Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

After the contribution we've just heard, I'd make this point: a lot of decisions in this country get made within a very small radius in Sydney and Melbourne, and there's a lot that was said then that I would agree with, in terms of the regions, particularly as a representative of the outer suburbs. We'll probably have our differences about how we get it done, but the main thing is that it's got to get done, because there are imbalances in the way that decisions get made that impact real people in the regions, both in your region and in ours. I'll just leave it at that.

I take great pleasure in being able to report back to the chamber on one of those areas. I send surveys out to my community. I read the surveys. I ring people up, who then tell me they never expected me to read what they had written on the survey—good, bad and indifferent. I think it's good to improve the way we do our job. One of the surveys I'm flicking through here is on new growth areas in the outer suburbs. Governments love to say that all these new homes are being built, but they never like to pay for it, and by that I mean they don't put the infrastructure in as people are moving in, so you don't have the roads, you don't have the schools, you don't have the hospitals, and you don't have all the other things that people expect will be there when they move into these big estates. In this survey that I distributed within the electorate, a number of people, for example, in Marsden Park, Richmond Road and Elara Boulevard, have real issues with regard to traffic: 'Too much traffic on Richmond Road, near Glendenning'; 'Richmond Road in Marsden Park has really bad traffic'; 'The roundabout at Aldi and Bunnings'—which is in the Colebee-Marsden Park area—'took 35 minutes to get out of that bottleneck'; 'Traffic is the main issue at the moment'; 'Better road infrastructure.' All those people are continually raising this issue. In fact, Marilyn wrote this to me: 'I moved from Ryde to get away from the traffic nightmares only to find that Richmond Road is a bottleneck,' and that's now part of western Sydney. That space is part of a broader push, where nearly 200,000 people are going to move in. It's become Sydney's Bermuda Triangle, because people move in and they disappear—off the radar of federal and state governments when it comes to providing infrastructure support.

I'm sick of seeing all the glitzy ads that suggest that all the infrastructure has been brought forward, when you see, in the area of the member for Werriwa and my area, in our parts of Sydney, people moving in and getting stuck in the local area. This isn't even on a motorway; it's just a local road. Richmond Road was widened a few years ago and it's already clogged. For the life of me, I can't understand how planners got it so wrong. Worse—on top of that—even if all the money were allocated today to fix Richmond Road, it would take three years to unclog the road, and thousands of people are moving in. Developers who built the estates have all those people moving in and did not think people would need an entry point and an exit point at the estates. Instead, they built one entry point and thousands of people are frustrated through the course of the morning and into the evening by trying to get access to those developments. The state government in New South Wales needs to get its act together. There's money sitting there. The planning has been done and it needs to be released. People in Marsden Park, in the electorate I represent of Chifley, are putting up with intolerable amounts of time, as they are in Colebee as well. They're just trying to access services, the local shops to get the groceries, medical support, or anything that they want, and it takes an unbelievably long time. It's unacceptable for those people. Better planning should have been done and I will keep speaking up on that.

On a separate matter, what rattles in the ear is when I hear the coalition talk about the need to be bipartisan because they used to be in the eighties and nineties. What rot. On all of the major things we did as a Labor Party to make life easier for people, this is just false. On the big reforms, they either opposed them outright, like Medicare and superannuation, or, if they know that the public support the things that Labor did in government, they have a slow process of undermining, weakening and rendering useless the reforms in the first place. They come in with a chokehold. They slither in, they coil around, they choke the reform and they make it useless. For example, if the coalition didn't like Medicare, which they never did, they would freeze doctor payments, force people onto private health insurance and cut funding to public hospitals. If they didn't like the NDIS, they wouldn't attack it full-on but would underspend it by billions. If they didn't like the NBN, which they never did, but couldn't take it out outright, they would say they'd deliver better broadband but would use copper to deliver it—and it's a terrible service and a lot of people can't stand it. They're doing the same thing on superannuation right now. That's what this attack is. They can't get rid of it outright, so a bunch of them are basically undermining faith in the superannuation system. And their chief advocate in this endeavour is Senator Bragg, who gets upset when people target him—he's had a little bit of a whinge today because Paul Keating basically said, 'Ignore Senator Bragg,' and he got all miffed on his Instagram account about it. But here's the thing: here is a man, in Senator Bragg, in a very powerful position within a governing coalition, who is doing his darnedest, having represented superannuation himself, who's gone into parliament thinking not all people should get a super fund or should have the support and the ability to live a comfortable retirement. He goes around saying all these falsehoods like: 'Super doesn't work.' 'It doesn't get many off the pension.' 'It costs the budget more than it saves.' 'It damages home ownership for low-income people.' They will never fix any of those issues themselves, but he goes around saying that stuff. This man has the ability to shape the outcome for a lot of men and women in this country on low and middle incomes, and he complains a bit if someone has the temerity to stand up to him.

The thing that I can't get is this: in the modern Liberal Party it looks like you need two things for success: (1) to become an MP you need a Liberal Party membership and (2) you need a trust fund. So many of them have trust funds. This is what's happening: the trust fund class are looking down their nose at super. And before those opposite say, 'You've got a problem with wealth,' I don't have a problem with wealth; I want people to do well. But my questions is: why don't they want other Australians to do well? Because the thing is with superannuation, if you look at the level of savings an Australian has when they retire—for most men it's about $270,000 when they retire and for most women it's $160,000; that's a gap that's got to be fixed—compared to some in the US, for instance—other major developed economies—would be completely different. This is a level of wealth that has been built up through supporting public markets. It has been built up through supporting infrastructure investment. It has been built up through the economy and helping people in there. And it makes sure that we don't, as a country, take the begging bowl to the rest of the world to try and get money to support investment, and it's all through our superannuation fund we're able to see that happen. We've got these people in the trust fund class of the Liberal Party saying that superannuation is no good.

I'd ask this: what do they want to do? They don't like industry super funds that are made up of businesses and workers where they have to, by law, make decisions in the best interests of members. And they are not-for-profit as everything gets ploughed back into the fund, so they don't like that. I bet any money they will not put the $3 trillion that's currently in superannuation funds on the table as a government and set up their own scheme for the nation. They won't do that. So what's the other option that they'll do? I bet you any money it's to turn to the banks. Make sure that retail funds—

Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Oh yes, they're good!

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'Yes, absolutely!' as the member for Werriwa rightly says with a fair dose of sarcasm. The retail funds that perform lower than industry funds are run by the banks. And here's the thing: they attack super through a pandemic, but they let the rats of the financial services sector off the hook by not implementing the banking royal commission recommendations and saying they can't do it now. They want the banks to look after people's retirement. We have seen the most terrible instances where banks have ripped people off and their fortunes have literally disappeared in the cover of night, and this is what the coalition want. This is a joke. People should have the ability to retire in dignity, not worry about supporting themselves and be able to put their feet up after a life of working hard. What we're seeing by the Liberal Party is an utter disgrace.