‘Full pensioners are locked out of normal Aussie society’

Worried about the adequacy of the Age Pension? There’s a new opportunity to make your feelings known.

Australia’s oldest not-for-profit organisation wants people to sign a petition in support of its #fixpensionpoverty campaign, as it attempts to drive the message home during Seniors Week, which starts in New South Wales today.

“It’s clear that the Age Pension is inadequate,” says the Benevolent Society’s executive director Kristy Nowlan. “It’s unacceptable that people who have contributed to society all their lives are forced to live at or below the poverty line.”

The society wants the government to set up an independent Pension Tribunal to create a new mechanism for setting the Age Pension rate. The pension is currently set using a complex benchmarking and indexing system twice a year, which the Benevolent Society says isn’t closely linked to the actual cost of living.

In September the society released 50-page report with research firm Per Capita that contained some frightening findings on the lifestyles of Australia’s pensioners.

The researchers held a series of pensioner focus groups, which “indicated that the pension was insufficient for those wholly reliant upon it to fully participate in Australian society,” according to the report.

Among the most worrying points gathered by the researchers from the focus groups were:

• Ownership of a home is crucial to the ability to have even a mediocre standard of living on the Age Pension; rental costs in the private market are rising faster than the pension, while rent for social and community housing is income-linked so rises every time there’s a pension increase, negating the benefits.
• Full pensioners that own their own home must still give up many simple luxuries, such as going to the movies or buying books and magazines, and do only essential maintenance to their homes to ensure a “careful, budgeted survival”.
• Out-of-pocket medical expenses are rising faster than the pension and even the purchase of daily necessities such as incontinence pads or diabetes treatment can eat up a big chunk of income, with little awareness among pensioners of government schemes that subsidise these kinds of expenses.
• Buying food that’s discounted because it’s close to its use-by date, choosing homebrands and shunning Woolworths and Coles in favour of Aldi are all methods pensioners use to cut their food costs, with many reporting missing meals if they must pay an unexpected bill.

The next pension rate adjustment is due on March 20. The most recent increase, on September, was for $1.40 per fortnight.

According to Superguide, a single person on the full age pension and receiving the pension and energy supplement payments receives about $22,805 a year, and a couple receives $34,382.

Do you think the Age Pension payment is adequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living? If not, how much money do you think would be adequate? How should the government balance the needs of pensioners and the costs of providing the pension?