Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's interesting to listen to the other side claim that they care about the economy and they care about the workers, because, if they really cared about the workers, they would let them keep their superannuation. At the end of the day, it is wage theft. It is blatantly wage theft. Paul Keating said, in a speech in 2007, that it is wage theft. It is taking money from people, and they were never given a choice. In 1992, had Paul Keating told people that, by 2025, 12 per cent of their income would be taken and given to someone they'd never met—and they may or may not get it back when they're 65—do you think that would have got up in a referendum? Of course not. But did they have a referendum on compulsory superannuation? No, they didn't, because, had they done that, the result would have been the same as what we saw in New Zealand in 1997, when they voted against it, 92 per cent to eight per cent.

Instead of wasting money on the Voice, why don't you have a referendum on superannuation and ask people if they would like to keep their money now? Out in the real world now there are tens of thousands of Australians who are doing it tough and need their money from superannuation. They're sleeping in the back of their car while the fund managers are gouging $30 billion a year from the $3.3 trillion parked away in superannuation. People are shivering in the cold because they don't have access to all of their income. I'll tell you who gets it—the union backed industry funds. They don't give their members a chance to elect the board—they're selected, not elected. That tells you all you need to know about the Labor Party. These guys opposite us in the Labor Party aren't interested in empowering the workers. If they were, they would let the workers keep their money.

What are they doing with the RBA? Who have they appointed to the RBA board? None other than Iain Ross. Iain Ross was an architect of superannuation, along with Bill Kelty and Paul Keating. He mandated—he snuck it in the back door—that they would take two per cent of your income, slowly increase it to three per cent of your income and then take another per cent and then another per cent. It was just like the vaccine mandates. Iain Ross was the Fair Work Commissioner when that came in, and he also supported mandates. Now we have him on the RBA board. The Labor Party appointed their mates, rather than actually sorted out the problem by using other levers apart from just qualitative easing, such as quantitative easing and macro prudential controls.

Let's not forget why we have this massive housing debt and this problem in this country. It's because in 1985 Paul Keating relaxed capital controls on foreign investment. That meant that foreign debt went from $8 billion in 1985 to $800 billion in 2008. What was that $800 billion lent against? Housing. So house prices went up from four to five times earnings to 13 times earnings. Of course, now we have interest rates going up on this massive debt it is killing the worker.

What's Labor's response to all of this? 'Let's go on a little junket and spend tens of millions of dollars holding a referendum on the Voice, which completely ignores the real issue of the cost of living, and then let's import billions of dollars worth of renewables while we leave hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal in the ground.' The Labor Party used to stand up for the coalminers of this country, but not anymore. They would rather serve their global masters and import renewables from other countries that have shocking labour practices in the development and production of these renewables.

Do Labor care about the worker? No, they don't. Do they have any solutions whatsoever for this inflation problem? Absolutely none. What was their response? In the budget they went on a spending spree. They went on a spending spree whilst at the same time not giving an income tax cut to the people who matter the most, the people who get out of bed every day, put their nose to the grindstone and supply the goods and services. When demand is higher than supply it causes inflation, so why don't you increase supply by cutting tax on the people who supply goods and services?

To make matters worse they've now got a high immigration rate of 400,000 people. I think the total population growth was just shy of half a million people last year. They talk about their housing fund. That's going to build 2,000 or 3,000 houses. That is a long way short of providing houses for the new 400,000 immigrants. Are the immigrants building houses? Of course not. They're going to university, not building houses.