Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

This is about keeping faith with the veterans—the people who look after us, who laid their lives on the line to look after Australian people—and I am very pleased and proud to support this important legislation in the House tonight. The Defence Force Retirement Benefits Legislation Amendment (Fair Indexation) Bill 2014 will finally deliver fair indexation to our veterans and deliver on the promises made by this government prior to the 2010 and 2013 federal elections.

Fair indexation was an article of faith by the now Prime Minister and indeed the entire coalition going into the past two elections. Six months prior to the last election, Tony Abbott, as well as the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, signed a pledge unambiguously committing the coalition to delivering this reform for veterans and their families. The pledge headed 'The coalition's clear commitment to our veterans' read:

A Coalition Government will deliver fair indexation to 57,000 military superannuants and their families.

The Coalition will ensure DFRB and DFRDB military superannuation pensions are indexed in the same way as aged and service pensions. All DFRB and DFRDB superannuants aged 55 and over will benefit.

Only a Coalition Government will deliver fair, just and equitable indexation for DFRB and DFRDB pensions.

With your support, Australia's veterans and their families will get the fair go they deserve.

As many in the veteran community and the wider community would be well aware, this particular issue has been fought for long and hard by a number of people over many years. I have spoken numerous times in this place on the need to provide fair indexation, and this is a significant issue for the people of the Riverina—especially in Wagga Wagga, a tri-service city where many veterans reside.

Providing fair indexation to our veterans so that military pensions adequately reflect increases in cost of living is absolutely the right thing to do. After all, veterans and their families sacrifice so much in our hours of need and for this nation—this really is the least we can do for them. Fair indexation for our veterans acknowledges that military service is unique and forces demands on our service women and men, and their families, in a way that other types of service simply do not do.

Last Thursday, I had the privilege of seeing a joint Sydney Theatre and Australian Defence Force production, The Long Way Home, here in Canberra. It is a moving story based on the real lives and experiences of our service men and women. This story tells of how our injured and wounded veterans recover from the scars of war and post-traumatic stress syndrome, and tells of the challenges to and the sacrifices made for us by many veterans and their families. It tells the real life story of servicemen such as James Duncan, who was injured by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in February 2011, and the story of Sarah Webster of the Royal Australian Signal Corps, deployed to Baghdad in 2006, who was severely injured by the blast impact of a missile hitting the wall of her concrete barrier while she slept. This is the story of our veterans, and, whilst the production is confronting, I would urge everybody here to see it if they get the opportunity.

I am therefore proud to be part of a government actually delivering this important and necessary reform—in fact, to be from the only side in this parliament to have made this commitment and actually delivered it. Every member and senator, and certainly every veteran I have met with, remembers Labor's campaign promises in 2007 to deliver fair indexation prior to that election. And we all know what happened after the election: how Labor shamelessly scurried away from and broke this solemn promise—like they did with many of the other promises they made.

The coalition has been committed to introducing this reform since 27 June 2010. We made the announcement in support of fair indexation before the election that year. Despite not forming government, the coalition nonetheless remained firmly committed to this important initiative. In line with that commitment, we introduced legislation into the Senate on 18 November 2010.

Rather than grasp the opportunity to finally deliver much needed fair indexation to our veterans, as their own election policies promised, Labor and the Greens delayed, dithered—and then called for yet another Senate inquiry into this issue. This was despite more than half a dozen parliamentary inquiries conducted previously supporting fair indexation.

But that Labor-Greens inquiry was never really a genuine inquiry designed to objectively consider the merits of fair indexation as a policy. The conclusions and single recommendation of this inquiry, being run by a Labor-Greens stacked committee, were already predetermined and foregone before the inquiry even started. The committee made parliamentary history by recommending against fair indexation—disgraceful! This Senate inquiry was nothing short of an unprecedented attack on Australia's veterans by Labor and the Greens. Well, what could you expect?

On 16 June 2011 the Labor-Greens alliance in the Senate voted down the coalition's fair indexation legislation. This legislation, this particular bill, when enacted will change the way the Defence Forces Retirement Benefits and the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits schemes are indexed—as it should. This measure will benefit 57,000 veterans and their families across Australia, 13,699 in New South Wales and 512 in the Riverina. I commend it to the House.

See this speech in context