Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Goldstein—and it's an excellent way that we started this debate—it is wonderful to speak on this piece of legislation, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Bill 2025, because, as you know, Deputy Speaker Freelander, superannuation is Australians' money. It's Australians' money. It's not the money of the Labor Party. It's not the money of industry super funds. It's not the money of the corrupt cartel kickbacks for the CFMEU. It's not there to be laundered for institutions as they see fit. It is there for Australians as they see fit. That's why we fundamentally believe that Australians should be able to use their super for simple things in the ordinary sequence of life.

Until 1992, you would have been told you were absolutely mad, absolutely stark raving bonkers, to think that it was more logical to save for your 67th birthday income than it was to save a deposit to buy your own home, because you get the benefits of buying your own home during your working life and your retirement. It's one of the foundations of economic security and one of the three pillars of retirement security. But that's not good enough for the Labor Party. They wanted to engage in a form of economic social engineering and reverse it because it helps the corrupt interests of the modern Labor movement, where they prioritise superannuation funds so that fund managers can take bigger bonuses, bigger graft and bigger components of people's superannuation money and deny Australians their capacity to buy their first home.

Not only are they trying to deny Australians the pathway to save for and buy their first home; it's even worse than that: they then want to use Australian superannuation money to buy homes that super funds own so they can rent them to young Australians so they can be serfs to superannuation funds. It is neofeudalism on a scale that we have never seen before, under the hysterical ideal that it is somehow advancing the interests of Australia.

Is the Labor Party the party of serfdom to super funds? You bet, they are! They can boast about it as much as they want in the parliament, but some of us see the con. Some of us see the trick. Some of us see the deception and some of us will never back down from calling out how much they are seeking to corrode and to eat into the foundations of the ambition and the dreams of the next generation of Australians to simply feed the interests of their friends.

Superannuation is a choice. Just to remind you, Deputy Speaker Freelander, superannuation did exist before 1992. Labor don't like to remind you of that. Before 1992, superannuation existed. And, before 1992, did you know that superannuation policies actually allowed you to cash them in to use as a deposit to buy your first home? People fundamentally understood that buying your own home was more important for your retirement security as well as your working life than having a larger balance when you turn 65, at the time, and now 67—logic! But they often deferred obligations to contribute, because people understood the biggest financial priority young Australians between the ages of about 18 and 35 had. They voted with their feet. People understood the most important thing you could do for your long term and your working life and your retirement financial security was to own your own home.

But, of course, when young Australians own their own home, guess what happens? They're proud, they're independent, they're more likely to go on and form families and be the foundation of the success of this country. They're more likely to start small businesses, lean into the future with confidence, own a share of this nation, want to defend it and conserve its great traditions and its values, and that's the one thing that directly assaults the progressive madness of the modern Labor Party. So they must attack it at its foundations at every step.

At the moment you see the insanity of the modern Labor project in their approach to housing and to superannuation. The modern insanity is where Labor likes to chuck an increasingly large chunk of young Australians' wages into a fund they control or their mates control, for their 67th birthday. Their answer to why young Australians can't afford to buy their own home, because Labor have deliberately and maliciously taken their wages and thrown them into the future in a way only they can access and control, is and then to say: 'The government should come along and own your home. We'll be the solution. The government should come in and invest in it.'

They're building out their control over homeownership while also increasing their control, because that's what the modern Labor project is. The modern Labor project is to control Australians. It doesn't matter what it is; from birth to death, they want to control you. They want to control education so they can indoctrinate the next generation of Australians to think that the state is their parents. They want to control the first job and the first opportunity young Australians get so they can control their career pathways and then go on and dictate to them how they save, how they use their wealth and how they're in a position to be able one day to go and secure their retirement. They want to take control of your wealth so they can then go on and decide and determine whether or not you own your own home, and their preference is that, if you are not in state sponsored housing, you are renting from their friends in super funds so that you are serfs to a super fund.

Then, of course, their preference is that they also control your working life by making sure that you're part of the organised labour system, and, if you choose not to be part of that system and take the diktat from organised unions and organised working organisations, you're shunned and isolated and you're not on the taxpayer's teat or you're not able to get the corrupt kickbacks and cartels that are part of the modern system that we see every day through the press reports of the CFMEU. Then, of course, when you get to retirement, all their questions are about how they impose more cost, more obligations and more responsibility at a time of your life when you can no longer earn an income, because their only pathway is to harvest anything that you have saved and sacrificed to get ahead.

