House debates

Thursday, 28 November 2019

Bills

Treasury Laws Amendment (Recovering Unpaid Superannuation) Bill 2019; Second Reading

11:24 am

Photo of Jason FalinskiJason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, the member for Whitlam came in here yesterday and wouldn't take an intervention. The intervention was to answer the question of where he gets some of his figures from. Indeed, I wanted to know where his research is from that shows moratoriums don't work. What we've actually found out is, just one Google search away, there are 312 academic articles on the impact and effectiveness of moratoriums, everything from protecting rainforests in Indonesia to improving tax collection and, indeed, gun collection. Not all of those articles, because overnight I did have to sleep for a few minutes, but the vast majority of articles that I could acquaint myself with all point to one thing: that moratoriums work.

Given that we have a single-touch payroll being introduced, given that academic articles demonstrate that moratoriums work, given that, according to industry super, there are tens of billions of dollars' worth of superannuation ready to be collected and given that businesses, in anticipation—trusting the word of this parliament, trusting the word of those both on this side and those opposite that a moratorium would be announced—have come forward to actually review their accounts and to pay those moneys. It seems to us quite reasonable that this parliament would not only pass this bill but do it with absolute speed so that we could create certainty and start collecting the money that those opposite say they're so concerned about employees having.

Why is it that those opposite are opposed? Could it be that some of the people who are not in favour of this are some of their largest donors? I don't know. I'm not in the boardrooms. I don't get invited to those boardrooms the member for Whitlam gets invited to, so I would have no idea what goes on inside those hallowed wood-panelled walls with the deep blue carpet on the 60th floor of some CBD office building. Indeed, it's difficult to know whether some of these associations would even know what their members thought. Because as the member for Goldstein pointed out, and I can't believe he is not here to hear this speech, but that would be typical—we all have to listen to him! When he asked industry super representatives, as they propounded to us what their members are thinking, how they knew, their answer was: 'Well, we conduct advertising.' Yes, we understand that you tell them what they should be thinking. Then the member for Goldstein asked: 'But how do you know what they want?' And they said, 'Well, we advertise to them and then we do research to find out whether our advertising is having an impact on their views.' In other words, the very people who are informing the member for Whitlam how he should stand on this bill are the very same people whose idea of consultation is talking at people through television sets.

So I wonder, truly wonder, if we were really here in the interests of workers and employees who have not had their superannuation paid by employers—people who, through no fault of their own, have been unable to pay this or didn't realise that they were meant to have paid for these things—whether we would be voting against this or whether we'd be voting in support of it or whether we would be coming into the parliament and making the umpteenth joke about a World War II movie that hasn't screened since the 1960s? Because that's what goes for policy on that side of the House when it comes to these important issues.

If those opposite really care about workers and their entitlements, if you really care about reuniting them with the money that they're owed, if you really are genuinely concerned about getting the right outcome for everyone involved in this process, then you wouldn't move motions that the speaker no longer be heard, you wouldn't be playing parliamentary games and you wouldn't be making references to World War II movies and somehow alternating between 'dirty dozens' and 'unseemly dozens', and who knows what else. You wouldn't be trying to make a joke of this; you'd actually ask members what they really thought. You wouldn't say that consultations are just advertising to them and you would start to make a real effort to pass legislation like this that allows and enables employers to get on with the job of paying money back and that allows the ATO to get on with the job of prosecuting those who won't.

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