Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the member for Chifley being present in the chamber now to hear my response to the Treasury Laws Amendment (2021 Measures No. 3) Bill 2021. I also welcome the contribution from the member for Dunkley, because she ended where I wanted to start, which was on the importance of housing. As members would know, I am a passionate advocate for making sure that Australians can own their own home. This TLAB has measures that are in it, but one of the reasons that I believe in it so strongly is that I respect Australians and the slipstreams of their life.

The Labor Party has an obsession with prioritising superannuation over all other financial decisions—life's second biggest financial decision over all other financial decisions. I am proudly a believer in understanding the importance of respecting Australians and their life progress and that financial decisions should be made based on their priorities and their order in life. Home ownership is the most important measure to ensure financial security in your working life and in your retirement. Those who retire without owning their own home live at a higher risk of poverty in retirement and are exposed to rising rental costs. The older that Australians buy their home, the more they pay rent over their working life, the longer they have to pay off their mortgage and, of course, the more likely—ironically as it is—that they end up using superannuation to clear their mortgage at the end of their working life. So at every stage it's better that Australians buy their home first and then save for retirement second. But, of course, the Labor Party doesn't like that.

The Labor Party want to engage in a form of economic social engineering where you prioritise superannuation ahead of home ownership. There are lots of reasons why they'd like to do this. It has something to do with the fact that money gets funnelled into funds that they and their mates control and they can use it as a form of laundering to empower themselves. They are then able to direct the funds through the unions, through marketing fees and the like, which somehow eventually end up in the pockets of the Australian Labor Party. Another fund, the megafund of the super funds, IMF Investors, refuses to answer questions of this parliament and the House Standing Committee on Economics, including on the $36 million bonuses they pay to fund managers. I can't believe, Member for Moreton, that anyone would accept $36 million being paid out of the retirement funds of Australian superannuants to individual fund managers by the industry super sector, but that is where we are. That could buy a lot of homes, including for low-income people.

The other problem the Labor Party has is they don't actually understand the housing market. Their solution is to put a giant bandaid on the housing market rather than fix the root causes of the problem. I am going to break a really hard truth: people would actually prefer to own their own home. There are lots of reasons why they might want to do that—social, political, economic, everything else—but I can tell you as a proud member of the government that we believe in Australians owning their own home because it's the pathway to democratic ownership of the country and democratic distribution of the wealth of the nation. If Australians cannot own their own home, then they normally like to rent in the private market. It gives them choice, flexibility, understanding of their reflection of their stage of life. Of course, securing a long-term lease which provides them with security for their living standards but also the raising of a family. If they can't rent in the private market then they turn to things like social housing.

We all as members of the parliament understand the importance of social housing. It has a critical role in making sure we catch people so they don't fall through the safety net of our society. It is the same reason we have other forms of social welfare. But our preference always should be that people can stand on their own two feet. Labor's solution isn't to try and fix the problems that might exist in the private ownership end of the market or the private rental side of the market but to focus on putting a giant bandaid on the bottom of the market, in social housing. The consequence of that is more people depend on it, but of course the Labor Party likes that approach to housing. They don't want Australians to own their own home. In a choice between empowered citizens and owners, which is the Liberal vision for this country, and indentured renters, which is the Labor vision for this country, they always go for the latter. They go for that for one reason: it empowers them. It empowers their control over the lives of Australians. Just look at the hypocrisy that comes from the opposition on housing policy. They say you shouldn't be able to use superannuation to own your own home. Apparently that's an outrageous attack on the superannuation system and retirement savings.

Mr Hill interjecting—

Apparently it's outrageous, and the member for Bruce loves to rant on about it. But they're silent when we expose those same superannuation funds that are the trustees of Australia's superannuation savings, who use your money to go off and buy houses that they own and rent back to Australians. What hypocrisy sits at the heart of a structure where the super funds can buy homes with your money and rent them out but you cannot use your money to own your home so that you can have financial independence and economic security for you and your family. Don't think this is an esoteric issue. Cbus have a whole portfolio of property that they own in residential property. In answer to a request from the House of Representatives economics committee recently, they conceded they own $800 million of residential property in Australia that they rent out. Who is it funded by? You, the Australian people through your superannuation savings for houses that they own that you can rent from them with your money. This is the gross hypocrisy of the structure of the superannuation system, which is empowering concentrated capital to own the country. This is why I say Australians will end up being serfs to their own superannuation funds. That's fine for the Labor Party, because through their mates in the unions they're the ones who will be living it high and dry and having a fantastic time. They're the ones who get to go to the tennis on the sponsored deals. They're the ones who get to enjoy the benefits through the marketing arrangements, through the trade unions, which are then funnelled into the Labor Party. They're the ones who get every single benefit of the system—and it comes at your expense. That is why we believe in home ownership. We believe in home ownership because it is about empowering you, the people of Australia.

