Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take a great deal of delight in getting up and speaking on this. In the last few weeks we've heard Dutton—sorry, the opposition leader—saying that he's the campaigner for the middle class and the working class, but actually what he's a campaigner for is the billionaires. We've seen the Liberal Party change. We saw Howard's battlers. Now we have Dutton's battlers, the billionaires. Dutton's billionaires need to be looked after. Those billionaires who have squirrelled away $543 million in superannuation, with concessions, have to be looked after. So Dutton's billionaires can be looked after.

The reason we're in the position where we need to make fair and equitable changes to the concessions that are paid—and there will still be concessions for those billionaires, those millionaires and those people in the community with $100,000 or $50,000, and we'll still have proper incentives to make sure that superannuation continues in this economy—is that what's quite clearly happened is that we have a situation where we have a trillion dollars worth of debt and we have to work out how to balance the books, and the people who can assist in that balancing of the books are the ones who also receive benefit. This is about a progressive approach to tax and properly protecting those people in superannuation, which was set up to make sure that there's a proper amount of money for people to retire on. It's also about making sure that those concessions are for those people that superannuation was initially geared up for.

What we've seen from the Liberal Party is that this isn't just about Dutton's billionaires. This is about an attack on super, because we all know they hate superannuation. They actually hate the whole concept of superannuation. They hate poorer people receiving super. The ones complaining about the billionaires and those people with more than $3 million in their super still getting a tax concession but paying a fairer level of tax are the same people who deferred increases to the superannuation guarantee for struggling working-class and middle-class people in this country. They're the ones who, over the 10 years of the previous government, stood by and saw young people missing out on the multiplier of that minimum increase in superannuation. They're the same people who have made sure that the amount of money that people can take home at the end of the day is not the same amount of money they need to take home to meet the foreshadowed increases as a matter of intergenerational change for both working-class and middle-class people in this country.

We clearly have to make a decision. If we are going to fix the trillion dollars worth of debt and have the money and resources to put into aged care and those areas of our society where we need price relief, including energy, we need to make the right decisions in the right policy areas. We have Dutton's billionaires on one side. Howard's battlers are now deserted, if those opposite were ever actually on their side. We know the reality of that. Those opposite were never really on their side. They were never Howard's battlers. They were people being used, like the Trump battlers. Those opposite were trying to use and abuse people by giving mixed policy directions. But at least Howard pretended he was representing a broad cross-section of the community. At least he had the capacity to pretend he was representing the vast majority of Australians, unlike Dutton, the opposition leader, with the sort of approach he's taken on this question about superannuation.

But what's really striking is the number of economists, academics, and—my goodness: I never thought I'd be agreeing on this aspect—even the CEO of the NAB saying it's a fair thing. But don't worry—person after person after person from the opposite side gets up and says: 'Our billionaires need to be protected! Let's all stand together! Let's make sure those billionaires get the sort of protection they deserve!' (Time expired)