Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

There was the levelling of the playing field by scrapping restrictions on those who can make personal deduction contributions. That benefited some 800,000 Australians, including those women working in roles without access to formal salary-sacrificing arrangements. One of the real changes that is occurring across our economy is the start-up of new home-based businesses, which many women, particularly in family roles, are taking on around the country. Our government has ensured that they can get access to the same superannuation tax concessions as anyone else out there working in a normal wage and salary earning job, and we have legislated to do that. These were part of the major changes that we introduced.

On top of that, there were the catch-up concessional contributions. They will benefit some 230,000 Australians, and the Labor Party opposed that. Where you had women who had gone out of the workforce for a period of time and they were in a position to try to make catch-up contributions in the future, to catch up when they went back to work, the Labor Party said no. They said, 'We don't want them to do that.' Fortunately, we've been able to pursue that through the parliament. We've got around two million women who hold a low balance, with inactive accounts, and that will be protected from erosion through the excessive fees and inappropriate insurance arrangements that we are getting rid of as a government. They're the measures that we're pursuing, which I announced in this year's budget. Around 1.6 million who are still contributing to low-balance accounts will see hundreds of millions of dollars worth of savings from those measures. And 1.3 million women will have their retirement savings boosted by around $2.5 billion, thanks to being proactively reunited with their lost, low and inactive balances.

So, as a government, we've been acting on these issues. That's why we've seen the gender pay gap, for example, on women's issues and women in the workforce, fall from 17.2 per cent when we came to government to 14.5 per cent. Under the previous Labor government, who always talks a big game on this, the gender pay gap went from 15.5 per cent up to 17.2 per cent. Don't listen to what Labor promise you; you can rely on what our government has done and will continue to do.

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