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

No sooner had the electoral writs been signed than Labor's new finance minister, Stephen Jones, had come out and said that Labor were going to look at investigating raising the superannuation levy to 15 per cent in their second term. Now why doesn't that surprise me? Labor just can't keep their hands off hardworking Australians' wages. Just tell me this: at what level of superannuation is Labor going to stop taking from hardworking Australians?

If Paul Keating had said, back in 1992, that by 2025 we were going to have 12 per cent of people's wages taken out of their income and given to someone they've never met, and there's no guarantee of them ever getting it back, do you really think that the people would have accepted that? We certainly know that they didn't in New Zealand. In New Zealand they had a referendum on compulsory superannuation in 1997, and they voted that down—92 per cent to eight.

There is no greater drain on the economy of this country than the $30 billion paid in fees to the financial services industries, and I'll include the banks in this—I'm not being partisan here; I don't care what type of superannuation it is—and the $50 billion in tax concessions that mainly go to the top 20 per cent. To put that into perspective, the pension costs $53 billion for the bottom 70 per cent. And that's the thing. Since superannuation's been introduced, the number of people on the pension or part-pension has only been reduced from about 76 per cent to 70 per cent, and a large part of that is because of the index changes made in 2018. Superannuation is not fit for purpose. It is a massive drain on the economy of Australia and it is hurting the people who need it the most: low-income-earning Australians.