Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Investment Funds Legislation Amendment Bill 2021 concerns the Future Fund, which is a fund of some provenance. It's probably worthwhile, for the benefit of members of this place, to go through some of the history of the establishment of the Future Fund. It was established in 2006-07 to fund the defined benefits liabilities of public servants, parliamentarians, judges and others who were the beneficiaries of a defined benefits superannuation fund. There was some controversy as to whether this was the best use of capital holdings of the Commonwealth. Many took the view that it was unnecessary and that the capacity of the Commonwealth to fund these liabilities through consolidated revenue was sufficient to meet current and future risks, a debate which continues today. And the fact that the fund still hasn't made a disbursement from its assets to fund the superannuation liability of the Commonwealth probably speaks to that underlying truth.

That being the case, it's now well established as a part of the architecture of the financing of the Commonwealth, and it has been added to by both sides of parliament since its establishment in 2006-07. For example, in 2000, in the period of the Rudd and Gillard governments, we established an education fund and a health and hospital fund to fund the Commonwealth's contribution to school, university and tertiary education as well as to the hospital system, including medical research. In 2014-15 the then Abbott government decided to close down Labor's health and hospital fund and fold the remaining proceeds of that fund into the newly established Medical Research Future Fund, so the assets of the health and hospital fund became the assets of the Medical Research Future Fund. In 2014 the Abbott government also established the Disability Care Australia Fund with the intention of funding, in part, the National Disability Insurance Scheme out of the earnings of that fund.

In 2018 the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Land and Sea Future Fund was established to assist the Commonwealth to make contributions to the Indigenous Land Corporation. And in 2019, quite famously, the Emergency Response Fund was established, together with the Future Drought Fund, to provide capacity for the Commonwealth to make disbursements in response to national emergencies and natural disasters and, more importantly, to help state and local authorities, together with the Commonwealth, to build the infrastructure which would help mitigate infirm economic assets to assist them in withstanding the damage of natural disasters. It has become a matter of some controversy in those drought and fire affected communities. I see that the member for Eden-Monaro is in the House. She has been quite outspoken on the fact that no moneys have been disbursed out of this fund to assist those fire affected communities. If you look at the member for Eden-Monaro together with the member for Gilmore, there would not be two electorates in the country that have seen more devastation over the last three years due to the impact of fires than theirs. It is a matter of deep concern, if not boiling, seething anger, that the government has not lived up to its promise to assist those communities in their hour of deepest and darkest need. I'm quite certain we will hear more from the member for Eden-Monaro and the member for Gilmore over the course of this debate, and probably over the course of the next six months, advocating as they always do for the community and advocating that the Commonwealth do what it promised to do and ensure that this fund is used for its intended purpose. The fund has not been established as a vanity project; it's been established to assist communities in need that have been or are at threat of future devastation because of natural disasters.

This is the context, the background, the land upon which the amendments before the House today are being debated. It is a matter of quite some national importance. Look at the subject matter of them: medical research; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land purchases—we can assist our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities on their project of self-determination and control of land and assets, with the economic and cultural benefits that come with that; drought resilience; emergency resilience; and the funding of Labor's National Disability Insurance Scheme.

There are some four or five amendments before the House today that I will speak to. Firstly, the bill creates a new employment framework for the Future Fund Management Agency. This is the agency which has the statutory responsibility for managing not just the Future Fund but the other five funds which I have outlined in my address this afternoon. The Future Fund Management Agency employs staff, and it is the responsibility of those staff to supervise the fund managers and ensure that all the statutory requirements of the fund are complied with. The provision of the first schedule of the bill will exempt it from the standard requirements of the Australian Public Service, like other specialised agencies such as: ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission; APRA, the prudential regulator; and the Reserve Bank of Australia. We are not opposed to this change; we recognise the unique charter of the Future Fund and the employment market in which it operates. Many of the employees in funds management and the managers of funds earn many multiples of the salaries that even the most senior public servants would earn. The purpose of these provisions is to ensure that public employees engaged by the Future Fund Management Agency are able to be engaged and retained; that is very important.

I want to take this opportunity, given that the bill goes to Public Service employment, to say a few things about the contribution public servants have made to our response to the COVID pandemic during these most difficult two years. I am sure not a member in this place would object to me paying tribute to the contribution that public servants have made. Government takes the glory but public servants do the vast amount of the work in this area. They have worked hard on the ground in airports, in our regions and in call centres around Australia to ensure that Australians have had the support they have needed throughout this pandemic. I ask you to cast your mind back to that period between March and June of 2020, when, in a few short weeks, we saw nearly half a million people queue up at Centrelink offices around the country. Many of those people were approaching a Centrelink office for the first time in their lives, in a desperate situation, not knowing how they would pay for food, rent, mortgages or any of the other requirements in what they thought would be a protracted period of emergency lockdown. It was way beyond the capacity of the systems, let alone the people who worked in Centrelink, to process that in the way that was needed.

