CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr GEORGANAS (Adelaide) (10:04): I rise today to speak about a very sad story in my electorate of a particular couple, Mr and Mrs Athanasiou, an elderly Australian couple who came to my electorate with a dreadful story of their funeral insurance. They're a hardworking couple who worked all their lives on a very meagre income. They took out a policy many years ago, which was a fairly reasonably priced policy, to cover their insurance costs when they pass away.
Like so many Australians, they wanted to spare their children the burden and the financial stress that follows the loss of a loved one, so years ago they made the responsible choice to take out funeral insurance. They paid their premiums faithfully, fortnight after fortnight, believing that they were doing the right thing for their family. But over time things changed.
That small amount that they were paying at the beginning started to increase by five per cent every single year. Now, in their late 80s, they are paying $93 a fortnight from a very meagre income, supplemented with the pension—something they just cannot afford. When they reached out for help with this particular company, after years of loyalty, they were told something devastating: if they stop paying, their policy would be cancelled and they would lose every single dollar that they'd already contributed.
Imagine that—doing the right thing, starting off with a policy that was a very small amount of money that increased by five per cent every year. This is not the only case that I've seen in my office. We've seen many cases like this and it is an unscrupulous, disgraceful way of taking money from older people.
We've written to the Assistant Treasurer and it's been referred to AFCA. Recently there was an article in the Adelaide Sunday Mail about another elderly couple in their 90s. It was a similar sort of thing where the premiums had increased, and it's a straight-out insurance product.
In other words, you pay, with the premium increasing every year, and if you don't pay, it just stops. There are other products that could have been sold to these people which mean that the premium remains the same or that, as money is accumulated in a particular account, the premium goes down. But, no, they were sold this policy that took every single cent from them and increased every year.
I'm going to write to the minister again to see what legislation we can put in place to protect people like Mr and Mrs Athanasiou. This is not how we should honour the contribution of older Australians who've worked every day of their lives and just want to do the right thing by their families and their children. Many older Australians would be in this very same predicament.
When we dug around, we found many, many policies just like this, where people have been sold this package that basically does not make sense as you get older, because, if you're on a pension, you just cannot afford to pay this, and they know that. They know that people will stop paying and it's all over and they won't lose a single cent but will just make lots of dollars out of older people.