Abbott cuts pension by $80 a week, leaves wealthy pensioners

So it boils down to this. The gov chickens out on booting millionaires off the pension as they were afraid of the broken promise thing not to cut pensions. So they decided to change the indexation rate instead for all pensioners, including those like me. In 10 years those cuts would add up to an $80 a week reduction in real terms in the pension.

This is Abbott's world; make the poor pay and leave the wealthy alone. 

Ironically, the first option of kicking the wealthy off the pension would have probably gone down in the community a lot better than clobbering everyone on the thing. Certainly much of the outrage about the cuts to indexation was becasue it would be affecting some of the poorest people in the community. Australians don't like that sort of thing. It's currently stuck in the senate after getting the senate chop.

News Corp says the government's budget razor gang shelved a secret plan to get millionaires off the aged pension in favour of slashing the indexation of payments for every pensioner in Australia. 

It says the expenditure review committee was asked to consider slashing pension payments to wealthy seniors last year by changing the taper rate, the preferred option of former Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews. 

Mr Morrison said on Sunday he was not on the ERC at the time but there would have been a discussion about a range of options. 

"The great revelation here is the government decided not to do something," he told ABC television. 

"I think that is a bit of a beat-up about something that happened over a year ago." 

News Corp said senior ministers had confirmed they agonised over the prospect Prime Minister Tony Abbott would be accused of kicking seniors off the pension and breaking an election promise not to cut pensions. 

Instead, Treasury proposed a change to the indexation arrangements for all pensioners, meaning the rate of increase would effectively be slowed, from 2017. 

The change was announced in the May budget, with welfare groups and Labor arguing it would cut pensions by $80 a week within 10 years. more

See that's their so called solution to the discrepancy between Newstart and the pension; to index the pension at the same rate as Newstart, making the pension eventually as fucked up and unsurvivable as Newstart; currently about $470 a fortnight.