Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to speak on the Banking Laws Amendment (Unclaimed Money) Bill 2015, because it reverses something that I and many of my colleagues have been advocating the reversal of strongly since 2012. As the member for Mallee quite rightly said, how unusual that not one member from the other side is here to speak on this bill. It is because of their sheer shame and embarrassment in confronting the implications of this measure they brought in on everyday Australians. I can recall, being an avid cartoon watcher as a young man, seeing Sylvester Junior occasionally come across the screen with a paper bag on his head, totally shamed by what his family had done. I guess the Labor family feels like that about this bill, and that explains why we do not have one speaker here in relation to this bill this evening.

The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years are remembered for many mistakes and, as a recent ABC television special reminded us, extraordinary disloyalty and dysfunction. Many things that Labor did during their term in office impacted on and upset everyday Australians. I think it is fair to say that is why Labor received their lowest vote in 100 years. We can all remember Fuelwatch, GROCERYchoice, the set-top box scheme, cash for clunkers, the green car scheme, the solar panels program and the Indigenous housing scheme. You might recall there was going to be a computer for every child in every school. And what happened to all the trade training centres and GP superclinics? As Australians quickly learned—when you think about that history—a Labor-Greens announcement was all doorstop and no delivery. We had the disastrous, overpriced and rorted school halls program, with over a billion dollars wasted. There was meant to be a childcare centre on every corner, you might recall, to stop the double drop-off, as the doorstop said, but that never happened.

Remember them unpicking our border protection policies that worked. Remember the disastrous pink batts scheme that resulted in four deaths and is the subject of a royal commission. Recall the back-of-the-envelope Rudd-Conroy calculations for the $70 billion National Broadband Network and think about that for a moment—$70 billion committed without any cost-benefit analysis. We can recall the $900 cheque giveaway sent to dead people and to overseas backpackers. We can recall the mining tax, which raised no money but on which commitments were made on the basis that it would raise plenty of money. There was the live cattle ban that destroyed our supply chains without notice and damaged our relationship with Indonesia. There was the carbon tax that former Prime Minister Gillard promised would never be implemented by a government that she led.

To pay for all this profligate spending, Labor kept telling us they would deliver surplus budgets. Indeed, the Leader of the Opposition put out that famous newsletter claiming at the time that they were already delivering surpluses, knowing full well there had not been a surplus in this country since Peter Costello's in 2008. As the reality of Labor's tax-and-spend policies became clearer, Labor did what they always do. They reached into the pockets of everyday Australians and trousered the proceeds to try to fill their growing economic black hole. Australians are a hardy lot and they will cop a fair bit, but, when something is so patently unfair, they understandably get their backs up. And so it was when Labor cut the time that bank and superannuation accounts could be dormant from seven to three years and then seized those accounts to alleviate their growing debt-and-deficit disaster. It was something that was very poorly received across Australia, and in my community of Northern Tasmania it resulted in hundreds of complaints.

It is worth recalling that the current Leader of the Opposition was responsible for this decision, a decision that by any measure attacked the savings of Australians, particularly senior Australians. It is a story that is worth recalling. Back in 2012 the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Maribyrnong, was the minister for financial services. As I said, Labor was busy hoovering up every spare dollar they could. Then-Treasurer Wayne Swan was using the federal government departments as ATMs, and whenever he and Senator Wong, the finance minister, said, 'We need more money,' another minister would ring the cash register. The reason for that, as I explained, was that the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government had run down our economic freedom of action that they inherited from the Howard government. To paraphrase former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Labor had run out of other people's money, and the budget's arteries were choked with an endless list of spending that was unsustainable, unfunded and unprecedented in Australia's history. Debt, as we found out soon after coming to government in late 2013, was on a trajectory to $667 billion—two-thirds of a trillion dollars. We were borrowing $100 million per day to fund legislated and recurrent Labor spending well above the revenue being received from taxpayers and businesses. So, when I say Labor were in panic mode, hoovering up money from government departments, they were doing it on a grand scale.

I was in the Department of Defence at the time, and I can recall $16 billion being taken from Defence in the years after the 2009 white paper, reducing spending to 1.56 per cent of GDP—the lowest it has been since 1938. In the 15 months before the 2013 election, the Labor-Green government stripped $5.7 billion in aid spending from the forward estimates. They also diverted $750 million in aid spending to onshore processing. They had lost control of our borders by any measure, with 50,000 unexpected arrivals in over 800 boats, and $12 billion in unexpected costs to the taxpayer. That was the result of the Labor Party's disastrous unpicking of Howard government border protection policies that worked. Moving money from the aid program to domestic onshore processing made the Gillard government the third-largest recipient of the Australian aid program.

But it was not only from government departments that the Labor-Green government were trousering every dollar they could get their hands on. Labor turned their attention to the people's hard-earned savings by changing the unclaimed-money rule. People in the gallery and those listening to this broadcast will remember that, up until then, inactive bank accounts could remain dormant for up to seven years before transferring to the Commonwealth. Labor changed that time frame from seven years down to three years. That was the people's money. It did not belong to the Commonwealth, but Labor took it. It is worth noting that these provisions relating to the transfer of unclaimed funds to the government had been around since at least 1911. They existed to provide protections for funds which Australians had forgotten they had in particular accounts, to stop them from being eroded by fees and charges. The intent was to ensure that, no matter what, those funds continued to belong to their rightful owner and could be reclaimed at any time.

