Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, if you needed any convincing that it's Monday, I think that contribution would be it. There wasn't really a lot on the motion. He said 'unions' about 50 times. He's clinically obsessed. They say 'Hawke and Keating' a lot, but it's really unclear what the rest of the point of that speech was. But I did see a media article about the member who moved the motion—thank you for bringing the debate. The media article said that he's one of the great hopes of the future of the Liberal Party, that he's one of the smarter ones and that really what they need to do is cut the deadwood away on the front bench and give that bloke, whatever his name was, a guernsey leading the team. Well, God help us if this motion is his best work. It's a word salad of utter nonsense. I mean, Member for whoever you were, do better.

The core complaint in this motion—and it's interesting that he didn't actually address the core point of his own motion in his speech—is that the government is making a modest adjustment to superannuation tax breaks for earnings on balances over, wait for it, $3 million. That's right. All the screeching and shouting and hyperbole in the motion is to champion tax breaks for people with millions and millions—in some cases tens of millions—of dollars in their superannuation accounts. The fact is that 99.5 per cent of Australians will keep the same tax break that they have. The 0.5 per cent of Australians who have been lucky enough, worked hard enough—it's a bit of both; some of it is because they've worked hard enough; a lot of it is just inheritance tax avoidance, frankly, where mummy and daddy give you millions of dollars to put in the super account so you don't have to pay tax on it. But that 0.5 per cent with more than $3 million will still receive tax breaks, just slightly less generous. And there is no change to the amount that people can accumulate in super. So, for anyone at home who has got a sleeping disorder—I get a bit of insomnia myself—you could google the motion somewhere on the Notice Paper and note the fact that the member didn't actually talk to the core complaint he's making, because it is ridiculous.

I give him full marks for comedy, though, for trying to dress up with 'concern for young Australians' his championing of a tax break for people with more than $3 million in their super accounts. The biggest risk to superannuation for young people, though—let's be very clear—is not a modest change to tax breaks for people with more than $3 million in their super account. No. It's what I've termed for a long time the gold medal for policy stupidity, which goes to those opposite—he mentioned it somewhere in the motion, near the end; I don't think he's really backing it in. But it's the super-for-housing policy. That's right. Their only housing policy is to allow young Australians to raid their superannuation and push up the cost of housing. That's why I gave it the gold medal for policy stupidity, because it's a double whammy: you trash your retirement savings and you enrich the people selling the house. Indeed, the modelling shows a $75,000 increase to the median house price if you let people unleash their superannuation savings in this way. Here's a tip for the bloke opposite who moved the motion: you don't make housing more affordable by making it more expensive. If you actually took their super-for-housing policy seriously—it's the kind of housing policy you have when you don't actually want a housing policy. It's a bit like the energy policy they announced last week, which was not a policy; it was a pamphlet with a cut-and-paste picture from the internet, with no costings. That's the kind of energy policy you have when you don't actually want to have an energy policy. So there's a bit of commonality here.

But it is a difficult challenge now, because, until last week, super for housing was their only policy. The only policy of the alternative government of the country, in two years, was to push up the cost of housing and enrich people who already owned houses. But now they have a second policy: the nuclear energy policy to push up power bills and rack up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt—and then God knows what: tax rises and cuts to other services?—in their nuclear fantasy. So it's a difficult competition—the member for Bennelong, I'm sure, would agree—as to which is the dumbest of their two policies: to push up power prices or push up house prices? That's all they've got out there at the moment.

Time doesn't permit the deconstruction of the last bit of the motion. It talks about the need for lower taxes. Well, here's a tip: from 1 July, every Australian taxpayer gets a tax cut under Labor's cost-of-living tax cuts—something that those opposite were not going to do. They were just going to shove it to those earning the most. On cutting wasteful spending, here's a tip: we've cut over $70 billion of wasteful spending. That has led to the first two surplus budgets this country has seen in nearly 20 years. The bloke who spoke before me said, 'We need a surplus,' and spoke of 10 years of deficits. You know where the 10 years of deficits were? They were under their government. Under their government, they racked up a trillion dollars of Liberal debt, with nothing much to show for it.

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