Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given to questions by all coalition senators today.

Another day, another broken promise—after both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer consistently assured Australians during the election campaign last year that they would not make changes to superannuation, last week we saw the government confirm that it will increase taxes on the savings of an ever increasing number of Australians. It has deliberately chosen to do this in a way that means more and more Australians will be hit by these tax increases in the years and decades ahead.

The mixed messages the government is pushing with this change are extraordinary, as were the responses provided to questions asked by the opposition in question time today. The point of superannuation is supposed to be to ensure that people can be self-sufficient in their retirement, making sure that they aren't reliant on the age pension. Now the government is saying to people that when they have worked for 50 years and had 11 per cent of their wage taken away every year and put into superannuation they are rich. So the Labor government is going to take a bigger handful of that money to prop up its own budget line. Does the Labor Party want people to fund their own retirement or punish them for doing so? As the years go on, more and more people—small-business owners, teachers and public servants—will be captured by this tax grab. Why would people trust the superannuation system in the future when they can see that this government will be using it as a big pot of money just waiting to be raided?

We are not even 12 months into this government and Labor's broken promises are starting to pile up. We have seen a backtrack on a number of major policy announcements since the election, most notably their pledge to save Australians an average of $275 on their power bills. Labor were adamant they were going to pass this saving on to households, but only a few months on from their guarantee, they were forced to admit that the only thing they could guarantee Australians in relation to electricity prices was that households could expect to see power bills go up. After promising that Labor would cut the cost of living, the cost of living is instead going through the roof. Hardworking Australian families are having to spend more and more of their income on groceries, energy bills, mortgage payments and rent.

It is clear to anyone paying attention that Labor told Australians what it thought they wanted to hear to win an election and now it is desperately trying to find excuses to break the promises it made. You can guarantee that Labor's broken promise on superannuation will be followed by many more broken promises, and more tactics to get their hands on the incomes of Australian workers through higher taxes. We saw the Treasurer just last week desperately trying to keep his options open on other ways to hike taxes and plug his budget holes. He didn't even want to rule out capital gains tax on the family home. And yet, less than an hour after that interview, we had the Prime Minister appearing on radio clearing up the Treasurer's mess, attempting to clarify exactly what was meant.

We can see how desperate the government is to plug the holes in its budget by the way it wants to break its promise and legislate these tax increases straightaway. If there is one thing we've learned over the years, it is that Labor cannot be trusted with money. It will always try to get its hands on more of the money that hardworking Australians earn, and that is certainly what they are seeking to do with this most recent policy announcement. As I said: another day in this place, another broken promise from the Labor government.

Australians deserve more. Australians deserve a government that sticks to the commitments that it made at the election last year. I recognise that during election campaigns parties will always put commitments to the public and will always seek to put their cases to the public in order to gain election. That's part of the contest of ideas, that's part of what having an election is all about—to enable people to look at the ideas that are on offer from both political parties and to make an informed decision. The Australian people made an informed decision based on the information that this government put on the record in May last year, and yet everything we have seen since, whether it's out in the community, whether it's in this place here, demonstrates time and time again that this government was willing to say whatever it liked to get access to the government benches over here. It said whatever it liked and since then all we have seen is broken promise after broken promise after broken promise. Australians, quite frankly, deserve more.