Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (Senator Conroy) to questions without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Abetz) and Senator Cormann today relating to ministerial code of conduct and to superannuation.

It is interesting when we hear Senator Conroy struggle at times. Today he was using the singular and the plural, talking about 'Mr Abbott themselves', that they were distracted. It seems that maybe Senator Conroy is a little distracted of late. Maybe he has a few things on his mind. Sometimes Senator Conroy forgets things. Sometimes he forgets which chamber he is in. For a while he thought he was a member of the House of Representatives, whereas he is a senator. The members' interests registrar was the wrong one to send it to and he reminded himself that he was a senator. Sometimes he forgets to fill in a senators' interests form; sometimes he forgets which chamber he is in; sometimes Mr Obeid forgets his name.

Sometimes the government are a little bit unclear about what they should be doing with people's savings, and this is what is really pressing. Superannuation is going to be a big issue at this election because people have always believed that when they put money into super it will be there when they retire. It was an old-fashioned belief. Superannuation was set up, supported by Hawke and Keating—I see Mr Hawke is here today—with the belief that we do not have the money to support people with pensions, so we will get them to provide for themselves. More importantly, their employer would provide for them by putting money aside. In that way, when they retired the money would be there.

Now we find that a government that has got itself $262 billion in gross debt, that has been through a $75 billion debt limit, a $200 billion debt limit, a quarter-of-a-trillion dollar debt limit and is heading towards a $300 billion debt limit, is trying to work out how to pay it back. So it devised the mining tax. The trouble is that the people who came to help them out with that were the major mining companies. They devised a mining tax whereby they did not actually pay any tax. The government said, 'We will have a mining tax,' and Marius Kloppers said, 'You certainly will,' and then he whipped out a pen and paper and gave them one. It is working very well for BHP; it is working very well for Xstrata—and good luck to them. If a fool invites you to their office and opens a cheque book, well you just start writing out your own cheques. The carbon tax is another tax that is not making any money. It is actually costing money at the moment.

So they have come to this conclusion that they have no money, so they have to go and find money. The first thing they do when they try to look for money is set up a class war. All things have to start with a moral prerogative: we must find evil people—evil, wicked people—and who is evil and wicked? Well, they are not people who are before ICAC. They are actually rich people; rich people are evil people and need to be dealt with. So we have the Prime Minister saying, 'Who will pursue proper Labor values?' Well, these must be proper Labor values. They are obviously going to go and just flog the money out of people's super. It is as simple as that.

Of course, all of this works so well! They had the metaphor at the start of the mining tax. They were saying, 'Oh, well, the mining tax will pay for the superannuation increase.' The inference there is that small businesses—miners, farmers, butchers, bakers—will not have to worry about paying the increment from nine per cent to 12 per cent; the government will pay it. But of course, the government are not paying it. The employer is paying it. The government are just booking the tax deduction as they are saving. But now the government—it is so sneaky—are saying, 'Well, you guys pay an extra three per cent on top of your nine per cent to get to 12 per cent and what we will do is rip it out of them on the way out!' If you follow the path of the Labor government ripping the money out of the superannuation on the way out and the small business employer having to put more in on the front end, all they are really doing is taxing small business. It is just another way to rip money out of business. And, of course, if everybody puts their money into super, they are going to say, 'Watch this crowd; they are running out of money.' This is step 1.

Who are the rich people? Apparently they are people with $1 million in super—how evil! You live off about nine per cent of it, so $90,000 per year is what you would be retiring on.