Ms BUTLER (Griffith) (16:24): Given some of the contributions that have been made in this debate today, it must be really lovely to be a Liberal and to live in that beautiful parallel universe that members of the Liberal Party and the National Party seem to inhabit—a universe in which there was apparently no global financial crisis; a happy place. The fact that the global financial crisis happened in our reality seems to have completely passed them by. If you listen to the justifications for the newest, fresh attack on pensioners, you will hear everyone on that side of the House pointing their fingers over here and saying, 'It's all Labor's fault that we have to attack pensioners. It's all Labor's fault that we have to do this sneaky, dodgy deal with the Greens, where we pull the wool over poor old Richard Di Natale's eyes to convince him that he's got a deal that he doesn't really have,' to get them to back him on this deal that is going to hit pensioners' incomes. It is going to affect pensioners significantly and adversely. Why? Apparently, their excuse for wanting to attack pensioners this time around is Labor. There is all this carry-on about Labor. During the global financial crisis, thank God the Labor Party was in power in this country. I am pleased that the Liberal Party saw fit to at least support some of the stimulus at the very beginning, but, if not for Labor being in power, would we have saved the hundreds of thousands of jobs that were saved through the stimulus that Labor introduced? Would we have come out of the global financial crisis with a AAA credit rating? No, we would not. Would we have come out of the global financial crisis as the 12th largest economy in the world? No, we would not, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta, because your mob would be doing what they are doing right now: trying to find austerity excuses and attacking pensioners. We certainly came out of the global financial crisis in much better shape under Labor than we would have had the coalition been in power. If you want an example of that, just look at unemployment. What has happened to unemployment is an absolute disgrace in this country since you people came into government. An honourable member interjecting— Ms BUTLER: Interesting. Unemployment got up to 6.7 per cent in my state of Queensland under coalition federal and state governments. We might also say that unemployment has reached its highest peak since the current Prime Minister was the employment minister in the early 2000s. What a shock! You would think that they would learn and you would think that they would understand, but what do they do? They come in and they say, 'You know what we should do? We should attack low-income earners and middle-income earners. That's what we should do. We should try to find some sort of basis for austerity and cuts.' What did we see happen to pensions last year? 'I know! Here's a great idea. I'm a coalition MP. What I really want to do is slash pensions by $80'—an indexation change to take away the pensioner and beneficiary living cost index as a basis for indexing the pension, to take away average weekly earnings as a basis for benchmarking the pension and only keeping CPI at a cost to pensioners, relying on excuses. Of course, we fought that every day since that budget was announced last year and we won that battle. Together with all of the pensioners and all of the people who speak out for pensioners across this country, Labor worked hard every day to defeat that indexation. But we know, Deputy Speaker Vasta, how addicted your side of the House is to seeking to attack the living incomes of pensioners. What have we seen in this year's budget? You finally realised that you were not going to get your indexation changes through—belated, but well done; congratulations. Instead, what have we seen? Somehow you managed to hoodwink the Greens into the idea that they are going to deal with superannuation tax concessions by dealing with you to slash the pensions of middle- and low-income pensioners—a new round of pension cuts that will hurt almost 330,000 existing low-income pensioners in this country, with independent analysis saying that, over the next 10 years, around half of the pensioners will be affected by these cuts. In total, a million retirees will have their pension cut, including around 700,000 people who are about to retire and are aged 50 to 65 today, including more than 90,000 part-pensioners, who will be thrown off the pension immediately and entirely. Any pensioner couple with more than $451,500 in assets will have their part-pension cut. Any single pensioner with more than $289,500 in assets will have their part pension cut. We are not talking about millionaires, notwithstanding what the coalition government might like to have you believe. We are talking about low- and middle-income earners. There is a price to these cuts. The Greens have sold their soul. What have they sold their soul for? A pig in a poke. We know the government are not going to change their position on superannuation concessions.