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

I'm not sure everybody in the chamber here today will recall the day JobKeeper was passed through this parliament. I actually do. I was one of the few who was here, in a not dissimilar context to the one we are presented with now. Many of us came up from different parts of the country or across from different parts of the country. If I were to describe the mood, it was tense, not just in this chamber but of course across the nation, because we were staring into the abyss—the unknown. We saw people being locked up in their homes in places like China. We saw people being in lockdown, in a way that we had not experienced at that point, in places like Milan. And what hovered across the nation was a sense of fear about the unknown and where we were to go next.

I remember the emergency support packages that were introduced into this chamber. Frankly, many of them raised deep philosophical questions for me, and I make no apology for that. Some people have made a virtue of deferring ideology at the point of crisis and, certainly, there was a need to reassure the Australian people at that challenging and difficult time. I remember the debate in this chamber and the mode that appeared at that time. I remember that the measures came in and the Labor Party of course were contorted about them. I had my own ideological conversations about what was necessary, but I want to make absolutely clear that I supported the legislation as the appropriate and right thing to do because of the moment we were in.

But I remember the contortions that the Labor Party had at the time over that legislation and whether they could support it. I'm going to bring people into a history lesson: it had nothing to do with JobKeeper. I remember it very clearly, in fact, because they argue that they put the idea of a wage subsidy up before the government did. Their contortion was over another section of the legislation—one which I will make crystal clear I agreed with. It was the introduction of the early release of superannuation. Actively in crisis, they couldn't decide whether they were prepared to allow Australians and their families, in a moment of crisis, to access their own money.

I just heard it there from one of the members opposite. They said that this was basically going to be the end of the superannuation system and retirement savings—because we dared, in a moment of crisis, to allow people to access their own superannuation to do things like pay off their mortgage, put food on the table and support their children and loved ones. They thought it was morally wrong. We all know deep down—

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