Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The measures encompassed in Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007 are sensible and will meet with the support of the opposition. Schedule 1 of the bill allows the Commissioner of Taxation to disclose taxpayer information to Operation Wickenby task force officers and to officers of future compliance operations. Operation Wickenby is, of course, the multiagency operation established in 2004 to crack down on offshore tax fraud. It is led by the Australian Taxation Office. Other agencies involved are the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Federal Police and ASIC.

Allowing the commissioner to share information with other government agencies involved in Operation Wickenby should help the compliance task force investigate tax evasion and enforce the law. The amendments allow the commissioner to disclose information to officers at Operation Wickenby and agencies for any purpose related to the task force. It also allows the commissioner to disclose information to officers of the agency for any future task forces established to protect Australia’s revenue. Labor supports all of the efforts by the Australian tax office to address tax avoidance and evasion and to increase fairness in the tax system.

I note that there has been some concern by some commentators about the potential privacy implications of this measure. The Law Society of New South Wales, the Taxation Institute of Australia and the Law Institute of Victoria expressed concerns in their submissions to the government’s discussion paper late last year. We respect these views and, of course, the motivation of these bodies. However, on balance, we are satisfied that these proposals are sensible.

I do note the concern of the Law Institute of Victoria that organisations such as ASIC will have no legal requirement not to disclose personal information provided to it by the Australian tax office. This is a valid issue to raise and perhaps the Assistant Treasurer, when he sums up this debate, could address that concern.

I do understand that the Australian tax office and ASIC have concluded or are about to conclude a memorandum of understanding on the sharing of information. I would assume that this would include a provision that ASIC would not provide the information to any third party. I recognise that this would not have the force of law if this were the case, but we do recognise the need for these measures and we do seek reassurance from the government that every possible protection is being put into place.

The government has made a significant financial commitment to Operation Wickenby; over $300 million has been allocated to the project over seven years. The 2006-07 budget measures increased revenue as a result of the operation. It estimated the increased revenue to be $323 million over four years. I note that the tax commissioner stated in additional estimates approximately two weeks ago that he is confident that the $323 million figure will be reached, and Labor certainly hopes that this is the case.

Schedule 2 of the bill proposes amendments to the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 to enable the Commissioner of Taxation or another ATO officer to provide information to an employee in response to their superannuation guarantee complaint against their employer. The provisions of the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act prohibit the disclosure of information about the progress of any action in relation to any person. This prevents the ATO from providing information to employees on the progress of their superannuation guarantee complaints. The amendments will allow the ATO to provide information to an employee in response to that employee’s complaint that their employer has not complied with its superannuation guarantee obligations.

The ATO will be allowed to provide information on the steps taken to investigate the complaint, actions taken in relation to the complaint and steps taken to recover any superannuation guarantee charge from the employer. Again, this is an eminently sensible measure. It is not logical for privacy laws to prevent an Australian government body from presenting information to the very individual concerned. If an individual rings up the Australian tax office and says, ‘I want to find out how my complaint’s going,’ it is illogical for the Australian tax office to have to say, ‘I can’t tell you how your own complaint’s going because it might breach your privacy.’ It beggars belief that the privacy laws could prevent information being given to an individual about their own case. So we support this schedule wholeheartedly; we have no concerns about it at all. The amendments will allow enhanced services to employees with concerns about their employer’s contributions.

I do note that this is estimated to cost $19.2 million over four years. I note that the budget announcement concerning this measure also mentioned that the government would clear the backlog of complaints made to the ATO in relation to superannuation, and I gather that that is the reason for the $19.2 million worth of cost.

Schedule 3 of the bill proposes amendments to a number of the tax acts to extend employee share ownership concessions and related capital gains tax treatment to stapled securities. The amendments allow the employee share ownership concessions for employee share ownership schemes to apply to stapled securities and rights that are included with an ordinary share listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. Currently, only the ordinary share component of a stapled security can qualify for the employee share ownership concessions. The other component, for example a unit in a trust, will be subject to fringe benefits tax.

