Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I note, following the member for Ryan, that he is the single government speaker apart from the minister in relation to the Tax Laws Amendment (Simplified Superannuation) Bill 2006 and the 10 cognate bills that are supposed to be the biggest package the government has ever delivered on super and tax. The fact that only one government member can get up and defend what the government is doing is a complete disgrace. I will note this in passing as well: despite my affection for the member for Ryan, his wife, Huyen, and his son, Ryan, the gestation period for Ryan Johnson was nine months; the gestation period for this bill is equivalent to that.

The last point that the member for Ryan made was about how long it took Labor to say anything positive about this. The actuality is that the plan for a suite of legislation in the future was outlined by the Treasurer in the last budget. The last budget was how many months ago? It was May 2006, was it not? The Treasurer boldly announced what he regarded as the greatest change in superannuation in Australia. But it was a plan for superannuation changes and not the actuality. One can have an intent or a plan for a child, in the case of Ryan Johnson, but the actual realisation of that comes about nine months later, unless there are complications and the child comes early. Here we are in February 2007. Count the months. It is about nine, I think—the same gestation as a child. Luckily it is not an elephant of a bill or we would have had an 11-month gestation period! It took from May 2006 until the Treasurer finally indicated a little while ago that we would get legislation in this area. What was he doing in the meantime?

In the budget, he trumpeted a plan to change super. He said: ‘We’ve got this plan. We want all the people affected, all the vested interests in the country, all the superannuation groups, all the companies involved in this vast industry, to comment on this plan and then we will eventually come up with’—although he never actually said it this way—‘a realised plan and then an action plan and then we might move and put a bill for an act together so that we can actually get some legislation with regard to this.’

This is extraordinary stuff. Do you know what the fundamental basis of these 11 bills is, Mr Deputy Speaker? Instead of people being taxed on the way out, they will be taxed elsewhere. They have not made a great deal about this. We have 11 bills here in a cognate debate. We have tax bills and super bills. As the member for Fraser well knows, not only because of his experience in the Senate but because of his experience as Assistant Treasurer, a job he did well and cleverly—and this is something he knew when he opened the Bankstown branch of the Taxation Office, as he knows it now—if you introduce these kinds of super changes with an impact on the tax act, you have to have two separate bills. That is the nature of our constitutional arrangements.

The person we have acting as Treasurer now, who could not come up with legislation to be announced at the last budget, came up with a plan to be determined. What have we got? Guess what: when you put money into super it is still taxed going in. When you accumulate money, it is still taxed on the way through. The only fundamental thing that they have really done here is to cut the tax on the way out. Well, whoop-de-doo. This is supposed to be the greatest change in super that we have ever seen, introduced at that dispatch box in May 2006 after 7.30 pm—I think it was about 21 minutes to eight on budget night. The Treasurer said, ‘This is the greatest and most profound thing ever done in superannuation in Australia,’ and that was entirely false. All he has done is say, ‘We won’t tax this bit,’ and make a few other changes. And he has the gall, the temerity, to say that he is really simplifying superannuation. Give me a break!

Since 1996, when the government came into power, they have complexified super. They have made it more difficult and they have come up with the dumbest series of arrangements you could imagine. They gull the public and say to people, in particular those people on lower incomes and those who came late to super: ‘Don’t worry about it. We’re going to give you choice. You can choose between these five or six or 12 different variants in relation to your super, and we think you will just love these little superannuation accounts here.’ It is like having an old passbook. This is a 19th or 20th century approach to a 21st century problem. You have your passbook account and you get the passbook stamped as you go in and you say: ‘Gee, when you have a look at it, inflation is running at 2.9 per cent per annum. What are they going to pay me? They’re going to pay me 0.8 of one per cent. That’s a bit rough. If I do my arithmetic, I think I will be 3.1 per cent behind,’ or whatever.

The Treasurer is saying to people, ‘Don’t worry about the complexity of all these other super things; you can have a retirement savings account.’ If you were really dumb, you would take what the Treasurer says and act on it. If you were uninformed, you would do that. If you were in a position where you did not know you were being taken down by a Flash Harry of a Treasurer, then you might get done.

This is a complex area. It does demand simplification, but my simplification, the Labor Party’s past simplification, actually has real dollars attached. I will tell you how many real dollars are attached to it, Mr Deputy Speaker: 65,000 million real dollars, $65 billion of superannuation investment that has come out of the pockets of ordinary working people in Australia and gone into super. This trumpeter of nothingness, this Treasurer who claims that he has remade the world, is simply riding on the back of what the Hawke and Keating governments did, riding on the back of the former member for Blaxland, who did the hard yards on this.

I am sorry, but it was almost too much for me today in question time, as it was yesterday, to have this fraud of a Treasurer saying that the fundamental changes in this area have been made by this government. That is completely and utterly ludicrous and everybody in Australia knows it. It was not easy—as the member for Fraser full knows, because he was a participant in the processes that put these changes together—to get fundamental superannuation changes made. Why? Because Australian people, love them as we do, did not want to put money into a savings account or a super account. They wanted the money in their kick.

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