Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will, certainly. This follows an exposure draft regulation that was provided for comment in July. This was the first act of this new minister, after having won the election. That regulation proposed to gut the transparency, to remove it, so workers could no longer see when their funds were sending money off to the union or bank. So they had a consultation. The FOIs revealed they only had a very targeted consultation with one organisation, the industry funds association, and they came back in September and made the regulation.

The substantial change in this regulation is very simple. Before this regulation was made, you could look at your annual member statement and see that this super fund had paid X dollars to X union. You could see that the first super fund had paid $1 million to CFMMEU. But that was all removed by Minister Jones's regulation.

Then you fast forward through a lot of extensive discussion, led by the crossbench in many ways, and we get to last week. The Australian Electoral Commission come along, and they decide they will release their annual data. In that release they provide the information that Minister Jones has covered up from the workers. So the AEC shows the enormous flow of money from the super funds to the unions of $14 million or $15 million a year ballooning to $30 million by the end of the decade. That's $30 million of retirement savings being sent off to the unions for non-commercial purposes and unknown purposes, which is very, very troubling.

In this fantastic release of data from the Australian Electoral Commission, we find that one fund in particular has been very generous in its payments, and that fund is called FIRST Super. It's rather a small fund. In the last financial year they provided a payment of $2.5 million to the CFMMEU. That's a tiny fund sending that money off to that union. We only know that information because of the AEC. Surely this information is of great interest to the public. I have to say, I'd be very surprised if many members of the public trawl through the AEC disclosures, but I'm certain that many members, many workers, would be very interested and would actually open their member's statement that they receive in the mail each year.

I don't want to detain the Senate for too long, but the substantial points are that we enacted a set of laws and regulations which guaranteed that workers could see where their superannuation money was going, because it's a compulsory scheme and it's the least we can do. The Labor government came in—the government for vested interests—and they worked through the list of grievances and rubbish that had been churned out by their favourite vested interests of the class action law firms, the unions and the super funds. Order No. 1 was to gut the transparency from the super laws, and that's what Minister Jones did. He put it out as an exposure draft, he made no changes and then he made the regulation in September. Then of course, last week, the AEC made an absolute mess of the minister's policy by showing that this very significant sum of money would be disclosed elsewhere.

So here we are back at the Senate, and, before finishing, I just wanted to say that I think the crossbench have done a really great job here in putting this forward. Senator Lambie and Senator Pocock in particular, but also Senator McKim, have all played a really constructive role. It's kind of unbelievable that it has taken so long for the Senate to stand up for transparency in a system that this parliament has put in place. This system only exists because of Canberra. We force 10 per cent of people's wages and salaries into these schemes; the least we can do is show these people where their money is going, and I very much welcome the impending division on this matter.