Of course some companies encourage employees to participate in employee share schemes by offering them discounted shares in that company. Where the scheme complies with the employee shares scheme income tax rules, certain tax concessions apply to the share discount given to the employee. Employees can choose when they include the discount given on the shares or rights in their assessable income through the upfront concession or the tax deferred concession.

Where an employee elects to take advantage of the upfront concession, the taxpayer obtains a $1,000 income tax reduction in the year that they acquire the shares. The difference between the purchase price and the market value is included in the employee’s assessable income in the year of acquisition. Only the excess over $1,000 is included in the employee’s assessable income. Therefore, if an employee receives $1,000 or less of shares they will not pay any tax on that acquisition.

Of course, the second option is to defer the tax liability on the shares for up to 10 years. Where an employee defers tax liability on the shares, the difference between the purchase price and the market value is included in the employee’s assessable income in the year in which the cessation of time occurs. The cessation of time is either when the shares are disposed of, when the disposal restriction ceases, when the employee’s employment with that particular organisation ceases or 10 years from the date of acquisition of the shares. Capital gains tax and fringe benefits tax concessions also apply. Labor supports this proposal.

There is strong evidence that employee share ownership schemes result in higher productivity. Some evidence suggests that the productivity differential between similar firms is six per cent higher for the firm with an employee share ownership scheme. Even at the conservative end of estimates, studies suggest that an increase of three per cent in productivity is likely with the introduction of an employee share scheme.

In 1987 a study in the United States found a 50 per cent increase in productivity when firms introduced an employee share ownership scheme. In other words, a firm with productivity growth of two per cent would have a growth rate of three per cent after the introduction of a share ownership scheme. Most studies find that the introduction of a share ownership scheme, in conjunction with participatory management, delivers the best results.

In 2000, a Rutgers study found that sales employment and sales per employee increased from 2.3 per cent to 2.4 per cent after the introduction of an employee share ownership scheme. As the Employee Ownership Group points out, these gains might seem small but, over 10 years, a company with a share ownership scheme will be 30 per cent bigger than it would otherwise be. This is good for the Australian economy, as well as being good for the individual firm involved.

Australia must take any step which improves productivity. I am glad that the honourable member for Lilley is in the chamber. He wrote a very fine article in the Australian Financial Review today about productivity. As shadow Treasurer he has been talking about productivity for months on end, if not years. And he has a lot to talk about because, currently, Australia’s productivity record is particularly poor. We have been seeing a slowing of productivity growth. In September 2006, the quarterly national accounts showed that productivity growth actually declined by 1.6 per cent in the previous six months. They also showed that labour productivity had not increased since June 2004. That is more than two years with zero net productivity growth.

When the Governor of the Reserve Bank appeared before the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration, I think last week in Perth, he agreed with the committee that the fall in the increase in productivity was not entirely due to the mining boom. He pointed out that, even when you take the mining boom out of the equation, we still have very worrying productivity trends. We are seeing the gap between the productivity in Australia, the productivity in the United States and the productivity of our competitors getting bigger. We are not catching up.

What is this government’s response? To introduce Work Choices. Work Choices does not increase productivity, but things like employee share ownership schemes do. Employee share ownership schemes can give you positive partnerships: partnerships between employers and employees, to improve the way they do business, to give employees a stake in the firm and to give employees more motivation to increase their productivity. Instead, this government drives us to a wages race to the bottom.

