James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

At the request of Senator Hume, I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for Prime Minister Albanese to not break his promise to Australians when he said on 2 May 2022, "we've said we have no intention on making any super changes", by committing to not hitting Australians with more taxes on their super, and to rule out any new taxes on the family home, negatively geared assets, trusts and retirees' incomes.

In the last two weeks, we have seen this Labor government break faith with the Australian people with unprecedented candour and shamelessness. Prime Minister Albanese doesn't take his past promises to the Australian people as rules. He doesn't even take them as guidelines. How else can you characterise a prime minister who looked Australians in the eye and said, 'We've said we have no intention of making any super changes', then skipped, strode, wombled into the Prime Minister's courtyard and announced that super taxes will be doubled.

It's not just the Prime Minister who thinks commitments to the Australian people are simply campaign tactics to be discarded once you make it onto the blue carpet and into the ministerial limo. Labor's Treasurer had the gall to say to the Australian people in April 2022, 'We've made it very clear that we don't have any proposals for tax increases.' There's a pretty obvious reason Labor wasn't upfront about this before the election: because they knew Australians would not vote for it.

The more Australians learn about this super tax, the more we can see how shifty this Labor government has been. First of all, they said it would impact about 80,000 Australians. Now we know—we learnt in question time today—that 10 per cent of Australians are going to be impacted by this super tax, and, unlike the super transfer balance cap, Labor ruled out indexing the $3 million cap.

Here, Labor are making a massive mistake. A lot of people I know don't have $3 million in their super account. Actually, I don't know anyone that has $3 million in their super account, but I know lots of people who do want to have $3 million in their super account. I spent last week driving from Cairns down to Townsville, going along talking to people. People are pretty angry about this. No-one I spoke to has $3 million in their super account, and they probably never will, but they say to the people who do: 'Good on you. You worked hard for it. Good on you, mate. Get out there. I'm pretty happy for you.'

Labor are saying to people out there who've worked hard, 'We're going to tax you.' But the people out there are also concerned that Labor have broken this promise. What other promises are they going to break? They know that Labor will decrease the threshold. If the threshold is set at $3 million, at the next budget it will be $2½ million. Then it will be $2 million and suddenly all of your super accounts will fall into Labor's trap.

This comes to the central tenet of why we are so upset at Labor's breaking of this election promise: because we're on the side of Australians and their money. It is their money. Labor think that people's super accounts are money that Labor can go and raid. Labor can be like one of those little bugs that gets into electronic systems and goes in there and empties our people's super accounts. I say: shame on Labor for what you are going to do to the confidence in Australia's financial services system.

There are so many questions that need to be answered about this proposal. How will it deal with unrealised capital gains? How will real assets be valued? How exactly does this impact defined-benefit schemes? The Prime Minister is on one. How will valuation increases be calculated? Labor is quite happy to mislead the Australian people, willingly break election promises and make false statements prior to the election in pursuit of electoral success and then doesn't even have the decency to be transparent with the Australian people.

We should have expected this from the Treasurer. We know that Dr Chalmers did his PhD on Paul Keating, the guy who said: 'Australia, we have to have a recession. Come on. This is the recession we had to have.' We can see where this government's going, can't we, ladies and gentlemen? We can see where this government is heading. Now Dr Chalmers's new super tax hike is alongside his idol Paul Keating's l-a-w law tax hikes in the pantheon of historic broken promises by Labor treasurers. I'm sure the Treasurer's proud of being in such distinguished company as Paul Keating, who sent so many people bankrupt. So much hardship was caused by him and what he did to the Australian economy, and now we see Labor with their secret taxes that they didn't want to tell the Australian people about before the election. They are coming out and going after people's super accounts. Shame on Labor. (Time expired)