James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will just make sure I am speaking on the right bill here, because I thought the Treasury Laws Amendment (2023 Measures No. 1) Bill 2023 was the one that was introducing changes to the franking tax credit system, part of the roller-coaster ride of broken promises we have seen from the government since the solemn vow they made, after the results of the 2019 election loss, that they would not be making changes to our superannuation system. The previous speaker just made me double-take on whether that was in this bill, because he didn't mention it at all. Mind you, it doesn't surprise me that the government don't want to talk about schedule 4 or schedule 5 of this bill, which are, as I say, the beginning of a really frightening raid on the retirement savings of the people of this country.

The member for Maribyrnong will be kicking himself. He's probably looking at what the Albanese government are doing and saying: 'Why didn't I do it that way? Why was I honest? Why did I come out and say before an election that I was going to make all these significant changes to the tax treatment of the hard-earned retirement savings of the Australian people and face the quite reasonable wrath of those that would have been significantly affected, who had planned for their retirement and made decisions based on what they believed to be a reliable taxation structure and treatment of those retirement savings? Why did I come clean and say I had these plans to do it when I could have been like the Albanese government and said nothing whatsoever in an election campaign and waited until after the election to start rolling out all of these raids—these smash and grabs—on the hard-earned retirement savings of the people of this country?'

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, because we members of the coalition always expect the Labor Party want to get their grubby hands on the savings of retired and soon-to-be retired Australians. Regrettably, probably a lot of Australians thought that they could take Prime Minister Albanese and the government at their word. During the election campaign, when journalists quite reasonably kept putting questions to senior members of the then opposition about what they might do if they became the government in terms of superannuation policy, the solemn vow was given time after time, 'If the Labor Party become the government, we will not make changes—none whatsoever.' It was not, 'We won't make any significant changes,' or, 'We'll do some things, but don't worry about it.' They said that, if they formed government, they would not be making changes to the way in which superannuation is treated.

I suspect a lot of people believed that, because I suspect a lot of people would think that no-one could commit such a colossal outrage as to give a firm, solemn vow on something as significant as the retirement future of the people of this nation and then go back on that word after the election. I think most Australians thought, 'We haven't seen anything like this in Australian politics for many decades and maybe we can trust the Labor Party, given that they were honest in the 2019 election about what they were going to do and outlined all of the outrageous policy positions around undermining the retirement, sustainability and security of Australians.' No doubt people thought, 'Because they said in 2019 that they were going to do all those things and they were rightly defeated because of those dangerous policies maybe (a) they learnt a lesson about that and (b) they have given this very clear commitment.' The people of this country are reasonable and expect that people in high office, or aspiring to be in high office, can be, generally speaking, relied upon if they give such an explicit commitment—and there were so many times and they were so very clear in their answer—and they would have assumed that they could take that party, the now government, at face value.

How broken-hearted the people who fell for that conjuring trick feel now, as we have now seen week after week more and more—it's death by a thousand cuts—people's retirement security being undermined before their eyes. The two measures in schedules 4 and 5 of this bill—the first TLAB of 2023—are the first two broken promises when it comes to superannuation and franking credits. Let's remember and understand what franking credits are and what the principle is. A franking credit is where a company has paid tax on a profit that they then distribute as a dividend. Tax was paid at the corporate tax rate of 30 per cent. If you own shares through your superannuation fund, the tax rate inside your superannuation fund is at a concessional rate lower than that corporate tax rate, so obviously there is a credit for people where the tax rate that they should be paying is less than the tax that has already been paid on that money—that 30 per cent tax rate.

This was looked upon with a great deal of greed by the Labor Party in the 2019 campaign. They thought, 'Let's take that away from the superannuation savings of the people of this country, because that is money that we can use for all the things we want to do and all the extra spending that we want that's outside the ability of a government that lives within its means. So we'll just raise taxes on people that we think probably don't really vote for us, and we think we can probably get away with this.' They didn't in 2019, but they're seeking to do it right now. As I say, this is the commencement of what is clearly an agenda to pursue the policy positions of 2019 slice by slice. We have these two measures in this bill. We now have the government saying they want to lift the concessional tax rate from 15 per cent to 30 per cent on superannuation balances that are of a value over $3 million. We were told that that was 0.5 per cent of accounts. Now we find that, if you're my age or a bit younger, you've got a one in 10 chance of being slugged by that double taxation of your superannuation once you get to retirement age.

One wonders what those projections are based on when it comes to the inflation outlook, because, regrettably, many of the inflators that have been applied through a lot of the models used, including by Treasury, have not been able to predict the significant and aggressive inflation rate that we've got going on in our economy right now. We hope that that has peaked, but we will only find that out in the weeks and months ahead. It could be well more than one in 10 people my age or younger that are affected by that double taxation. Where will this end? As I say, I predict it will end once the government have got their greedy little hands on as much of the retirement savings of the people of Australia as they possibly can by fully implementing the Shorten agenda from 2019, just surreptitiously, by stealth, slice by slice—and the first two slices are in schedule 4 and schedule 5 of this bill.

