, we want to ensure that
no-one, no matter how old they are, is living in poverty. We know that poverty is a political choice. It's a choice that the government is making, and it's a choice that the previous government made. And this is at the same time that they are choosing to hand out billions of dollars to billionaires and billions of dollars to the ultra wealthy …
Senator Smith's bill has some measures that will make life easier for age pensioners, but there is so much more that needs to be done. And there's a simple answer here: we can make a different choice. We can choose to increase the rate of income support so that payment rates are above the poverty line. We can choose to care for people rather than profit. We can choose people over corporations. The Greens believe that no-one in Australia should be living in poverty, and we will keep fighting for that change.
Recommendation
The Australian Greens recommend that the Government provide earlier access to the Age Pension, so that all those aged 65 and over are able to access it.
Recommendation
The Australian Greens recommend that the Government increase the rate of income support across all payments, not just the Age Pension, so that it is above the poverty line.
Senator Janet Rice
Deputy Chair