Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the House for showing long overdue support for our view about what the government is doing to the superannuation system.

In question time today, the latest excuse for the government not to have an economic plan for this country after 2½ years was that they did not want to 'rush to failure'. That is what the Treasurer of this country says about why he has no clue about tax and why he has no clue about the economy—because he does not want to 'rush to failure'. What an extraordinary excuse! It is the latest in a long line of excuses from this hopeless, hapless and heartless Treasurer. He came up here and said that the reason they do not have a clue about the economy is because they are not in a rush to fail. What a joke the Treasurer of this country is.

They might not be rushing to fail, but they are dawdling to defeat, dawdling to division and dawdling to disarray. The sort of chaos that you see on that side of the House is exactly what happens when the Prime Minister of the country is incapable of providing the economic leadership that he promised. When you pretend that you are all things to all people, it catches up on you at some point. When you say one thing and do another, inevitably it all collides and crashes at some stage. We have seen that with the motion just moved by my very capable colleague, the member for Griffith.

We have a Prime Minister who says that he believes in marriage equality at the same time as he does what he can to cruel the chances of marriage equality in this country. Just like it is with marriage equality, the same is true for superannuation when it comes to the Prime Minister's keenness to say one thing about superannuation and then to do an entirely different thing. The Prime Minister has said over and over again—as has the Treasurer and the Assistant Treasurer—that they believe in compulsory superannuation. They say that while they work behind the scenes to diminish it and to destroy it.

As always, if you want to know what the coalition actually thinks about these things, you need to listen to the newly liberated member for Warringah. When you listen to the newly liberated member for Warringah you know what they really think about compulsory super. This is what the member for Warringah has said about super:

Compulsory superannuation is one of the biggest con jobs ever foisted by government on the Australian people.

That is what the member for Warringah said. When it comes to economic policy, in the absence of leadership from the Prime Minister and the absence of leadership or competence from the Treasurer, we now know that the shots are being called by the member for Warringah from his perch over there. When he says that super is a 'con job' we should listen, because we know that when he gets up in the party room and gets into the Prime Minister and the Treasurer it causes them to flap around and try to accommodate him. That is the view of the Liberal Party. That is the reason why this Prime Minister and this Treasurer are so frozen with indecision when it comes to the economy. They are so paralysed by the fear of getting off-side the member for Warringah and all of his cronies that now populate that part of the parliament.

Just like it is with super, it is also the case with Medicare. There is a link between what they want to do to Medicare and what they want to do to super. They want to attack universality and access. They want to attack the very foundations of what makes this country good in a policy sense—universal health care and compulsory superannuation. Those two attacks are of a piece. They are all part—as the member for Lilley said yesterday—of their efforts to rip and tear away at the social safety net in this country.

We know that they are working behind the scenes to strangle compulsory super because we get the usual kind of gutless, sneaky leaks to The Australian or to the News Limited tabloids. That is what they do. When they do not have the courage to come right out and say it, what they do is just put it on the front pages of the paper instead. The first one that we got was this ludicrous idea that we should take the 'compulsory' out of compulsory superannuation and make superannuation optional for those pesky people on low incomes in this country—those pesky people earning less than $37,000 a year. These are great Australian people working hard on low incomes, and those opposite want them out of the compulsory superannuation system. They want to make it optional. As the good people of Rice Warner pointed out, that would mean a 24-year-old today would be something like $18,500 worse off at 65. Anyone can see that there would be a massively detrimental impact on low income earners in this country.

That is not the only one they snuck into the papers because they did not have the courage to fess up to it. The second one was, 'Push to end super rate rises' on the front page of The Australian on Friday, 5 February. This story was about how those opposite wanted to freeze permanently the super guarantee at 9½ per cent. We already know that they have frozen it three times with huge impacts for working people in this country, and then they sneak on to the front of The Australian this plan to freeze it indefinitely. That would again have serious consequences for Australian working people.

Then we had the Prime Minister stand up here and say at that dispatch box that they had no plans and that it was no part of their thinking to mess with the capital gains tax discount in superannuation funds. Then we have this story in the Australian Financial Review the next day: 'Cabinet digs in as PM backflips on CGT'. What a farce! What disarray that we see from those opposite. These sneaky plans are dropped into the paper of all of the things they want to do to diminish superannuation, especially for people on low and middle incomes in this country, with the capital gains tax in funds, the super guarantee rate and also, of course, the compulsory nature of super itself.

Already they have done so much damage in superannuation. They have frozen the SG, as I said, three times. They abolished the low-income super contribution. They say they care about women in the super system, but they abolished the low-income super contribution which impacts on 3.6 million Australians, 2.2 million of whom are women. They say they care about the gender gap in super, but this is what they do and this is what their actions mean here in Australia for Australian working people. They are also weakening the penalties for bosses who do not pay super on time. So we have a problem where 690,000 Australians are missing out on $2.6 billion of super they are entitled to by law every year. It is a big and growing problem. The solution from the Assistant Treasurer is to weaken the penalties for people who do the wrong thing. There are all kinds of ways they are weakening the system.

Our superannuation system is the envy of the world, but it is not perfect. There are all kinds of ways we can work to make it better. We have got issues around adequacy, particularly at the low end. We have got issues around gender, as I have already mentioned. We have got those issues around compliance that I just mentioned. We have also got these ridiculously unfair tax concessions in the superannuation system.

One of the most important contributions was made yesterday, 1 March, by Tom Garcia from the AIST. He said:

AIST's research shows those at the top end of the income percentile receive as much as $660,000 of total government support to their retirement income over a working lifetime (mostly through super tax concessions). This compares to around $300,000 in government support to someone on the median wage of about $50,000 a year.

That does shine a light on the unfairness that we are seeing in the superannuation system.

Faced with these acknowledged concerns and challenges in super—and we have a terrific super system, a proud achievement not just of the Labor Party, although it is certainly that, but a proud achievement of the whole country—what do the Liberal Party do? They do all the things that will make it worse. They are not part of the solution when it comes to superannuation in this country. They are part of the problem.

In superannuation and all across the economic policy field, Labor is filling the void when it comes to good solutions for the future of this country. The Prime Minister of Australia wanders naked into the marketplace of ideas, without a stitch of policy to cover himself up. Whether it is negative gearing, capital gains or, especially, super, as I have just said, we have more concrete, better costed, more intelligently considered policies for the future of this country. We have got a plan for fairer superannuation which starts to address some of that unfairness at the very top of the superannuation system so that we can fund health and education in this country and we can underwrite the future of our country.

The time has long past for those opposite to give the Australian people some clarity on economic policy, on superannuation, on negative gearing, on capital gains, on all of the tax issues—no more just sneaking stuff onto the front of The Oz when you do not have the courage to stand up and say what you believe, when you do not have the courage to say that you do not believe in compulsory super, to say that you want to rip and tear at retirement incomes and the retirement income aspirations of ordinary working people in this country. Have the guts to say it. Put a policy on the table like we have. We put our policy on super on the table in April of last year. For the best part of a year, we have had a policy on super, and they lack the intelligence, the competence or the courage to say what they really think about super. They say they believe in it, but they are working behind the scenes to diminish it. Let's have no more sneaky leaks or half-baked hints when it comes to superannuation, no more saying one thing while you do something else.

If there is one thing that characterises this Prime Minister, it is pretending that he is one thing while he does another. The member for Griffith knows that when it comes to marriage equality. Everyone here knows that when it comes to all kinds of economic policy in this country. My message to those opposite is: have enough respect for the Australian people to put your super policy on the table and let them choose which is better, yours or ours.

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