Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to call out the Liberal government's attacks on Australia's world-leading superannuation system. This is a system of which Australians should rightly be so proud. Right now we have $3 trillion under management in the system, rising to $10 trillion by 2040.

Politicians are often rightly criticised for not thinking about the long term for the country. In the 1980s, the Labor government put in place superannuation as a way of raising the living standards of ordinary Australians, taking what used to be for only a privileged few—the elite—that is, proper retirement standards for them and the pension for everyone else, and putting this in place. It was also about offsetting our ageing population. It created a savings pool of capital that is owned by ordinary people, not multinationals and big companies.

Superannuation in this country is now part of your wage. The simple truth is that a cut to super is a cut to your wage, and every Australian understands that. I call on the government to rule out cutting superannuation and continuing their attacks by cutting wages—to rule that out in the next budget. They're still flirting with it and they still have the backbench trying to push the Treasurer by saying, 'Let's cut the superannuation guarantee,' which is another way of cutting wages. They should rule that out.

I also call on them to stop vandalising and attacking superannuation; it's not a piggy bank for every problem that the government won't take responsibility for, it's for retirement savings. They effectively privatised the first six months of the recovery. Shamefully, in those first six months people had spent more from their superannuation—usually low-income people withdrawing from their superannuation—than the government had spent on JobKeeper and JobSeeker combined. As a result of that, $37 billion has been withdrawn from superannuation and 600,000 Australians now have zero dollars in their retirement savings accounts. And the economic geniuses over there got low-income people to withdraw their last bits of super at the bottom of the market, the very worst time to withdraw superannuation.

Then, of course, there was the appalling proposal to let family violence victims withdraw $10,000 from their super, asking women to subsidise their own escape from domestic violence and the guarantee of their children's safety by cashing in and trashing their super, leading to long-term poverty. At the very moment that women need the community and society to support them, the Liberal government's response was, 'Well, let's privatise your response; you're on your own.' Finally, after three years of trying to push this measure, the Minister for Women announced in Senate estimates yesterday that it was being dropped. That wasn't because of common sense—they could have listened to people for three years telling them that this was a dumb idea—but because of the prevailing political circumstances; these geniuses realised that it wasn't sustainable.

But if anyone thinks those two ideas were bad enough, the prize for the dumbest proposal to undermine superannuation—the gold medal for policy stupidity—is the idea to let people withdraw their superannuation to buy houses. It's hard to think of any policy that does so much bad in one go. It's a triple whammy: reducing retirement savings, like the other two, but pushing up housing prices and creating a transfer of wealth from young people to older people unprecedented in this country. That's what that would do. Labor believes that superannuation is good and home ownership is good, but that you don't have to choose between the two. We're trying to protect super and the Liberals are trying to destroy super.

But the biggest lie in this policy is that it's not about first home buyers at all. The only people who would benefit—the only person who would benefit—is the person selling the house. You're not making it easier to get into the market if you're pushing the house prices up. Think about it: if you have two young people bidding at an auction and each of them has managed to withdraw, say, 20 grand—probably all the super they have if they're in their 20s—then they're each there bidding with 20 grand so they're just going to pay 20 grand more on the house price! The only person who benefits is the person, usually the guy, selling the house. It's like taking a vacuum cleaner, putting it in your super account and sucking all the cash out into the pocket of the person selling the house.

The modelling released by Industry Super Australia—that's independent modelling, despite what those opposite say—showed that this policy would have an impact of an increase of eight to 16 per cent on the median house price in the capital cities. Even when Joe Hockey floated this thought bubble of an idea when he was Treasurer in 2015 he had to rule it out quickly, because he was pounced on by Mathias Cormann, the then finance minister, saying: 'That's a dumb idea. We wouldn't do that because house prices would go up.' The advice from the Grattan Institute and leading economists like Saul Eslake hasn't changed, Malcolm Turnbull is out there telling us it's a stupid idea. You don't make housing more affordable by making it more expensive. So I call on the Treasurer to put this idea out of its misery. Put the member for Goldstein and all these backbenchers trying to get their names in the paper back in their box and rule this out.

See this speech in context