Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Moncrieff for introducing this motion and for her continued work to protect the interests of young Australians. This motion allows me the opportunity to focus on super tax's effect on regional Australians. As we have seen time and time again over the past 12 months, under Labor's policies, the regions are set to do the heavy lifting once again—and with no safeguards in place, where we need them the most. We've seen, with regional health, the changes to the Distribution Priority Areas for GPs, which we worked so hard to expand for places like Cowper; a lack of safeguards for regional community pharmacies when changing the dispensing laws, which is an ongoing, serious problem; and the resulting and potential closures of critical healthcare facilities in our towns. I think 23 have closed since Labor's policy was implemented early. We've seen this with the ill-prepared move towards renewables. We're not against renewables, but there's nothing to replace them at the moment, and we've seen electricity prices skyrocketing across this country. Today the Wicked Elf brewery in my electorate—renowned across Australia; it's received awards—announced that it is closing its doors because it cannot pay its electricity bills; they've increased that much. We've seen a complete lack of infrastructure funding, with proposed projects that would have ensured better regional road services and communications cancelled or put on hold in order to funnel large sums of taxpayer money to Labor pet projects in metro areas, and now we're seeing it in superannuation.

Contrary to the stories by the ABC and others, the effects of these changes to superannuation are not confined to people in Double Bay, Toorak or other affluent metropolitan suburbs around the country. In fact, in the vast majority of these cases these super funds won't be used to purchase yachts or luxury cars in retirement—which was so gleefully insinuated. These changes actually affect our businesses, like GPs, pharmacists and especially our farmers—those people who literally keep the economy going, keep food on our tables and keep health care afloat.

I have heard the average person ask, 'How on Earth do people have $3 million in their super?' Well, the simple answer is: land value. A considerable number of professionals, small business owners and farmers have placed their business premises or farms in their self-managed super funds because of the prospective capital gains tax advantages. These aren't people with waterfront mansions; these are people on farms and, in the case of pharmacists, for instance, their cash flow is next to nothing. Although they may be asset rich because of the increasing value of their land, they're technically cash poor.

The implications of this scenario are more complex than my five-minute speech will allow, but the resulting outcome is that people with a business landholding in any kind of self-managed super fund may face considerable stress through liquidity difficulties in meeting what will be a crippling tax bill for unrealised capital gain. In a significant number of cases, forced land sales will prove to be the only solution.

This government will attempt to push this tax through, presenting images of super fund holders akin to Scrooge McDuck swimming in piles of money and laughing at those who are paying their fair share of tax, but the reality is quite different. While those on the other side of the floor claim that this will affect only 80,000 Australians, the Treasurer's own modelling shows that this number will drastically increase year on year, and it is specifically designed to do so in order to exponentially increase tax earned as a result of the policy—yet another tax by stealth, yet more smoke and mirrors, and not fiscally sound.

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