The superannuation system, in its current structure, is about empowering the Labor Party at the expense of Australians—and that's how they like it. Every single measure and every single pathway that shifts the balance back to empowering individuals and families, they will oppose—when we know full well exactly what happens when we don't keep a close eye on what the super funds get up to. We in the House of Representatives Economics Committee exposed superannuation funds reactivating low-balance inactive accounts—which funds had a legal obligation to pass through to the Australian Taxation Office—and funnelling them into their own funds so they could secure them and use them to harvest for fees, for bonuses and for insurance premiums that Australians didn't want. This is the height of corruption and misconduct. The Labor Party rightly talk about the problem of fees for no service in the retail and banking sector—and where that happens I completely agree with them—but they turn a blind eye and in fact run interference when it's their own mate being caught up in the job, where they are the ones charging fees for no service and doing nothing except taking Australians' money to feed their own bonuses. Their silence leaves them condemned.

An honourable member interjecting—

Because the royal commission overlooked these issues, and we've been exposing them. I know the Labor Party hates, every step of the way, the scrutiny the House Economics Committee provides. We've got APRA and ASIC looking at insider trading in superannuation funds. We've got APRA and ASIC going after funds that are engaged in misconduct or charging people fees or giving them misinformation about how they can use or transfer their money.

There is a reason why the Labor Party opposed the measures in last year budget which enabled young Australians to draw down on their super at a time of crisis and need. It was because they saw very clearly that it exposed the deep problems of liquidity that sit at the heart of the superannuation system. They also saw that, when Australians had a choice about what they wanted to do with their money, it wasn't the system the Labor Party set up, designed to empower the Labor Party; it was Australians making choices about taking their own money to empower themselves. They hated it every step of the way, and we know why. It's because the debate about superannuation isn't a debate about retirement savings, as much as the Labor Party want to make it so; it is a debate about power. It's about a choice between empowering Australians, which is what the Liberal vision is, or empowering the unions and the Labor Party, which is what the Labor Party want it to be. They know that every time Australians have that choice, they seek to empower themselves, because that is the success on which this nation is built. It is not built from empowering centralised Canberra, monopoly businesses and corporates; it comes from building the potential of individuals, families and communities, from the citizen up.

When you build a country with 26 million empowered citizens, you build a great nation. But when you seek to concentrate power in the hands of accords between corporates and big government, we know full well where that ends up: it empowers the few. Make no mistake: this is why Labor weren't a participant in the Federation and actually voted against it back in the 1800s. That is the reason why they opposed decentralisation of power. It is why they love nothing more than empowering themselves in every piece of legislation. They look at every single Trojan horse that they can seek to use to achieve that, because they know that politics is about power. They know that this is about the choice of who you empower.

We want to see Australians succeed. When we empower them to take control and responsibility for their own lives, they live a better life. We know that, when you empower Australians to be able to control their finances and have choice, they make decisions that reflect their interests as part of a mutual cooperation through a market economy and, of course, through community to improve their circumstances. The whole model of the Labor Party is about conformity and trying to knock away that choice. Don't get me wrong, once upon a time I do believe Labor believed much more in empowering citizens. That's what the member for Hunter goes on about regularly. He regularly talks about the issues of making sure Australians have the dignity of work. He regularly talks about the right of respecting workers and their efforts, and they enjoy the benefits of that. But we know in the mad, ideological world view of the modern Labor Party that that is now heretical. This is why there are so many problems and so many issues of division within the Labor Party today, because their interest is in what they need to do for themselves, not what we need to do in this parliament to help Australians.

There are a lot of other measures in this bill of course, but it's important to make this point: it's always important to talk about the structural divide, because it ultimately comes down to the choice that voters have at the ballot box, about who is going to back you, the Australian people. And it will always be people on this side of the chamber, whereas the Labor Party will always choose the reverse to empower themselves. This bill includes many measures that focus on how we go about doing that, from the simple to the substantial, like making sure the Medicare levy and Medicare levy surcharge income thresholds are indexed so that people aren't punished for working more or doing more or seeing CPI increases in their income.

There is also the Family Home Guarantee, which deals specifically with making sure that eligible single parents with dependents can build a new home or purchase an existing home with a deposit for as little as two per cent regardless of whether that single parent is a first home buyer or previous owner/occupier, because we understand that, regardless of people's life circumstances, we want them to own their own home. That should be the objective of this government, this parliament, this nation. It's one of the great traditions that sits at the heart of our social contract. Right from the beginning, the foundations of modern Australia have always been focused on how we empower ownership and democratic ownership of the country. There are many other measures in this bill that I won't have time to talk about today, but each one of them matters because it's focused on empowering you, the people of Australia.

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