Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

True—and who taught me that you should always make a substantive argument and present the argument to the House. The purpose of today is for me to present very clearly to the House the argument as to why the coalition won't be supporting this. It's not ideological; it is straight index based benchmarks of return. But there is a slippery slope here. If the government carves out special treatment for faith based funds, what's next? Why should faith based funds have special treatment? Why not an ESG based fund? Why not another fund that seeks to do good somewhere else? Why wouldn't they have the same carve-out? Or could we just agree in this place that all people are created equal and everyone should be equal under the law and they should all be equal under the superannuation benchmarks and the rules?

The second amendment that we'll be moving in the consideration in detail debate is to return the annual member meeting transparency measures that were in regulation—which were removed by this government as the first act of Treasury—to hard encode them and enshrine them back into law. When we moved the Your Future, Your Super measures in government previously, there was an opportunity, which the previous government did not take, to decide to outlaw or make illegal co-sponsoring payments and other non-political donations to political entities. The AFR has reported through a freedom of information that, over the last five years, super funds have provided $85 million in non-disclosed, non-donation based payments to political entities—and it's mostly that side of the House. That's just a statement of fact from an FOI. We could have decided to outlaw that, but that's not democratic. What's democratic is disclosing it—that super funds should have to disclose to members what their payments are.

I will look, for example, at two annual member meeting notices that came out—and I spoke about this in the House yesterday. The Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation—and I thank the Minister for Finance—has reported fully on all of their payments, with some $600,000 plus in sponsorships, support payments, marketing and the like itemised in detail, as you'd expect from a government agency and a substantial super fund. AustralianSuper is Australia's biggest super fund. It is a well-run and good-returning super fund—and there's no criticism of them there. My criticism of them comes on their annual member meeting statement where they had aggregate payment for sponsorship and marketing of $30 million—just aggregate; that's it—and associated payments of some $109 million, give or take, which is probably fees and charges for investments. They have to aggregate it up; therefore, there's no problem providing it in detail. This is what our amendment will do.

The last thing I'll draw the attention of the House to as to why it's important that the annual member notices are transparent and why this amendment is being moved in line with this bill is agenda item No. 10 of the Hayne royal commission, an order and risk management committee report from 20 May 2015. This is a public document that I am reading from, which was an item that was tabled in the Hayne royal commission. It is a KPMG report into review of payments made to Cbus-sponsoring organisations. It's a very good report, and Cbus's response to the report is also very good. The report makes it very clear that this is the purpose of Cbus, a very large and well-performing fund—there's no argument with that. KPMG's statement is:

The sponsorship payments made by Cbus are governed by Cbus's sponsorship policy and are made subject to an evaluation.

Good to see.

The benefit obtained by Cbus from sponsoring payment is recognised as the acquisition and retention of members and super contributions, together with an estimated increase in the brand value.

That's it. They get invoices and they pay marketing and service payments. There is a whole list of them on pages 13 and 14, and all it says is 'advertising and sponsorship'—nothing else. It doesn't list what it is for; just 'advertising and sponsorship'. The invoice comes in and Cbus pays it out of members' money, and it's for acquisition and retention of members. It's that vague.

And let's look at the payments that are made to a number of sponsoring organisations. Those sponsoring organisations are the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the CFMMEU, the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union, the Australian Workers' Union, Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union and Master Builders Australia. They're the sponsoring unions. In 2010, there was $1.3 million just for marketing and services and nothing else.

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