Public servants came from every corner of the Public Service and every corner of the country. They picked themselves up from one agency and were relocated to another agency, often virtually, and did the job of processing those claims. That was just in one agency. It was repeated in many others. The Australian Taxation Office, for example, was responsible when the government was dragged kicking and screaming into introducing the JobKeeper arrangements. It was also responsible for administering the superannuation early release scheme. The Australian Taxation Office managed a similar job of work, remarkably, from remote locations around the country.

So I want to take this opportunity, on behalf of the Australian Labor Party, to thank those public servants, because I don't think the government has done that. I want to thank those public servants for the work that they've done through a trying and difficult period. At times, I was incredibly critical of the work that the government had done. During the various review committees—whether it was the COVID review committee chaired by Senator Gallagher, the various Senate estimates processes or the House committees—and even in the adversarial forum of this chamber, I had some harsh things to say of the government, and it was warranted and necessary. I would hate for those public servants to feel that those harsh words were directed at them. They most certainly were not. They are doing the bidding of their masters, as they do, as an apolitical public service is charged with doing. So we simply thank them for their service.

The second schedule in this bill provides a partial exemption under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 for the Future Fund Board of Guardians and the Future Fund Management Agency in relation to investment documents. I want to say something about this, because this provision has a fascinating progeny. When it first burst onto the legislative scene, it had a younger sister, and that younger sister was a provision intended to be made by the Treasurer which would have applied to all of the APRA regulated superannuation funds. That provision did exactly the opposite of what this provision, which applies to the government regulated Future Fund, does.

Let me explain. Schedule 2 will protect, in part, the Future Fund, its board of guardians and the management agency from freedom of information applications in relation to investment documents. What will those investment documents be? It may be a document which has been provided by an investment adviser about the valuation of an asset. It may be a more recent audited valuation of a holding document. This is a perfectly commercial arrangement, because it would be perverse in the extreme—because superannuation funds do not buy assets; they sell them as well—if the government, representing the taxpayers of Australia, were proposing to sell an asset that it owned and the counterparty to that transaction could lodge a freedom of information request in the midst of that commercial transaction and have access to a whole heap of commercial documents which prejudiced the Future Fund in its part in a sell-side transaction. It would be perverse in the extreme if the act worked in that way. So this is perfectly commercial for the Future Fund and its board of guardians, and it's perfectly sensible for the government to bring legislation to this effect to the House today.

What is extraordinary is that, at the same time that they were moving this provision into the parliament, they were doing the exact opposite and proposing to create a requirement upon every APRA regulated superannuation fund in the country to disclose the details, including the book valuation, of every asset in their portfolio. You don't need to be a Rhodes scholar—and hasn't the currency of a Rhodes scholar been devalued over the life of this government and its predecessor?—to understand what is going to happen in those circumstances. In exactly the same way that the Future Fund would have been prejudiced in a sell-side transaction, so would every APRA regulated fund in the country. Deputy Speaker, you would know, because you'd have a close eye to these matters, that that's you and me, that's every member of this parliament and that's every Australian employee who has their money in an APRA regulated super fund. This was going to cost them billions of dollars. An ideological obsession, driven by the Treasurer and those who advise him, was going to cost Australian retirees and those saving for their retirement billions and billions of dollars.

It was Labor's position that what was good for the goose was going to be good for the gander. If they didn't fix it, we wouldn't be supporting this. Thankfully, after exhausting every other option, the government has decided to do the right thing with the APRA regulated funds, and it's Labor's happy duty to advise the House that we'll be supporting this provision in this schedule in this bill. A dawning of common sense comes upon the government, not before due time.

Schedule 3 of the bill amends the Medical Research Future Fund Act 2015 to provide for the administration of the Medical Research Future Fund grants program and to provide a new disbursements framework. I want to pause and repeat that: a new disbursements framework. It should be noted that this legislation provides for a maximum of $650 million to be annually disbursed from the Medical Research Future Fund. This represents something that has become all too common over the life of the Morrison government. This represents a direct breach of promise to the Australian people. We have become so accustomed to the Prime Minister promising one thing and doing another, to the Prime Minister saying one thing and hours later denying that he ever said it, to the Prime Minister telling one group of people one thing and another group of people something completely different, and to the Prime Minister saying to some of our most trusted allies that we have a commercial arrangement with them, all the while knowing full well that he's proposing to do the exact opposite. Is it any wonder that everybody, from our international allies to members of the Prime Minister's own government to those of us on this side of the House and every member of the Australian public, now knows that you cannot trust a thing that the Prime Minister says?

An opposition member interjecting—

Yes, he 'sent a text'—we saw it in question time today. You could have knocked me over with a feather. You get this bloke who stands up in defence of his own sorry track record of deserting the country in its hour of deepest need and tells a completely fictitious fable that he sent the Leader of the Opposition a text message telling him that he was going to be in Hawaii. The only problem with this story is it wasn't true, like so many of the stories and tall tales—I cannot use the unparliamentary word. They're simply not true, and they're—

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