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

I don't have a lot of time. While I agree with the sentiment of this motion from Senator Scarr, I think that, with six months remaining before the next federal election, it's time the Liberal Party also put out their policies. It's one thing to criticise, and it's been very easy to do with the Labor Party, who have been floundering, but I spent five years as the secretary of the finance backbench on the Liberal Party. I called many backbench meetings to look at reforming policy. I've made numerous suggestions. I note Senator Bragg's comments about foreign fund managers owning housing in this country. The Liberal Party has done nothing to tackle superannuation in this country. I asked Josh Frydenberg, the former Treasurer, numerous times to pause that increase in the superannuation levy. He didn't do it. He allowed it to go to 12 per cent. John Howard and Peter Costello should have stopped the rise in superannuation when they got in in 1996 and killed superannuation stone cold dead. They didn't.

This morning, the People First Party released its capital markets policies. One of the things we are going to do is to actually make superannuation boards be elected by the members. There's this little thing called democracy, and superannuation is very undemocratic. There was no referendum that even asked if people wanted 12 per cent of their wages taken from them and given to someone they've never met.

The other thing we're going to do is disallow superannuation funds from voting at AGMs unless they get direct proxies from their members. We're not going to have these left-wing superannuation funds, or any ideological superannuation funds, shoving their ideology down corporate boardrooms—