Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the House for the opportunity to contribute to this debate. Our vision for Australia and Australians is that they will be able to be independent. That is what we would hope for every Australian: that they would be able to be independent financially wherever that is possible. That is what we seek to encourage at every opportunity, whether it is to find themselves in work or whether it is to find themselves saving for their retirement and to be able to draw down on their hard-earned savings to provide for their quality of life in their retirement. That is why they worked so hard for it. That is why governments for a long period of time now have provided support through the tax system to encourage people to do exactly that: to have a superannuation pool that enables them to live well in their retirement. That is the reward of a lifetime of hard work, of diligence and of saving. That is our goal not only for middle-income earners, who the debate today is focused on, but also for all Australians regardless of their level of means or opportunity—whether it is people with disabilities, those who have had very difficult starts to life or whatever it is. Our goal is to make sure that they can realise their potential and that they can become financially independent. This is not a welfare nation; this is a nation of free, independent people who want to have their own choices and be able to guide their own lives and not have their futures dictated to them by the government and the cheques that are sent to them.

We have a very different and, I think, more aspirational view of the Australian population—that they would do everything in their power to ensure that they will not be dependent on financial support from the government wherever possible. There are those in the community who need that—and that is what it is there for. We know that the welfare system is a safety net, and we know that the pension is a welfare payment. The pension is there as a safety net for people who, for whatever reason, over the course of their life have been unable to accumulate the savings they would need to support themselves in their retirement. At this time, with the superannuation system not having come to full maturation, there are still those who are coming through the system who will be more reliant on the pension than others. But it is important to recognise that the pension is a welfare payment. It is not superannuation. It is not savings that people are spending. It is a safety net for those who really need it and those who need it most.

We want to focus on a fairer and more sustainable pension. The pension currently costs around $42 billion and it is increasing. On the projections that are before us, it will continue to increase. We cannot simply stick our heads in the sand and think we can just keep pushing the bill onto the taxpayer without fundamentally thinking about whether the system is fair and sustainable. So we have engaged in a process where we are looking to put a measure in place that will ensure a fairer and more sustainable pension.

Over the next 20 to 30 years, more Australians will come to benefit from the maturation of the superannuation system and the pool of investment that they have been able to accumulate. Do you know why that was done? Do you know why Labor actually did that in the first place? It was so that, in the future, more Australians would not have to rely on welfare payments in the form of the pension. The whole point of superannuation tax incentives was that people would not have to depend on welfare in the future. That is what the pension is for and that is what superannuation is for. Those opposite seem to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between a government welfare payment and someone's own money in the form of superannuation.

With this background, and understanding the fiscal challenges that the country has, we set out to find a way to have a fairer and sustainable pension. It is true that, in the last budget, we had a measure to curtail the growth in the pension based on linking indexation to the CPI only. We have abandoned that position because we listened to the Australian people. We listened to the Australian people, we worked through this issue and we said: 'Fair enough, there's another way to deal with this issue. We aren't going to walk away from the task of having a fairer and more sustainable pension.' We engaged with stakeholders, we engaged with the sector and we engaged with people in this place and the other place to ensure that we could come up with a proposal and a measure that would be able to secure the support of this parliament. We engaged with Senator Xenophon, Senator Leyonhjelm and others in the other place. We engaged with stakeholders such as ACOSS. It was ACOSS—that great bastion of unfairness!—who brought to me a proposal to rebalance the assets test for the pension.

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