So far this decade we have seen Australia’s productivity, compared to the levels in the United States, fall from 85 per cent to 79 per cent. That is a very significant drop. It is unusual to see figures of that magnitude when you are talking about productivity gaps between nations. In this decade we have seen a six per cent productivity gap between Australia and the United States. That is a very poor result indeed and we as a nation, as a government and as a parliament must embrace measures to improve productivity. We welcome this as one very tiny step from the government, which is a positive contribution to improving Australia’s productivity rate. We would like to see much more of this. And we will see much more of this under a Labor government, because improving productivity is a priority for the Rudd Labor opposition and will be a priority for the Rudd Labor government. We need to see much more productivity in this nation. We need to talk about it more and we need to do more of it. Only by improving productivity can we compete with our competitors. It is not through reducing wages, it is not through driving wages down to the bottom, as we see from this government; it is through innovative measures to improve productivity. This proposal is a good, small first step.

This proposal will encourage more employees to take a financial interest in the company for which they work. However, the government could do even more to encourage employee share ownership schemes, putting aside all the other things they could do about productivity in the education field, for example. They have had 11 years in office but have done very little to increase the take-up of employee share ownership schemes.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Workplace Relations conducted an inquiry into employee share ownership schemes in 2000 and recommended that stapled securities be included for ESS purposes. They conducted that inquiry in 2000. It is now 2007, and we are dealing with this legislation.

It has taken seven years for the government to adopt the bipartisan recommendation of their own committee. That is seven years of lost opportunities in relation to productivity. I am not suggesting that employee share ownership schemes are a magic bullet, I am not suggesting they turn around productivity overnight, but they are one part of the process. They are one part of the policy response that this nation must provide to improve productivity.

In February 2004 the then Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, the member for Menzies, announced a target of doubling employee share ownership schemes in workplaces, from 5.5 per cent to 11 per cent by 2009. We are roughly halfway through that period and the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data show the total number of employees participating in employee share schemes has risen from 5.5 per cent in 1999 to 5.9 per cent in 2004. We need to see much more of an increase. I recall that the Prime Minister once said that he wanted Australia to be one of the great share-owning democracies of the world, but the government has done very little to promote employees owning shares in their own companies.

Finally, I note that this is the first of the tax laws amendment bills of the year, no doubt the first of many. The government, as is its wont, will be introducing many tax laws amendment bills, and we still have no action from the government in relation to section 51A(d) of the act. When I see every tax law that comes into this place, I think maybe this is the time the government will fix section 51A(d)—maybe this will be the one; maybe we are finally going to see some action.

Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Never!

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the honourable member for Lilley says: never. I am constantly disappointed that the tax laws amendment bills that come into this House say nothing about section 51A(d). This is a clause that the government said in 2003 it was urgent to fix. They took decisive action and issued a press release. Then we heard nothing. As I have said before, a press release changes nothing. If this is how the government deal with something that is urgent, I would hate to see how they deal with something on the backburner.

At estimates hearings last week, we heard the Treasury confirm that one of the reasons we have yet to see action on section 51A(d) is that it has to compete with other government priorities for action. The former Assistant Treasurer—not the one just past, or the current one, the member for Longman, but the one before that, Senator Coonan—said in 2003: ‘This is urgent. This is a priority for the government.’ Here we are in 2007, and we are still debating tax laws amendment bills which say nothing about section 51A(d), which do nothing to stimulate investment in infrastructure projects. On the contrary, in another tax bill the government is making it harder to raise funds for infrastructure projects. But there will be plenty of other opportunities to talk about that.

I noted with interest that the Institute of Chartered Accountants, in its budget submission, has included a reference to seven major tax measures which have been announced. The press release was issued but no legislation was introduced. The amendments to section 51A(d) and division 16D are the most significant. Again, we call on the government to introduce this reform into the House as a matter of urgency. We support the measures in this bill and we will be voting accordingly. They are sensible measures. They improve tax compliance and make it easier for the Australian Taxation Office and the other agencies involved in cracking down on large-scale tax avoidance to do their job. They also make it easier for individuals to access information, which is their right. It is an individual’s right to know how their complaint about superannuation is going. It is an individual’s right to get that information. We support that. We also support any moves to encourage employee share ownership as something beneficial for the individuals involved, for the companies involved and for the Australian economy.

