Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the motion and to congratulate the member for Kingston for bringing this matter before the House. It is an incredibly important issue and deserves some respect. The previous speaker, the member for Fadden, included the same rank partisanship that he puts in all of his speeches, which is very sad because this is an opportunity for the House to address this issue in a bipartisan way—nobody made any sort of great point about the 2001 issue. It is a bit of a pity that he had to give such a flamboyant and inflammatory speech.

I would like to talk a bit about the strong links to the United Kingdom that our country has, particularly South Australia and particularly my area. Anytime the Central Districts Bulldogs play, you can go down to the oval at Elizabeth and see the Union Jack being waved every time they kick at goal. You can also see the flag of St George and other English paraphernalia in the crowd. That is testimony to the fact that so many people in that area, including myself, have relatives back in the old country, back in England—it is their heritage.

That heritage is part of a strong emotional and institutional link that defies geography and economic circumstances. It is an emotional relationship and it is a relationship that we have always treasured. It has been through two world wars. It meant that we paid our debts to British banks despite the Depression. It meant that we rationed petrol after World War II. Despite being orientated to different trade zones, Australia and the United Kingdom have a great deal to do with each other even today in terms of exchanging people back and forth. Indeed, my sister leaves for the United Kingdom in October.

That link is why the failure to index state pensions for UK pensioners living in Australia is such a disappointment. It is an insult to our shared history and the shared bond between our countries. There are many people in my electorate, as I have said, that were born in the United Kingdom. Elizabeth is a city built on English migration: 14.5 per cent of the residents in the city of Playford were born in the United Kingdom and, to its north, Gawler has 13 per cent. So there is a great bond between those two towns and the United Kingdom.

I want to speak briefly about one of the residents, Mr Michael Woodley, of Willaston, which is part of the town of Gawler. He started work in England at the age of 14. He worked in a blanket factory to start off with. Then at 18 he went into the army. He served his nation in the British Army for a number of years before leaving to work in a car factory, building the Hillman Minx. He later worked in the coal mines in the north of England and, later again, back in a car factory building Austin 1800s and the old Wolseleys. The entire time he paid his National Insurance contributions.

When he left for Australia at the age of 42, he had an expectation that that work and that commitment would be recognised by the British government. Sadly, he now receives a frozen state pension of $180 per fortnight and his wife receives a frozen pension of $118 a fortnight. Every year the real value of those pensions drops. We know that the cost of living places an awful lot of pressure on pensioners and those on fixed incomes; it places even more pressure when those fixed incomes are not adjusted for inflation.

Mr Michael Woodley has had a bit of correspondence with the British government. I am not going to go into it in great detail, but he has received a reply from the ministerial correspondence unit of the Department of Work and Pensions. The subtext of this letter is basically that it costs too much—that it costs £440 million a year to unfreeze state pensions and the British government basically will not do that until they are forced to. I think this is a real disgrace and a real slur on our shared history. I hope that the British government addresses that matter fairly and reasonably for the sake of people like Mr Michael Woodley and all the other UK pensioners who live in my electorate and around Australia. I commend the motion to the chamber.

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