Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

David Murray will do very well. There is no question about that at all. Another change in the budget which is a good idea and supported by Labor is that self-employed contributions—those covered by the co-contribution scheme—will now be given the same general tax treatment and limitations as employees. I think this is a good move and a worthwhile change. But, if you break it down and take out the 15 per cent, this is the only new measure, in terms of self-employed contributions, that directly encourages higher contributions to the system. I think that is key. What we should be doing is directly encouraging higher contributions—if the government had the gumption. Senator Minchin said a number of times in interviews that the real kicker, the real bonus, would have been on the way in. Anybody who has done basic maths 101 would understand that, if you save the 15 per cent on the way in, the accumulation over a lifetime to retirement gives you a much bigger outcome. That can easily be demonstrated by anyone who sits down and does some simple arithmetic on this. Of course, the cheaper option, the easier option, is to do it on the way out. I think that is what the Treasurer was talking about when he said this is less complex. Yes, it is less complex for government, but it is not necessarily less complex for those who are about to retire.

So there are a range of issues. The government has finally taken some notice on superannuation. The greatest tragedy is that, with the size of this budget, the government, in raining down dollars wherever it could, missed the mark. The government missed the opportunity to make visionary changes where they were needed the most. For me and a lot of people I have talked to, that is the real miss in the budget and the super changes. People were pretty excited up front, and I think this is why the government missed the point on this. They thought they would get a great week or two out of their budget, but it only lasted a few hours because people worked out very quickly that there were more politics than good measures in what the government had done. Labor support this bill, but we think the government has a lot more work to do. (Time expired).

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