The Budget is out

and contains no good news for me or the Senior Cat. This is because he gets "government superannuation". It sounds good but in actual fact some people on superannuation would be better off on the pension.
The Senior Cat is fortunate in the sense that it is the "old" scheme. When he started teaching it was a "pound for a pound" - that is, he if he put a pound into the superannuation fund then the government put a pound in as well. It sounds generous and in many ways it was.  When you retired the scheme paid you back - for as long as you lived. 
The Senior Cat has done rather well out of it I suppose because he is now 96. There are very few people left on the "old" superannuation scheme. It didn't take the government too long to discover that they could not afford to keep this generosity up. 
But was it really so generous? For the Senior Cat it wasn't  in the sense that he spent almost his entire teaching career  in rural areas. He was forced to rent government provided  housing while people in the city had mortgages and were paying off their own homes. The housing provided was - shall we say - interesting. The houses were either fibro-asbestos or weatherboard. The first one was probably very good for the time in which it was built. There were eight of them built  in two rows of four each...for the teachers and the electricity and water supply people. Those houses are still being used over sixty  years later. By now they look "tired" to say the least. I can remember ours quite clearly. There were other houses, one built on land which had not been cleared properly. There were trees struggling to grow under the house - the snakes loved living there. The house had not been built according to plan either. My sisters and I slept on the floor all the while we there because  they could not get the beds into the bedroom. (Someone suggested bunk beds but my mother was having none of that.) My parents had two single beds in another room - they slept toe-to-toe and only one of them could get dressed at once. It was a "new build"  but the "Public Buildings Department" condemned it after we had lived in it for two  years. Still, the Senior Cat had to pay rent.
And there was another one of those fibro-asbestos places where they had to take out a window and put the furniture through that way because it too had not been built to plan.
My parents were retired before they had their own home - the one the Senior Cat and I now live in. He doesn't want to move from it and we children will do everything we can to keep him here.
I thought of all this as I glanced through the budget material in this morning's paper. We are due an election in May and all the signs point to a change of government. The incoming government will slash the Senior Cat's "pay" even further - just at the point when he needs it. He can't do the maintenance he once did and neither can I. We will manage but the likely incoming Prime Minister who has twice married into money and is extremely well off himself keeps saying that those with superannuation can afford to pay more - all of course but himself. When he retires he will retire under  his old scheme as well - even more generous than the one the Senior Cat once had. 
If it wasn't going to be that way he might think differently.