Julian Simmonds (Ryan, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have been eagerly anticipating the contributions to this debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Your Future, Your Super) Bill 2021. It's a very, very important bill for Australians—for the super retirements. But, unfortunately for the Labor Party, the member for Canberra, the previous Labor speaker, has let the cat out of the bag about why Labor is opposing this bill. It's because it is a protection racket—a protection racket run by the Labor Party to protect their union mates and protect the dollars that flow into the unions from the superannuation scheme. That is why the Labor Party want to oppose this particular bill. It's because they want to keep the money flowing into union coffers and to keep their union mates in jobs, and to make sure that that money then flows to the Labor Party. Let's be very, very clear about what this bill is about. It's about having a single default fund that follows you around, it's about making sure that people have better transparency about whether their fund is underperforming, and it's about ensuring that your fund is acting in your best financial interests.

What possible reason could there be to oppose those three very important safeguards for consumers? As the member for Canberra said, it's because they want to keep unions injected into your super. The member for Canberra tried to make the point that everything's better with unions, the world is better when unions are involved. But in fact, some of the behaviour of unions is what has led to this bill. Time and time again we see that these measures are there to safeguard some of our newest employees, those young employees who are new to the workforce and who aren't as focused on their retirement as people who are further along in their career, and understandably so. We get it. There are a lot of competing priorities. You want to start your career, you want to establish your career, you want to start a family. These are more pressing priorities than your superannuation. Unfortunately, because of the way the Labor Party have set up the superannuation scheme, while you're not focusing on your superannuation, the unions are. They're focused on making sure that you have multiple different funds whenever you go to a new job—

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