Swan's Song

A quote has been sticking in my mind all day. It came from Barack Obama talking about his grandmother. She has osteoporosis and can’t travel.
And she told him on the phone about the biggest problem about getting old.
She said: ‘You’re still the same person. But your body is falling apart.’ I heard that and I thought ‘Are you listening, Mr. Rudd? Are you listening Mr. Swan?’  You’d better be. Because unless start treating pensioners with a bit more respect and a bit more compassion then your first term in Government could be your swan song.

I tell you; already they are starting to soften you up for a big let down when it comes to a pension increase in the next Budget. And they’re already using the global economic crisis as the excuse to tell you they can’t afford to lift your pension.

Rudd is saying that pension increases had long-term effects on the Budget. He said yesterday that there would be reform to the pension system but stressed the high cost of even a small rise and the need for Budget restraint.

He said’ Every $10 a week we would increase the pension by in future results in an extra $2 billion to the Budget  bottom line in one year’. So? If they’d done it –as advised last Budget – the surplus would have been $20 billion instead of nearly $22 billion.

I’m also sick of the way pensioners are treated like invisible Australians in most monetary and economic discussions. In praising the Reserve Bank’s one per cent rate cut this week the Prime Minister must have used the term ‘working families’ three times in one sentence.

It means tiddly-squat to pensioners who don’t have mortgages. Were brought up in a time when they didn’t have super. They just paid their taxes for about fifty years. Raised their kids (our most valuable commodity, right, Mr. Rudd?)  and got sweet FA from the government along the way.

Your own ministers keep saying they couldn’t live on the pension. So how do you expect pensioners to?  If I were Prime Minister I would grant an urgent $30 a week pension increase effective immediately.  And take it out of next year’s Budget.

Yesterday, before swanning off overseas again, Treasurer Swan was rabbiting on about ‘building our investment funds so we can invest in infrastructure for the future’. 

How about the people who have already spent their lives investing in this country’s future, working all their lives, paying their taxes, raising future taxpayers, and who now must scrimp through their twilight years.

I usually say ‘the only difference between them and us is that they got there first.’ Not quite true -- when you think of the cushy gold passes and the taxpayer-funded super duper super retirement packages Mr. Rudd and Mr. Swan will eventually take home.          

Thursday, October 8, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008