Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Banking and Financial Services) Share this | Hansard source

We are in a public debate; we are not in the Senate committee inquiry. We have had at least part of this discussion before. The minister is splitting hairs when he claims that this is employer money to meet employer liabilities to a defined benefit fund debt. That is no different from a private sector defined benefit fund that has both employee contributions and employer contributions to meet the accrued liability of the fund and the moneys that will be paid out. It is absolutely no different. It begs the question, and this has been debated ad infinitum: why is the government actually setting up a separate fund? The money should have gone into the existing superannuation structures.

Minister, you shake your head, but the law of the land in this country requires the employer to place their money in a superannuation fund in the same way as the government is placing its money in the Future Fund. The law of the land requires an employer to place into the superannuation fund their money, held in trust for the employees, alongside the employees’ money. Yet the government has chosen something different.

To come back to my point: given that very close analogy, we see no good reason why there should have been a departure from existing superannuation fund practice in this country. It is not the government’s money, Minister; it is actually the money that is going to belong to the superannuation fund members. It is not their money at the moment, legally, because you choose not to put it in the superannuation fund; you refuse to fund it. So the closest analogy is superannuation fund trustee law. That is what guardians are; they are trustees. And the most appropriate way to carry out at least some of the checks is through APRA. Why have we got APRA scouring and licensing every superannuation fund in the country and going back and checking all the trustees’ backgrounds? Why are they doing it? Exactly the same approach should apply to these so-called guardians, who are no more than superannuation fund trustees.