Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Service Economy, Small Business and Independent Contractors) Share this | Hansard source

Before that, superannuation was the province of the wealthy. What these changes did was to extend superannuation coverage to working Australians more generally. Not every working Australian is fully covered now. We would always like to see better coverage for women, for example, who are in and out of the workforce, having children. When they reach retirement age they tend not to have the size of the superannuation savings asset that perhaps men who are fully employed through their lifetimes do.

The second area of concern is in relation to casual employment. There is a very large section of the workforce that is casually employed. Quite often, sadly, employers do not make the necessary contributions in superannuation payments in the informal part of the Australian economy. As a consequence, those who are in and out of casual employment can find themselves in the predicament that when they retire they do not have adequate savings through their superannuation.

These measures of the previous Labor government also had the effect of protecting the integrity of the budget, because we could not foresee a situation where the entire retirement incomes of working Australians would be provided through the budget in the form of the age pension—and there was the farsighted approach adopted by the previous Labor government.

It is interesting that the minister has interjected, in a very friendly way on this occasion, saying that he is prepared to acknowledge the contribution of the previous Labor government in developing and implementing these measures. It is a pity that his colleagues at the time did not follow suit; they opposed the superannuation guarantee at every opportunity. And when we hear the Prime Minister saying, ‘Labor opposed this and Labor opposed that, but we supported the reform program of the previous Labor governments,’ that is just not accurate. The coalition in opposition did support some measures, but it was vehemently opposed to the superannuation guarantee arrangements.

However, it realised that it too would have to deal with the integrity of the budget and other matters in relation to the adequacy of retirement incomes, and, therefore, in going to the 1996 election, it said that it would, in effect, deliver on the extra instalments on the superannuation guarantee in what it described as a more equitable manner or a more efficient manner. It did not. One of the big savings measures adopted in the 1996-97 budget was the most short-sighted savings measure that you could imagine—that is, the government cancelled that increase in the superannuation contribution from the Commonwealth. As a consequence, the retirement incomes of working Australians were no longer assured.

The government then gave some of the proceeds of that back as income tax cuts in 2000, claiming that they were jolly good fellows, that they were compensating for the GST and introducing the biggest income tax cuts in Australia’s history. All they were doing was giving the Australian people back some bracket creep and the superannuation commitments—

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