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today it gives me pleasure to support the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007. I want to focus on one area of the bill that is related to the disclosure of information relating to superannuation guarantee complaints. The objectives of these amendments are to enable the Commissioner of Taxation or an officer of the Australian Taxation Office to provide information to an employee in response to a complaint that an employee may have about an employer not complying with their obligations under the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992. It is particularly important that employees should be able to discuss information pertaining to the money that they have in their super accounts, particularly from the guarantee contributions. It is very important that they be able to have those discussions about the money—which they own—or, in some cases, the lack of money, in these superannuation funds.

Earlier this month I had reason to contact the minister regarding the concern of a constituent who had made contact with my office in Wagga Wagga in Riverina. That person’s employer had allegedly not been paying anything into their superannuation guarantee fund for the past three years. This person’s records showed that in the financial years of 2004, 2005 and 2006 the employee earned in excess of $80,000. We could reasonably assume that payments of nine per cent on that amount would equate to approximately $7,000. However, the amount that was on the superannuation statements did not reflect the amount of money being deposited into the constituent’s chosen fund.

All of the alleged payments that were supposedly contributed under the guarantee levy were printed on the payslips, yet the payments were not appearing on the constituent’s superannuation statements. She had a right to be concerned. Try as she might to discuss this, she simply could not access information as to her own accounts. She was not only concerned that the mandatory nine per cent superannuation employers are obliged to pay was not being contributed, but she was also disappointed in the way the Australian Taxation Office had handled her complaint. They could not give her any detail. She could not discuss what she felt was within her rights to discuss—and that is to determine the bottom line of her inquiry into this money not being forthcoming, or not appearing on the superannuation statements.

My office contacted the Australian Taxation Office and were told that the investigation would take possibly many months to complete. That is exactly what my constituent was told. I can understand process, and there certainly is a need to undertake investigations in these areas, but what concerns me is that when my constituent contacted the ATO in July 2006 to follow up the matter, after speaking with the employer, she was told to wait a further two months to see if any payments would be forthcoming. That was fine; it was agreed. That was a simple and sensible thing to do. Sometimes the payments may be honoured in that time and there may be no need to pursue this any further. However, no payments were made. So my constituent again contacted the ATO and they again stated to her that they did not like the chances of seeing any money. They were concerned about the way in which the finances of the small businessperson might be impacted upon. They indicated that a matter like this could take anywhere between one and six years to be finalised.   

When I read the intent of this bill, my interest was aroused because I think people are entitled to understand, to know and to expect that employers do the right thing. Time after time and occasion after occasion in this House I support and defend employers with respect to Work Choices, industrial relations and many other areas, but at the same time they have to be fair in their consideration and determination. Employers have an obligation to do the right thing by their employees, particularly in relation to their superannuation contributions. I become particularly aggrieved when I see employers choosing to do things with their finances other than meeting their clear and concise obligations for employees. If it is good enough for me to come into this House to defend the rights of employers in a host of industrial relations matters, which I will continue to do, it is simply good enough for me to come into this House to also ensure that I deliver my views about the ways in which I believe employers are obligated to do the right thing by their employees.

The passage of this new legislation will mean that employees will be able to obtain more information on the progress of their inquiries about the nonpayment of superannuation guarantee contributions. Let us face it: they belong to the employee. I believe employees have every right to access this information. Superannuation payments are supposed to be contributed so that employees will be able to live in the future—the reason the guaranteed nine per cent contribution was put in place in the first instance.

The changes are aligned with the findings and recommendations of both the Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry and the former Senate Select Committee on Superannuation and Financial Services. Under this new law, the commissioner may provide information to an employee in response to the employee’s superannuation guarantee complaint.

Under the current law the commissioner or an officer of the Australian Taxation Office generally may not disclose information held by them in the course of their duties. There is no provision at all for the disclosure of information to employees about their employer’s compliance with obligations under the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992. I think this is simply unacceptable.