I've got more than 10,000 self-funded retirees in my electorate, and there are just as many who are approaching retirement in the decade or so to come. It is a very big decision to make, to retire. Once you've left the workforce, it is not so easy to re-enter the workforce. If you make decisions to provision for your retirement, and you assume you can rely on a certain set of rules and tax treatments being in place, and then those goalposts are moved on you, for many people it is far too late for them to re-enter the workforce or change the way in which they've structured their finances in order to provision for their retirement when the rules keep changing. If the changes to those rules are continuously ramping up taxes on superannuation, then all that means is that the sort of retirement that people thought they were going to have is going to be greatly diminished.

That's really nasty, really unfair. When these changes are built off the breaking of a fundamental election commitment to explicitly not do any of these things, which is what schedules 4 and 5 do, then we've really got to ask ourselves some questions regarding the moral compass of a government that wants to go to an election, give those solemn vows and then break them at the first opportunity. What will be next? We don't know, but no doubt we'll find out as more of these ideas are ventilated through the press and/or other essays that are written by treasurers and others. All we know is that we're now seeing the slow and steady march of continuous attempts to increase taxation on people who have made decisions to provision for their retirement on the basis they thought they could take the Prime Minister at his word when he said he wouldn't change the taxation treatment on them.

It is quite heartbreaking for people who are approaching retirement and starting to get nervous about whether or not they have provisioned the right amount of money in their superannuation, because they don't know how the rules are going to change on them and they don't know whether or not the amount of money that they have calculated they needed to have provisioned before making the decision to retire will be enough if at any point in time suddenly all sorts of new tax treatments might come into play. We saw this, of course, just last week, with the announcement on the $3 million balances. That was accompanied by a whole range of other confusing thought bubbles and doublespeak and contradictions from the senior members of the government's economic team around the tax treatment of the family home—whether or not unrealised capital gains may attract taxation treatment. In question time today, we even saw the Assistant Treasurer effectively confirm that that's what they're about. That's what's next. It seems that, with each week that goes by, there's another little slice taken from the hardworking Australians who have done the right thing and saved to provision for their own retirement in order to be as limited a burden on the taxpayer as they can. The punishment for them doing so is to have that money constantly eroded away by decision after decision that this government is taking week after week to figure out how it can get its hands on more of these people's hard-earned savings.

This is money that people have worked hard to earn to provision for their retirement. We heard some of the examples that came up in question time today. We're talking about primary production businesses. We're talking about a circumstance where, by the mere change in the valuation of your property—not through selling it but just through its valuation—you might be liable for a very significant capital gains tax bill.

Then we got a lecture on the need for people who have structured themselves that way to have the liquidity to pay that tax bill. Apparently they're meant to be clairvoyant and assume and know that it will be the intention of a Labor government to always look for more ways to tax superannuation and that they should make sure they're provisioning for that. They got a warning letter saying: 'Make sure you've got enough liquidity in your superannuation because we're coming after you. We're on the way.' Each week we're going to see more examples, like schedules 4 and 5 in this bill, of the government looking for ways—as a death by a thousand cuts—to implement the Shorten agenda that was taken to the 2019 election.

For constituents of mine who are self-funded retirees or who are planning to retire soon, this is a very frightening revelation, especially in an environment where interest rates are going up, electricity prices are going up, the cost of living is growing exponentially and inflation is at its highest rate in my adult lifetime. There are self-funded retirees who were hoping to maybe help their kids get into a housing market that is ever more difficult because the policies of this government are driving interest rates up and making it more difficult than ever to buy a home. There are self-funded retirees, or soon-to-be self-funded retirees, who were looking forward to enjoying their retirement because it would be, in many cases, the first time in their lives that they'd be able to have certain experiences. They've been working hard to save their own money so that they can use their own money to enjoy their own retirement, only to find that maybe that's not going to be possible to the extent that they had planned, because these changes have happened.

We will fight all and any attempts of this government to raid what they derogatorily describe as a 'honey pot'. This is like some kind of a socialist exercise of redistributing the wealth of self-funded retirees and the superannuation balances of hardworking Australians for the purposes of government policies that the government aren't prepared to properly cost and they can't afford. As we say: when this government run out of their own money, they come after yours. We in the coalition will stand up for people and protect their money. We will fight against broken promises—solemn commitments that this government took to an election that they're already breaking. The self-funded retirees of this country know that they can always count on the coalition to stand up for them against this sort of recklessness.

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