David Coleman (Banks, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I hadn't planned on speaking on this motion but this is just quite extraordinary what's happening here. This is one of the situations where the government should just walk in and tell the truth. The government should walk in and say: 'Yes, we are deliberately restricting the ability of super fund members to find out what is happening to their money. We are doing that deliberately. We are seeking to do that and we're doing that because it's inconvenient for our friends in the union movement for these marketing payments and other payments to be disclosed. We don't want people to know about that, so consequently, we're moving this change to the regulation.'

I must admit I felt a bit sorry for the member for Fraser—who is quite an accomplished person and a good contributor to this place—tying himself up in intellectual knots trying to justify this, but it is ridiculous. What sort of government takes an existing rule which is about transparency and allowing people to find out what's happening to their money, which they must compulsorily contribute through super, and says: 'Let's not do that anymore. Let's take that away.' That is outrageous.

You can see from the breadth of concern about this legislation, right across the chamber, that this is a regulation that is unusually bad and completely unacceptable. For a government that was elected, to a significant degree, on a platform of integrity—so-called—to make one of their early moves to literally tie a blindfold around the eyes of superannuation fund members so they can't find out how, specifically, their funds are being spent on things like marketing payments to unions is absolutely outrageous. We all know that. We could tell by the very contorted contributions of those on the government side that they are embarrassed by this regulation—perhaps not the minister, but the rest. They should be embarrassed because it's shameful. I very strongly support the shadow minister's motion in this regard.

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