CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr FARLEY (Farrer) (16:06): I rise to speak for the people who built this country and who this government has chosen to ignore. Farrer is a vast expanse of rural and regional Australia. Pooncarie to Albury is a seven-hour drive.

Distance is a daily reality, challenging access for our older residents to health care, services and support. Almost 20 per cent of my electorate is aged over 65, and around 19,500 rely on the age pension. The maximum single rate for the pension is $1,237.70 per fortnight; for couples, it is $1,866 per fortnight combined.

That is what our pensioners are attempting to live on. Let me tell the House what survival costs. On modest figures, a pensioner household faces roughly $5,250 in rent increases, $3,250 in food, $875 in fuel, $450 in council rates and then essential services of health—a real annual burden increase of around $10,075, or 22.5 per cent of their pension, absorbed within one government's term.

The pensions have not risen by 22.5 per cent. Something must give, and it is wellbeing, mental health and dignity. Then, of course, comes health.

This government's private health insurance rebate changes will directly affect 14,000 senior residents in Farrer. Our seniors rely on private cover far more than their metropolitan counterparts, because our public infrastructure is thin on the ground. Policyholders are going to be affected by circa $255 per year.

Health advocates have warned that seniors will drop or downgrade cover, and that burden will fall onto Albury Wodonga Health or Griffith Base Hospital, networks that are already stretched to their limits because Canberra could not see beyond the Sydney basin when it drew up this policy. Farrer is also home to 3,965 veterans, of which 2,576 claim support, as well as 3,100 NDIS participants and 4,200 people on disability pensions.

Constituents who have served this nation, raised its children, worked its farms and paid their taxes are now asked to absorb these costs with no meaningful relief in sight. Every aged constituent in Farrer has a family beneath them—children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who admire and love them. When you ill-treat our elders, you do not fail just one— (Time expired)