Teresa Gambaro (Brisbane, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Banking Amendment (Unclaimed Money) Bill 2013. I want to reiterate what the members for Higgins, Moncrieff and Gippsland have just said: that we are in this terrible situation of having to come into this House to clean up a bill because the 'world's greatest Treasurer'—and he was 'presented' a plaque at the campaign launch of my opposition the other day with the 'world's greatest Treasurer' on it—has had in the recent budget a $20 billion blow-out. So we have now got to find the money from somewhere. So what do we do? We go looking at ways by which we can get the money back and we go looking at people's bank accounts. This bill exempts reactivated accounts from being reported and transferred to the Commonwealth as unclaimed moneys and allows the Commonwealth to provide refunds to authorised deposit-taking institutions, or ADIs, if moneys are collected unnecessarily.

In the 2012-13 MYEFO, in an attempt by the government to find savings to bolster their now-defunct commitment of delivering a surplus in 2012-13, the government announced an array of changes relating to unclaimed moneys in bank accounts, life insurance accounts, superannuation accounts and corporations. These changes sought to bring forward the period of time at which money is recognised under the relevant law as being lost or unclaimed. These changes can be referred to as Labor's desperate cash grab—and that is all it is, a very desperate cash grab—where the Gillard government seeks to ambush by stealth the newly classified unclaimed moneys in savings accounts, life insurance accounts, superannuation accounts and corporations. As with every piece of shambolic legislation that is put forward by this government, the devil is in the detail and with these changes the devil is in the new period for accounts to be treated as unclaimed moneys, which this fiscally challenged government has significantly shortened. Since the government has been trying this week to claim that it is committed to dealing in facts, here are the facts about this blatant cash grab—and I repeat that that is all it is, a cash grab—and the changes it has made so that it could raid these accounts.

If you have a bank account, it is now reduced from seven years to three years. If you have life insurance moneys, they were previously treated as unclaimed after seven years but that has been reduced to three years. Superannuation accounts with balances of less than $2,000 and accounts of unidentifiable members that have been inactive for 12 months were required to be transferred to the Commissioner of Taxation. The changes reduce from five years to 12 months the period of inactivity before which the superannuation accounts of unidentifiable members are transferred to the ATO. The unclaimed property of corporations is now to be recognised directly in the Commonwealth Consolidated Revenue Fund—impacting the underlying cash position of the Commonwealth—upon receipt by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, as opposed to the companies and unclaimed moneys special account. These measures have netted the government nearly $900 million over a four-year period to 2015-16.

A government controlled Senate economics committee inquiry was held into this bill and recommended that the government bill be passed. The coalition members of the committee inquiry gave a dissenting report. The coalition series of amendments sought to delay implementation of schedules 1 and 2, relating to bank accounts and first home saver accounts, for a full year to commence on 31 December 2013 to feed into the banks' annual processes that had largely been completed for this calendar year when the MYEFO announcements were made. The coalition sought to delay schedule 4 relating to superannuation accounts for a full year in order to align with the deadline of the autoconsolidations necessary under the previously announced SuperStream reforms, which are due to commence from 1 January 2014. The purpose of the coalition amendments was to allow the banking and finance sectors to put in place proper governance processes for the implementation of these changed time periods—and I have got to say that the amount of regulation that has been put on the banking and other sectors has just been absolutely incredible.

But, no, this government was not interested in the interests of ordinary Australians and ensuring that their savings accounts were not ambushed. So desperate have the government been, because of their woeful mismanagement of their budget, that they have just wanted to grab the cash of ordinary Australians as quickly as they could in a vain attempt to prop up the ever-growing debt that they have racked up year after year. The coalition amendments were defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives and the coalition voted against the passage of this bill in both the House of Representative and the Senate.

How repugnant is it to steal someone's money from their bank account, and I want to go through a few examples of that. A particularly disgusting example was hijacking a bank account in the case of Adrian Duffy, a Brisbane pensioner, who emerged from a quintuple heart bypass—if going in for a quintuple heart bypass isn't stressful enough—only to find his wife's $20,000 Suncorp account empty because the bank gave it to the government.

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