The big end of town is quietly attacking the cost of our aged pension.

While the talk of increasing the GST has dominated the media, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI), the Grattan Institute and the Financial Services Council have been floating a claim on the family home to claw back pension payments.

The idea is that pension payments will be debited against the family home and when the pensioner sells it or dies, the government will grab that money back.

They say the government has to address ‘runaway spending’. Yet according to the OECD, Australia’s spending on aged pensions is only one third of the average for OECD member countries. 

Why does the ‘top end of town’ want to attack pensioners while protecting top end superannuation contributors? At the same time, why have these lobby groups and think tanks, funded by some of the leading accounting firms and law firms, not spoken up about the negligible tax paid by big multinational companies?

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