An employee or former employee may make a complain to the commissioner where they think that their employer has not complied with its obligations under the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992. The complaint must specify the obligations in question, which is quite onerous. In the end, an employer may also have choice of superannuation fund obligations in respect of its eligible employees.

Under the law employers must make superannuation contributions to the employee’s designated superannuation fund at least every three months. You might recall that I said this employee had not had any payments made for three years. Superannuation contributions are invested over the period of the employee’s working life and the sum of compulsory and voluntary contributions, plus earnings, less taxes and fees is eventually paid to the person when they choose to retire. People absolutely depend upon these, particularly as the retirement age is dragged out.

The sum most people receive is predominantly made up of their compulsory employer contributions. It is imperative that these be beyond question. I believe that, if an employer is not making the correct payments on behalf of an employee, they are not meeting their obligations and an employee has the right to lodge a complaint. They also have the right to find out where these complaints are up to and exactly how the investigation is going. I am fully supportive of this amendment to the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007. I congratulate the Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer on introducing this legislation for the protection of employees. I commend the bill to the House.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 1) Bill 2007 is an interesting bill—as is all tax legislation. It is an omnibus bill with a range of measures in it. The key is that it is tripartite. We are looking at a widening of provisions for the tax commissioner, in certain circumstances, in regard to an existing project, Operation Wickenby, looking at fraud against the ATO on an international basis. The funding for this program is due to run out at the time the sunset clause for this bill will run out. So when the funding runs out, the task force comes to an end—Operation Wickenby—and these two will come together.

The proposal is to change a fundamental provision of the tax act—that is, it is not normally the case that the commissioner will allow the private affairs of any individual to be communicated to another, a so-called ‘third person’. The specific provision here in regard to Operation Wickenby is this: under certain circumstances, members of the task force will be allowed to gain access to taxpayer information—normally private and secure—for the purpose of making an assessment as to whether or not there has been fraud against the Commonwealth.

There is a related provision, which on the face of it is a bit unusual, given that this particular task force is proscribed in time and has a sunset clause in relation to it. The wider provision, or the extension of it, is that if in the future there are task forces of the same nature as Operation Wickenby they can be encompassed by this legislation. They can be designated as such by the government and, under regulation, the tax commissioner could have the same effect—that is, he can allow private information to be communicated to the officers of those designated task forces.

I do not have a problem with that in any shape or form because the fundamental in this is always the key principle: how do you secure the Commonwealth’s ability to not only tax but in the gaining of the revenue ensure that those who would otherwise defraud the Commonwealth do not succeed? There are cases of massive amounts of fraud. Historically, we have seen case after case where those who were in the best position to do so, those who were richest, those who had the greatest capacity to buy their way out of not only their duty as citizens but their liability for tax, so arranged themselves and their circumstances to not pay much tax at all.

Wickenby is an important operation that has been ongoing for a number of years. The specific provisions we entirely support. If you look at the date in the sunset clause, 30 June 2012, you see that the task force ends and that is where the provisions end. If you look at the scope of Wickenby, you are looking at major fraud that is transnational. The expectation is that it will cost something in the order of $300 million, which has been allocated over the seven-year period of Wickenby; that is a lot of money. The expectation is that, over four years, there will be $323 million in revenue back to the Commonwealth. Despite the fact that people have second-guessed and said, ‘Maybe that’s not going to be the case,’ the evidence of the Commissioner of Taxation to the Senate estimates committee has re-endorsed that argument and says that that is the order that we are looking at. That is a first initiative in this regard.

