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

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to the Prime Minister's own budget papers, which show the cost to the budget of superannuation tax concessions outstripping the cost of the age pension in just four years. Given most of these concessions go to high-income earners, how is this either fair or sustainable?

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would say to the honourable member, as he has said previously, that people want stability and certainty around the rules governing superannuation. He wants to have it both ways. Before the last election he said there will be stability and certainty for five years, and now, for the second time, he is proposing changes within that five-year time frame. The fact is, Australian superannuants are now facing lower economic returns—lower returns on investment—than they would have expected some time ago, because of lower global interest rates. The Governor of the Reserve Bank has said that. Central bankers around the world are saying that. We are facing a period when we are going to have lower returns than may have been previously expected. That is one of the reasons why the coalition is determined not to impose any new taxes on superannuation, because when people are getting low returns they will get even lower returns if the government comes along and takes money off them.

But that is exactly what the Labor Party wants to do. The Labor Party has announced that they are going to introduce a new tax on Australian superannuation. Why are they doing that? Because, as I have been saying for more than 12 months now, they are in a policy cul-de-sac. They are going around the country pledging everything to everyone. They are opposing every possible saving, even the savings they took to the last election, and they now, as they get closer to an election, find themselves in a policy cul-de-sac where they have made promises they cannot deliver, made pledges they cannot afford and proposed savings that are not deliverable.

How do we know that? Because we are keeping a tab. Labor has made $58.6 billion of promises, and not one dollar of saving is going to deliver that. They have a multinational tax proposal that everyone rubbishes and that they will not release the assumptions on. They have a plan on superannuation—damn right they do; that you can believe. They will be imposing a tax on your superannuation. And when it comes to everything else, they are even opposing the savings that they took to the last election—savings that improved the budget bottom line, that they fought an election on, and that they are now voting against in the Senate. In this place, you have to be consistent. You have to be predictable. The problem for the Labor Party is they have a weak leader—an insipid leader; a man that runs around the country more worried about protecting his own hide than protecting the interests of the Australian people.