Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and Financial Technology) Share this | Hansard source

I have in front of me extracts from correspondence or summaries of correspondence that my office has received from the states of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland and from the ACT. Admittedly, I didn't get any from Tasmania. I would love to be able to give you one from Tasmania. I do not have that. I do have eight different examples of correspondence that has been received by my office from people who are actually in UniSuper and would like to get out. One of them has actually said that she feels discriminated against—this is an interesting one. She's an academic at a university in Sydney who wished to move to a different fund but couldn't do so. She wrote to her local member—so it wasn't directly to my office; it came to my office indirectly—about how, as an academic, she felt discriminated against, as she did not share the same freedom as many other Australians when it came to superannuation providers. This is the sort of person to whom you're trying to deny the choice that everybody else has. I think that's kind of crazy, but I understand where you're coming from, and I want to say that this is not supposed to be an attack on defined benefit funds—quite the opposite. I would love to see a proliferation of defined benefit funds out there, because I genuinely think that they suit a number of Australians, but they have to be able to stand up on their own two feet without compelling people to be in there in the first place.