Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

That is exactly what happened. I refer you back to the draft report, the interim report and the interim recommendations that were put out by the Productivity Commission.

They were very clear in recommending strong and appropriate moves to a more open, transparent and competitive process. Minister Shorten took the unprecedented step for him to respond to a review before it had actually finally reported. That is never what Minister Shorten does. That is completely inconsistent with his usual modus operandi. Everybody that has anything to do with Minister Shorten knows that that is not normally how he does business. It was a very unique approach. Normally, for any report that comes back to him he has a follow-up consultative review and discussion—a review into the review type process. Quite frankly, in a general sense, Minister Shorten struggles with making decisions. But on this one there was a very clear driver: Minister Shorten wanted to protect the vested commercial interests of his friends in the union movement, who clearly have an interest through union-dominated industry funds to preserve the current situation for as long as possible, which gives them an unfair competitive advantage.

The minister talks about the fact that the Australian Industry Group is also supportive of the government's approach through this legislation—prescribing further government intervention through Fair Work Australia, despite the fact that the Fair Work Australia process as deployed over the last four or so years has been widely discredited. There is such a thing in Australia, still, sadly, called the industrial relations club. There are some cosy arrangements at times between organisational stakeholder interests that are separate from the actual best interests of individual Australians. That is what is happening there. They want to have this cosy arrangement through which, behind closed doors and through a non-transparent, non-competitive process, they can make deals. That is not in the public interest.

What is in the public interest is to have the greatest variety and number of suppliers from across the board—industry funds, retail funds, you name it—competing with each other and keeping each other on their toes in terms of fund performance, investment performance, fees and quality of service. Across all these aspects of the superannuation value proposition it is important to have appropriate competitive tensions to ensure that people can make informed decisions about what is in the best interests of employers and employees in a particular set of circumstances.

The minister in her answer today effectively told us that the MySuper default fund product is not worth the paper the legislation is written on, because, in her words, 'Letting employers direct Australians who do not make active choices in relation to superannuation into MySuper default fund products is contrary to the employee's best interests', unless Fair Work Australia can do another job on top of it—