Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

That is correct. If you look at the transcript, you will see the term ‘real wages’. If you look at the government’s proposals, what you will see is that, in any given year, the increase in the superannuation guarantee is no higher than 0.5 per cent. In other words, it is expected that real wages will continue to increase, because typically the real wage increases are significantly above that and the historic trend is that and we anticipate that real wages will increase at a higher level than those rates. So real wages will not be cut; real wages will not be reduced. That is precisely why I did not accept the interpretation being put to me on Q&A about that statement, and I stand by all of that.

Yet again, the people who opposed occupational superannuation in the 1980s are going to be opposing it now and they are going to continue opposing it. Why? I say it is because it benefits ordinary working people. Why do they oppose occupational superannuation? It is because when we took office in 1983 superannuation was the privilege of the rich, the well-heeled, whom the Liberal Party are interested in supporting. What Labor did in office was extend access to superannuation to ordinary working people. What we are now proposing to do is to strengthen that access to superannuation for ordinary working people. That is why you do not like it and that is why you are opposing it, along with cutting company tax and along with improving the tax provisions for small business. You are opposing it because, ultimately, you are on about the well-off. You are on about the well-heeled in this society, not ordinary working people. Yet again you will oppose the extension of greater superannuation to the ordinary working people of this country. That is the issue here.

The government is resolutely committed to delivering this improvement in superannuation and retirement incomes for ordinary working people and strengthening the investment pool which, amongst other things, helped save Australia from the global financial crisis and helped protect Australia’s economy during that time. Any serious player in financial markets will tell you that, because there was a guaranteed automatic pool of billions of dollars coming into the markets, no matter what occurred internationally, from that occupational superannuation arrangement. That is why the government remains resolutely committed to improving occupational superannuation in this country: because it improves the retirement incomes of working people, for whom the Liberal Party has never done a jot, and because it improves the investment savings pool that will be invested in the long-term economic growth for the future of Australia. That is why we remain committed to this proposition, and that is why you oppose it—and no amount of sophistry and misrepresentation and verballing about things that I have said will change any of those things. (Time expired)

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