Hard-earned money has been seized from everyday Australians. For over 100 years, accounts had to have been inactive for at least seven years before funds could be transferred, and under those rules only $70 million in unclaimed funds was transferred to ASIC in 2011-12. However, the Labor-Greens government's reduction of that period of inactivity to three years resulted in an almost eight-fold increase in a single year. Around $550 million from 156,000 accounts owned by everyday Australian families was seized. It is a travesty that many of these accounts were certainly not unclaimed or forgotten but were transferred to the government regardless in order to improve the budget bottom line—for no other reason than that.

For many Australians, this meant the cancellation of their holidays or a delay in purchasing goods they had been saving for—or, as the member for Mallee, who spoke before me, recalled, the end of a family's livelihood. That was the effect that these measures from those opposite had. The consequences of not being able to access their hard-earned savings when needed most were particularly severe for many Australians in regional communities like mine, in northern Tasmania. People were unexpectedly placed in positions of financial difficulty. In the worst cases, some individuals had to sell their homes. That was and is unacceptable.

Having spent everything and borrowed even more, Labor were taking from the people to feed their insatiable appetite for other people's money. And they have not learned. In the last sitting week of parliament, the member for Grayndler, I recall, was trying to make a point in question time about having funded an infrastructure project, loudly declaring to the Deputy Prime Minister, who was on his feet at the time, 'That was our money.' That is what the member for Grayndler said. Wrong, Member for Grayndler, it is not your money; it is the hardworking taxpayers' money. That attitude from the member for Grayndler and those opposite is at the heart of everything that is wrong with the modern Labor Party.

We see that wrong attitude in the opposition leader's budget reply, which added billions more in spending to Labor's growing black hole, with no detail of how he would fund them. The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, ignored Labor's appalling economic and legislative history, repeated past mistakes of deciding to tax and spend even more and showed Australia that he had learned nothing from the accident-prone governments led by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. And, to compound their errors, Labor now stand, without principle, in the way of our efforts to fix the budget, by blocking billions of dollars of savings measures in the Senate, including things they themselves said before the next election that they would save.

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, did not cost his promised five per cent tax cut for small business, which we know will cost the budget over $2 billion a year. He says a Labor government will scrap the HECS debts of 100,000 maths, technology, engineering and science students—another $3 billion. He promises a Smart Investment Fund—$500 million more. If Australians ever again have the misfortune of a return to the tax-and-spend days of the Rudd-Gillard years, they know who will come hunting for their bank accounts. We already know that the Labor Party have the hard-earned superannuation accounts of everyday Australians in their sights.

We are rolling back Labor's raid on bank deposits, and I congratulate the Assistant Treasurer, my friend the member for Kooyong, for leading so effectively on this issue. I have told him and the Treasurer repeatedly that this was one of the most raised issues in my electorate of Bass during the 2½ years that I spent as a full-time candidate before the 2013 election. That is why I am so pleased that we are reversing Labor's policy by taking it back from three years to seven years, which is also a recommendation from David Murray's Financial System Inquiry. We did not support this change in opposition, and, as promised, we are making it right in government.

This bill amends the Banking Act and the Life Insurance Act to specify that funds in bank accounts and life insurance policies cannot be deemed to be unclaimed until they have been inactive for at least seven years.

Another important change we are making is to exempt funds held by or on behalf of an individual under the age of 18 from the unclaimed money provisions. Young Australians can once again save with confidence for the long term, knowing their accounts will not be seized after three years by the government. This bill reinforces that the government's instinct is to reward, not punish, those Australians who work hard to contribute to their family's future. Children's accounts will never be transferred to the government, and I know that many people who contacted me when Labor raided their kids' accounts will be very pleased with this bill.

The third change is to introduce new protections for people's privacy, because until now, if you had a dormant account, your name and details could be published.

To further ensure that only funds that are truly forgotten are transferred to ASIC, this bill provides more options for how an account holder can keep their accounts active. If an account holder alerts their financial institution in any way prior to their funds being transferred to ASIC, including by simply checking their bank balance online, that transfer will no longer occur.

We are also ensuring that exemptions are provided to foreign currency accounts, which are primarily used by sophisticated consumers to settle complex business transactions. That is important, particularly in the Asian century, as Australian businesses leverage the benefits of the trifecta of free trade deals negotiated by our hardworking Minister for Trade and Investment, Andrew Robb.

This bill delivers on the government's promise to reverse Labor's unfair assault on the savings accounts of everyday Australians. We are restoring to Australian families their control of their own money, their own bank and superannuation accounts. We are restoring the safety net previously in place for a century to protect those who have forgotten accounts. And we are concurrently responding to privacy concerns by better protecting personal information. I know that the measures in this bill will be very warmly welcomed by people in my constituency of northern Tasmania and right around the country. I commend this bill to the House.

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