There is a second initiative which is expected to include standardising the provisions into a new framework, a single piece of legislation. So where at the moment changes to the secrecy and disclosure rules are limited to Operation Wickenby and future large-scale tax avoidance and evasion task forces, those proposals will be carefully looked at by Labor on a case-by-case basis. But the government will effectively be able to do this simply by regulation; it will not necessarily come back to us here. My major point: Labor has always been about security of the taxation revenue of the Commonwealth. Labor, before it came to power in 1983, argued against the bottom-of-the-harbour practices, which involved hundreds of millions of dollars, where the failure of the current Prime Minister who was then Treasurer to take action against the bottom-of-the-harbour schemes completely eroded the Commonwealth’s ability to ensure there was enough money coming in the front door to be expended on Commonwealth government programs.

When it came to power Labor ensured that there was rigorous prosecution of people who were involved in those campaigns. Throughout its period in government Labor was a very efficient economic manager and, not only that, was an active participant in ensuring that the Commonwealth controlled what happened in the taxation area. Provision was made for the department of taxation to go after those who sought to defraud at the bottom or at the top. So I support this initiative, as does Labor.

This is an omnibus bill. What is the third element? I will save the best for last when I come to the superannuation guarantee just before two o’clock. The third element, which involves the Income Tax Act and the other acts here, is to extend the employee share scheme concessions to certain stapled securities. So what is that about? Australia has not had a good history of incorporating employees into sharing the profits of a company. There are significant examples in the United States, particularly in Silicon Valley and in a range of other innovative areas, where employee share schemes have been the very basis of the innovation that has driven the United States economy and where the idea that, whatever a person’s skills, if they have a part to play in a company in producing not just for the company but the community and country at large, the smart thing to do is not to treat them like cattle or chaff but to make them an integral part of that entire process of production.

Those schemes have worked well. Okay, you could argue: that is very innovative; that is the stuff that ran out of Stanford University and has been the core of the transformation of Silicon Valley, and effectively the transformation of the most modern elements of the American economy and the leading-edge elements of what we have seen in the technological transformation of our world. We know that there are employee share schemes in operation in Europe, and they have worked very well. Take Germany, for instance: whatever its problems at the moment, in Germany we have seen a fall from the ‘grand coalition’ government, we have seen a fall from 12 per cent to 10 per cent in unemployment and we are now seeing 2.7 per cent growth over the past year. We have seen a country that has absorbed the whole of eastern Germany and has made itself a greater Germany, a country that will play a much more significant part in the future. But the core of Germany’s postwar success has largely relied upon seeing its companies as an extension of its communities and ensuring that, in cooperation between the unions and the employers, the riches for Germany are created both for the people who run the place from the boardroom—and the Germans actually incorporate the unions at the boardroom level—and for the people on the factory floor producing good-quality goods for the world.

What has been the situation in Australia? Comparatively it has been pretty poor. It is not an integral part of the way we go about things. We have had a British model in which it is a case of excluding people rather than including them. We have not learnt the postwar lessons that Japan learnt. Go to the Honda plant in Japan or to Toshiba or to Sony and what you will see is not only a vast number of suggestion boxes around the place but a culture within which people are actively part of the production process, and there is a continual betterment of what is being produced.

They have employee schemes in operation there, because they understand that if you create something that is strong and unified it can endure. The Japanese have done a lot of things postwar that were wrong. They have not invested heavily in their own domestic needs and their own domestic infrastructure in the way that they should have, but they have got a lot of their corporate culture right in the way they have incorporated their employees.

What this offers for Australians is a chance to participate in the wealth that a company or an enterprise creates. You can staple securities to this. Stapled securities are available. It is a way of adding on to an initial set of shares. The terminology they use is that you can get this extra thing; there is a company employee share as part of that scheme and you can staple it to existing shares. They are specific because it is not part of the generality of what has been provided in terms of people taking up an interest in the company. This is a good and sensible move on the part of the Commissioner of Taxation, as are the fundamental moves that have been made in the other of the three areas that this bill deals with.

