Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Has the Treasurer seen advice from Treasury that the so-called half a percent of people affected by their super changes will rise to 10 per cent of Australians?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It took until 3.24 to break the pea-hearted silence of the shadow Treasurer. We had to sit here for an hour and a half to wait for a question from the shadow Treasurer. He hasn't asked me one since November, and, after all that waiting, that's the best that he can come up with—what a joke!

The answer to his question is this—and I know that it comes from questioning in the Senate, where they did have the courage to ask some questions about superannuation today, not like the pea-hearted approach of the one opposite here, the shadow Treasurer. The answer that the shadow Treasurer is referring to is that right now, in 2025, less than half of one per cent of people will be impacted.

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Let me finish. Wait for it. By the beginning of the next decade, it will be around one per cent. And the answer that Minister Gallagher, the great finance minister in the other place, gave a moment ago is: in 30 years, one in 10 people will be impacted by it. This is the number that the shadow Treasurer thinks is some kind of stunning insight. These are lengths that they will go to, to hide what should be their shamefaced embarrassment. We can't get a question from the shadow Treasurer about energy bills. We can't get one about housing affordability. We can't get one about manufacturing and the National Reconstruction Fund. But this bloke will go to the wall for half a per cent of people getting big tax breaks in the superannuation system.

We are proposing a modest change, but it is a simple choice. On this side of the House, when we inherit a trillion dollars of Liberal Party debt and deficits as far as the eye can see, unfunded ongoing commitments and intensifying pressures in the budget, we say that the generous concessions in superannuation for half a per cent of people can be a little bit less generous. We know what those opposite do when the budget is under pressure. They victimise and demonise the most vulnerable people in this country—with robodebt. They come after Medicare, like the member for Dickson did the last time the Liberals were in office.

As those opposite splash and thrash around in the shallowest and muddiest puddles of political opportunism, on this side of the House the adults will continue to make serious decisions about serious pressures on the budget that we inherited from those opposite. We will continue to make the right calls for the right reasons to clean up the mess that they left us.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Hume and the Treasurer will cease interjecting.