After a busy couple of weeks in Canberra it was nice to get back to the electorate recently and catch up with a lot of great locals.
I want to congratulate Wayne Robinson from the Australian Budgerigar Society on a fantastic Carnival Show at Cedar Vale. It was my pleasure to support the show and I thoroughly enjoyed dropping in to see all the exciting displays.
It was also great to see so many families getting involved and visiting a local community event. Every time I head out in to my electorates western suburbs, I always find a real sense of community.
Access Community Services officially launched The Access Gateway and I was glad to be back from Canberra so I could attend the official opening.
The team at Access are doing a tremendous job to respond to the needs and vision of the local communities, facilitating support services for health, housing, English and education, employment, social connections, safety and more.
Talk of pension changes
I know there has been some media coverage and information circulating recently about changes to the assets test for pensioners, which will commence from January 1, 2017.
Changes to the assets test will provide more support to people assessed under the assets test who do not own their home and those who have more modest assets.
At the same time, it will provide less taxpayer support to those who can support themselves because of the significant assets they own.
The assets test changes will only affect people who have significant assets, other than their homes—more than 90 per cent of pensioners will either better off or have no change to their pension.
I encourage anyone with questions about these changes to please call my office on (07) 3807 6340. I am very happy to arrange a time to chat about these changes, and answer any questions you might have.
Bert van Manen MP
Federal Member for Forde
Parliament of Australia