Commissioners of taxation are usually sensible; so is the Treasury secretary, Ken Henry. Ken Henry was sensible when he ran our operation in Paris, when he was Australia’s lead man in economic policy and Treasury policy in Paris. He just happened to do that after he had spent some considerable time in Treasurer Keating’s office. The person who is now the secretary of Treasury, who left Treasurer Keating’s office, went to Paris, extended his skills and is so significant as a public employee that even this government saw the benefit of picking him up and utilising his skills, who is someone sensible—Ken Henry—knows just about everything there is to know about the superannuation guarantee.

The nine per cent superannuation guarantee that we have now is dealt with in the third element of this bill:

... amends the Superannuation Guarantee (Administration) Act 1992 to allow the Commissioner of Taxation—

or an ATO officer—

to provide information to an employee in response to a complaint that an employer has not complied with its superannuation guarantee obligations.

You would think the scope of this would be narrow and confined. The fundamental scope is such that, at the moment, if you make a complaint that the employer has not kept up his end of the nine per cent, you go to the tax office and they say, ‘Sorry, pal, we can’t do anything for you,’ because the secrecy provisions are such that you cannot get any further with this. So what do these provisions do? When these amendments go through, a person in that position can say, ‘I have been rorted; I have not got my nine per cent.’ They can be told (1) what steps have been taken to investigate the complaint; (2) what actions have been taken in relation to the complaint; and (3) what steps have been taken to recover any superannuation guarantee charge from the employer.

I applaud these specific measures that will make it easier for someone who has been diddled out of their superannuation guarantee to hold the employer to account. But I would like to enlarge it for every person who is in receipt of that nine per cent superannuation guarantee. So we should take the provisions here and apply them to the federal Treasurer. We should be able to make a complaint against the federal Treasurer, because there was a nine per cent superannuation guarantee in place when he came to power and the government’s express intent was to move towards taking that nine per cent guarantee to 12 per cent and then to 15 per cent so that we could provide not just a superannuation guarantee but a living wage for people in retirement. Who nicked the other six per cent? It was the federal Treasurer. When he came to office he made a giant hullabaloo about the l-a-w law tax cuts, and year after year he went on about it.

The reality is simply this: under the impress of the circumstances faced at the time of the 1994 budget, a fundamental decision was made that tax cuts would be delivered early. The first tranche was delivered one year before it was expected to be delivered—in full. That was the first half of the bargain. The decision was made that the second half of the bargain would be that the next three per cent, the productivity dividend to people, would not take the form of a tax cut but would be commuted by a Labor government into a further extension of the superannuation guarantee, and it would move from nine per cent to 12 per cent. Who took the extra three per cent of superannuation guarantee? This federal Treasurer and this government.

So, under the aegis of this, where an individual citizen is meant to check with the ATO as to whether or not they were diddled out of their superannuation guarantee entitlement, we should be able to put the federal Treasurer in the stocks and say to him simply this: why did you and this government move to take the superannuation guarantee as the final statement for all low-income employees in Australia? Why did you make provision for those at the top but say to people in the vast bulk, in particular the baby boomers, ‘You have not provided for yourself before, but you can look forward to a pension rather than to a superannuation guarantee,’ where they could have a living superannuation guarantee into their future?

The provisions of this bill for individual complaints should be enlarged as a class action by every Australian who would want to take it up against the member for Higgins in that he nicked the other six per cent of superannuation guarantee when he came to office as Treasurer. He did not invent the superannuation guarantee. That nine per cent, which is now over a trillion dollars worth of ballast in the Australian economy, is there not because of the member for Higgins but because the former Labor government put it into place. They also put into place the steps to go to 12 per cent and then to 15 per cent.

The provisions of this bill—where a single Australian can go to the ATO and say: ‘I want to know where the rest of my superannuation guarantee has gone; I want to know who has stolen it. I want to know why the employer has made sure that I do not get it’—should be extended to the current Treasurer. Every Australian should be in a position in retirement to benefit from a 15 per cent superannuation guarantee. The only reason we have not got it is this federal Treasurer.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.