Mr MARTYN EVANS (11:53 AM) —All members of this House are conscious of the great debt which we as Australians owe to our veterans, whatever particular conflict they served in. That is reflected in the fact that all governments in this parliament since World War I have recognised the service of our veterans. The creation of the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and the various forms which that has taken over the years, and the various initiatives and benefits which all governments have extended to our veterans indicate the degree of support which their cause enjoys in this parliament.

Consistent with that, the opposition fully supports the Veterans' Entitlements Amendment (Gold Card) Bill 1998 which is now before the House. This bill continues the history of providing support to veterans, including gold card benefits. The benefits were first introduced by the then Labor government in 1973, when surviving World War I veterans were issued with the gold card. In 1974, ex-prisoners of war were also offered the opportunity of using the gold card. Ex-service women, mainly nurses who incurred danger in World War II, were included in the group in 1987.

The gold card entitles veterans to taxpayer funded access to a range of essential health services, including dental care, private patient hospital treatment, optical care, physiotherapy, podiatry and domiciliary nursing care. As other honourable members have indicated, access to the card is not means tested and assistance is not restricted to an illness or incapacity that was part of their war service. So this is a very substantial benefit and one which is expensive to the community. The average cost of this initiative is $4,000 per year per veteran, but it is an entirely appropriate contribution to make to the health of people who are now over 70 years—which they need to be in order to be eligible—and who are likely to be experiencing a decline in their general standard of health. The gold card will therefore make a significant improvement to their quality of life.

There are some issues though which arise from the way in which the government has defined the group who are eligible for gold card status. Many veterans in my electorate who served in British and Allied forces have contacted me and my office to indicate their concern that those groups are not included in the gold card ambit. There are 100,000 or so surviving World War II veterans in Australia who do not meet the requirement of having served in the Australian forces. These veterans and mariners served in the forces of British and Allied countries and many of them later migrated to Australia, some quite soon after the war during the substantial period of migration from Britain and Ireland. They have made significant contributions to the Australian community in the years since World War II following their migration to this country. They have paid taxes and they have been part of our community. Many of them have come to see themselves as entirely Australian citizens and I think they often had an expectation that the benefits applicable to Australian veterans would also flow to them.

We must remember the very close association between the United Kingdom and Australia which applied in the years following the war. That continues to this day, but it perhaps takes a slightly different form to what it did in those early years of migration to Australia from the United Kingdom following World War II. In those days, our constitution referred to `British subjects'. A requirement for membership of this House and for voting in Australian elections was that that person be a British subject. The requirement of Australian citizenship was only introduced some years later in the 1970s and 1980s when the Australia Act was introduced. Those who migrated to this country from the UK in the period following the war very much believed that the two communities were legally and historically interlinked and that that would extend to Australian benefits.

While we retain that very strong association and historical link with the United Kingdom, there are now substantial differences in the legal entitlements of people who served in the Australian forces and those who served in the Allied forces, including those of the United Kingdom. Those UK veterans—and there are nearly 100,000 of them now—are excluded from the gold card provision. It would be very tempting to include those people within the provisions of the gold card service. That would be at a substantial cost to the taxpayer, but that is not the only issue to be considered here. The cost is important, but what is also important is the impact this would have on the position of Australian servicemen contrasted with the position of Allied servicemen. I think we have to be very conscious of the fact that each and every country owes a substantial debt to its own service personnel. Those veterans who served in a country's forces during armed conflict are able to claim a special link to that country, and the country has a substantial obligation to ensure that those veterans are appropriately provided for, notwithstanding that the veterans may have moved in the years following the war.

Australia as a country has always honoured that commitment. It has done so in a bipartisan way and with the substantial support of Australian governments and the Australian community. Other countries have not always seen fit to provide for their veterans in quite the same way. Indeed, many of those British and Allied service personnel receive only minimal benefits from their own country's government. It is to that end that we must look at the relationship between those respective governments and their veterans now living in this country. Only some 5,500 British veterans living in Australia currently receive a British war pension, and only a handful of veterans receive any pension from Canada, the former Czechoslovakia, Malta, New Zealand and Poland, to name just some of the other countries that fought with Australia in World War II. As you can see, the contribution from those countries to their now Australian veterans is minimal, and I think that is where we must look for some improvement in this condition.

The United Kingdom government, along with other allied governments—but principally the UK government because of the numbers concerned here—must look to their own benefit provisions and examine the ways in which they look at veterans' affairs and the debt they owe to their World War II veterans to see whether there is some way they can improve the services they offer to their veterans, who offered their lives in the service of their own countries and, as part of the British Commonwealth, contributed to a substantial combined effort to defeat Nazi expansionism in Europe and Japanese aggression in the Pacific theatre.

I would like to take the opportunity to indicate to British veterans in my electorate that I think there are ways in which we can advance their position with respect to the UK government. We must bring to the attention of the United Kingdom government the plight of its veterans in their ageing years, when they make a substantial demand on health services, to ensure that the UK government does honour its obligation. Obviously there are some war service and disability pensions payable, but I believe that the example which the Australian government is showing by extending the gold card service to our World War II veterans should set an example to other countries to extend their own payments accordingly.

I think this has to be seen as a parallel issue with the matter of British age pensions now being paid to those British age pensioners resident in Australia. While those pensions are paid from the UK, the United Kingdom government declines to index those pensions for inflation and, over the years, many British pensioners have seen the real value of their British age pension substantially eroded. This would be bad enough if it applied to all overseas British pensioners, but it applies only to British pensioners in those countries where there are a substantial number of British pensioners.

In fact, if you are a British age pensioner in the United States you receive full indexation. If you are a British pensioner in a European country which is a member of the EEC, you receive full indexation. But if you are a British pensioner in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or South Africa—which, coincidentally, are those countries where the majority of British pensioners migrated to after the war—then the British government declines to pay you indexation and that denies those pensioners the real value of their pensions.

Given that inflation is now quite low, the impact of that is less, but over the years many of those pensioners have seen the purchasing power of their UK pension eroded and the Australian government has had to step in, under the means test arrangements, to partly top up those pensions. They are not able to do so to the full extent necessary, but I am sure it is a welcome contribution to those pensioners. It is a very real example, combined with the one which we have before us today, of the way in which the United Kingdom and other governments have failed to look after both their veterans and their age pensioners, and I think it is one which should be forcibly drawn to their attention.

I will be looking at ways, in conjunction with those British war veterans and British age pensioners in my electorate, to take the fight to the UK government which, as we know, has recently changed. I am hoping that Tony Blair and his new government in England will take the opportunity to reconsider past decisions of previous UK governments and, in the light of the prosperity which now applies in the United Kingdom and the substantial revenue gains which that country has had in recent years, consider whether they can now see their way clear to fully honouring their proper obligations to United Kingdom war veterans and age pensioners. In both those areas I think there are grounds for expecting the governments of the United Kingdom and allied countries to reconsider their position, to examine their hearts and their consciences and to see whether they are serving their veterans in the way in which their veterans served their countries.

Although I have only spoken on a limited aspect of the bill, it is certainly a very important one to people in my constituency, which contains a substantial number of UK veterans. In the last few weeks, since this issue became a public one following the government's decision to extend the gold card to a substantial group of Australian World War II veterans, they have again become conscious of the way their own former government treats them, and I think it is time for that issue to be reconsidered.

I would like to conclude by again indicating my full support for this measure. It is one which, in a bipartisan position, the opposition and the current government—which was in opposition during the seventies when these benefits were first extended—fully support and which I am sure all Australians will want to see extended as widely as the revenue position makes practicable.