Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am asked by the member for Bass a very telling question: what did they find? What did the Parliamentary Budget Office find? It found that Labor's proposals for two increases in taxes, on contributions and on earnings, would affect 425,000-plus people. Now, Labor has refused to index the threshold, which means that more and more people will go into those thresholds and more and more people will pay additional tax. The question is, why has Labor done this? Do they not like superannuation? Paul Keating did put the idea first on superannuation, and we supported him. But why has Labor done it? It is clear that Labor has done it in a desperate grab for cash to fill its budget black hole. Superannuation is the budget pinata: strap on the blindfold, grab a big stick and take a whack at people's hard-earned savings in super. It is the budget pinata, because you know that Labor's budget black hole is some $58.6 billion of measures that they are not supporting, including measures that the member for McMahon, sitting opposite, took to the last election as Labor's Treasurer and is now refusing to support in this parliament. Shame on Labor.

So, $58.6 billion is this budget black hole, which only grew when the Leader of the Opposition got up here on budget night and spent $220 million a minute. They have no way of balancing the books. In fact, the member for McMahon knows how to balance the books. While they were in government he put out a note to his electorate about the surplus they were to deliver. He was very proud of the budget surplus that would never eventuate. That is Labor's shortcut to surplus.

We have to do the hard yards. We have to do the long, hard yards to get to surplus, and we are doing that by prudent economic management. But what we will not do when it comes to superannuation is what Labor did: promise no changes and then introduce a whole lot of changes. We went to the last election saying we would make no adverse, unexpected changes to super in this term, and we will keep that commitment. Kevin Rudd went to the 2007 election and said he would not change superannuation one jot, one tittle. And what happened? There were 12 adverse changes, including to contributions, including to earnings, including to the self-managed super fund levy, going up under Labor, when we came up with self-managed super funds in 1999, under John Howard. And now one million Australians, like many of my colleagues know—members of their own electorate—put their hard-earned savings in their self-managed super funds. They are the people who were hit by Labor's additional taxes on superannuation. Those opposite were addicted to tax—wrongly, for the Australian people.

To digress, as Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism—and you could say the problem with Labor—is that eventually you run out of other people's money. And that is the problem. They ran out of other people's money, and now they want to raid superannuation, even though the member for McMahon rushed out a press release in 2013 and said in the headline, 'We will make no changes for five years to superannuation'. That lasted all of 48 hours. Now we are in 2015 and the member for McMahon is supporting the member for Fraser, who is supporting the member for Watson, who is supporting the member for Maribyrnong—all increasing two taxes on super which, we know from the Parliamentary Budget Office, will hit at least 425,000 Australians.

That is a shameful record. But another problem that Labor has is pensions, with a sustainable retirement income, and the member for Jagajaga knows this all too well. As the member for Cook said in this place today, 'Superannuation is the hard-earned retirement savings of Australians and a pension is a welfare payment from one taxpayer to a pensioner.' And the more people save for super, the less they rely on the taxpayer for the pension.

The Prime Minister said today that we want to take people with $1 million-plus off the pension so that we can have a sustainable pension over the long term. The member for Jagajaga may not be aware that pension is the largest single budget item.

Ms Macklin interjecting—

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