Fisher committed Labour to amending the Constitution to give the Commonwealth power over labour, wages and prices, to expanding the navy and providing compulsory military training for youths, to extending pensions, to a land tax, to the construction of a transcontinental railway, to the replacement of pound sterling with Australian currency and to tariffs to protect the sugar industry.
If there is any silver lining, the trends appear to have somewhat curbed Albany's appetite for extending pension enhancements to public employees to placate labor unions, which wield enormous clout and lobbying dollars in the capital.
However, extending pension entitlement in this way would weaken the case for the self-employed paying lower national insurance contributions than employees; therefore, the government may decide to offset this benefit by demanding higher NI payments from them.
The same law also committed the government to extend pensions, death benefits and worker-accident insurance to the nation by July 2015.
The law, which takes effect in a year, will also nationalize the pension system and extend pensions to the three million people -- 60 percent of the working population -- who labor in the informal economy in everything from street vending to bus driving.
In what is seen as an attempt to woo older voters, the chancellor is expected to extend pension changes from April 2016, to allow existing pensioners to swap their annuity for a fixed lump sum.
The ultimate settlement raised union pay above $100 a day, added dental insurance and extended pension rights to the widows of miners.
In just two years China has extended pension coverage to an additional 240m rural folk, far more than the total number of people covered by Social Security, America's public-pension system.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that the city would seek to extend pension benefits to same-sex partners of city workers who are wed in Vermont and other places where gay marriage is performed.
The real-life Laurel Hester died in 2006 after successfully convincing Republican authorities in Ocean County, New Jersey to extend pension benefits to registered domestic partners seven years before the state enshrined gay marriage in law.
The government thinks that it can hold the line at around this level by freezing the real value of the basic state pension and extending private-pension provision, whereas projections for the EU show further increases.
