Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government is basically lowering—and making it easier for employers not to pay—compulsory super contributions. This government has put forward the fact that they want to reduce the penalties for employers who do not pay their staff properly. The one thing I agree with the previous speaker about is that superannuation is wages. It is wages that people have earned. It is wages that they have decided to defer until they have retired, for their retirement income. It was workers who decided, through collective bargaining, to defer these wages and to save them for superannuation.

It was a Labor government that introduced the compulsory super contribution so that all Australians would have access to super. Prior to this, it was only those at the very top end of the wage bracket who had access to superannuation savings schemes—or people who were in collective agreements. Now the government want to say that people do not have the power to decide collectively which super fund they will have. They want to weaken that opportunity through some of the attacks that they have made on super.

The government have clearly not sat down and spoken to somebody who has lost super as a result of an employer going broke or an employer not paying their superannuation. Time and time again, whether they be cleaners, people working in hospitality or security guards, people who work in a number of businesses lose their super because their employer has chosen not to pay it. Whether it be fraud, whether it be theft, these are people who are not paying people what they are entitled to. This is part of their wage that they are not being paid.

This government wants to go weaker on them and make it easier for them not to pay what they are supposed to. It is like the minimum wage. If you do not pay somebody their weekly wage, you can be pulled up before Fair Work. It should be the same for super. It is compulsory to pay super, yet this government wants to weaken the compliance measures. Already the statistics are out. Roughly 700,000 Australians are losing because employers are not paying super. The Australian National Audit Office believes that it could be as high as 20 per cent of employers that are failing to meet their super guarantee obligations—20 per cent! Imagine if 20 per cent of employees did not receive their pay cheques on Friday. What would the government be doing about that? Maybe this government would be doing nothing about that. Maybe it does not care about low-paid workers. But, if you are required to pay wages on time, you should be required to pay and have the toughest penalties against you if you do not pay super on time.

If we are serious about lowering the pension obligations of the government into the future, that is linked to how much people have in their superannuation. Superannuation is about empowering people in their retirement to have the income that they need to live, and the sooner they start saving superannuation the more they will have in the long run. I know. I am in the generation of superannuation. When the people in their 30s retire, they will have a working lifetime of super to retire on, if we continue as a parliament to support measures to boost those savings.

That is why this government's attacks on super are hurting not only the people of today who are retiring but also the people of my generation and of the future who will retire. There is the fact that it has frozen the super guarantee. Let us just remind people: it is a minimum guarantee. Like the minimum wage, it is the decision that we have made for the minimum amount of savings that people need to ensure they have an income when they retire. That is what this is about: the lowest paid workers in our community, who have worked really hard their whole lives, having enough income to retire on. It is about our cleaners, our nurses, people working in hospitality, people working in food processing—making sure that they can have a decent life in retirement. All they get from this government is attack after attack, whether it be their basic weekly wage or their superannuation. This government needs to stop attacking people's super.

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