Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

than people who are taking $1.5 million in income a year tax-free. It is outrageous, and what it goes to is that the Liberal Party has never believed in superannuation for Australian workers. They believe in advantageous tax arrangements for their own kind; they do not believe in it for workers. John Howard called superannuation a 'job killer', and it was unsurprising when his government scrapped the proposed increase in compulsory superannuation from nine to 12 per cent within six months of coming into office. Tony Abbott infamously called superannuation 'one of the biggest con jobs ever foisted by government on the Australian people'. When he came into government, what did he do? He froze the increase in compulsory superannuation from nine to 12 per cent.

The reality is that you cannot trust the Liberal Party with superannuation; you cannot trust the Liberal Party with your retirement savings. This is a government that sees the total cost of superannuation tax concessions within the period of the forward estimates increasing beyond the scale of the total spend on the pension. And it says, 'Do nothing'—do nothing in the name of uncertainty. We need to provide certainty to investors—as though people taking $1.5 million a year from their super are relying on certainty in order to survive—the certainty that they did not take into account when they slashed the superannuation income of millions of low-income working Australians. You cannot trust the Liberals on super. (Time expired)

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