19th Mar 2018, 8:42 PM – Senate Social Services Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform) Bill 2017 - in Committee - Wife pension

The majority voted in favour of amendments (1) to (8), (17) to (31), and (33) to (38), which were introduced by West Australian Senator Louise Pratt (Labor).

What do the amendments do?

Senator Pratt explained that:

These amendments go to the substantive parts of this bill and the core reasons that Labor are opposed to it.

Schedule 3 provides for the cessation of the wife pension. This is not something that Labor support. We note that, of the 7,750 recipients, there are many who would transfer under this provision to the age pension and the carers payment and would be no worse off. Indeed, it makes sense to simplify payments. But I have to say that we are not prepared to see many other vulnerable women on the wife pension go backwards in their access to income support. There are 3,100 women who will be worse off and 2,900 women transferring onto a jobseeker payment. This is not a new area of social security; this has been closed to new applicants since 1995. So you have 2,900 women who will have been out of the workforce for more than 20 years who will be transferred onto a jobseeker payment. This is a pretty extraordinary thing to do to women who have had very little, if any, exposure to the workforce.

We are also very concerned about the 200 women living overseas who will no longer be able to access any income support other than the support that their spouse is eligible for. We can see that, overnight, they would be $670 worse off a fortnight. This is an incredibly perilous situation to put them into. We have here a group of low-income women who will be left with nothing to live on other than their partner's pension, many of them having been out of the workforce for a great many years. As I said before, they will have been receiving the wife pension for a minimum of 22 years.

It seems reasonable to us, in the opposition, that this group of women should be grandfathered, to avoid them facing such a significant financial crisis, the kind of crisis that comes with not only deep economic cost but also a great sense of personal distress. There are a reasonably small number of women affected; therefore, there would be a reasonably minimal cost of grandfathering them. It is indeed a cruel and unnecessary cut.