That is the Labor project. The Labor project is about how they control Australians. But don't worry. To the children in the gallery who want hope and opportunity, I say there is a better way—a better way young Australians can control their money, their ambition and their destiny. It is the Liberal way, because we believe that young Australians can own their own home, control their income, control their super and control their destiny. We believe in backing Australians and any Australian who wants to back themselves. That is the lived ambition of the Liberal dream—a nation of 26 million people standing on their own two feet, appealing to their best hopes and aspiring to something better not just for themselves but for their families and their communities.

When we talk about a bill like this, what we're talking about is whether Australians own their own money or not, whether they control their own money or not and whether they can then go on and use their own money or not. But, of course, the Labor Party is not interested in achieving that. Their motivation and their objective is how they get as much money as possible into the funds they and their mates control, because, when they get that money into those funds, they can then use it for the cartel kickbacks to the unions that can then be kicked back into the campaign coffers of the Labor Party so they can sit in the chamber and then go on and vote for more money. It is the circle of cartel kickback life.

It's almost like the opening of the movie The Lion King. It's so perverse it's beautiful, because, literally, the mafia could not design a system with such legality and seemingly such lawful sanction as that circle of life. Labor Party MPs get elected. They vote for more income to go into industry super funds. Industry super funds give, through marketing expenses, more cartel kickbacks to unions. Unions donate to the Labor Party to campaign to get elected to this chamber and keep repeating the circle, the cartel kickback circle of life. That is the labour movement, whereas we look at it and say: how do young Australians earn their own money, own their own destiny and control their own future? That's what we believe in, so, when we want young Australians to have their super fund, we want them to own their own destiny.

When you look at this bill, you should be able to say that it's your money. You should control it and it should be paid with your wages. We look at it and see an empowerment for you, but we want to make sure that it doesn't impoverish small businesses on the road towards that future. One of the things the Labor Party doesn't care about is small business. With the greatest of respect, they managed to come up with a minister responsible for small business, but we know she has no say at the cabinet table. Because they're not part of the right faction or they're not part of the right union or they're not part of the right state—whatever it is—many ministers who might have something worthwhile to say are silenced on the issues that matter to the future direction of this country, and we know that from this legislation. The government's own advice from the Treasury was that this bill needed 18 months to be implemented so that small businesses didn't go broke, because there is no super on jobs that don't exist when a small business collapses. We already have record insolvencies for small business in this country. We already have the lowest private sector jobs growth in the history of this country. We already have, nationwide, eight out of 10 jobs being created only because of taxpayer revenue. This government is fuelling inflation in the process. It's using debt to finance expenditure today to prop up job numbers, which is fuelling inflation, which means Australians are paying higher interest rates because of this government's reckless fiscal policy. They pretend their economic program is working when, in fact, it is failing and fuelling inflation today. Every Australian is paying for the consequences of this reckless Labor government and its reckless spending program, and they're paying it through higher interest rates, today.

One of the worst things we could see is small businesses collapsing because the government simply won't implement this reform with enough lead time to help small businesses adjust. Deputy Speaker Young, I know you understand small business, because you've been in it yourself. When you're waiting for revenue to come in—and sometimes people aren't paying you as fast as they want, whether it is the Commonwealth, the state government, a big business or another small business who are waiting to be paid themselves—you have to finance costs from your own account. So often, small-business people, who are aspiring to get ahead and back others, have had to find ways to make sure that their staff are paid on time. They always pay their staff before they pay themselves—always. And that is always something that's lost on this government; it doesn't care. And the same goes with super. Enabling small business the breathing space to find their pathway to conform with the law has been met by the Labor Party with: 'Stuff them. That doesn't matter.'

We know from public reports produced by some of the biggest payroll companies in the world, like MYOB—companies that so many small businesses depend on—that 22.6 per cent of businesses are at risk of insolvency. And they are not just at risk of insolvency in terms of going to ASIC and saying, 'We can't do this anymore.' Not only can that potentially deny the people who run those businesses their future economic success and their capacity to afford their own superannuation. But what goes with that, if those companies go down and those small businesses go down, is their existing employees and, of course, their superannuation and their wages.

Small businesses are the starting gate of opportunity for so many young Australians. It is the first step on the ladder of economic opportunity. Small business jobs are often the first gateway to full participation in the Australian economy—the participation that we want. It is where young Australians get the skills, the training, the knowledge and the enculturation into a business environment. It is where they find their hunger, their thirst, their ambition and their dreams. When that's suffocated because Labor simply don't care—Labor's objective prioritises getting as much money as possible into super funds so that their mates can pay off cartel kickbacks and pay their fund managers bigger bonuses at the expense of small businesses—they are trading off the ambitions and the dreams of young Australians to feed themselves. It's not just immoral. It is wrong. And it's why this amendment is so important. Not only does it go to the heart of an economic transition that will help small business survive; it goes to the heart of the type of economy we want—an economy built from the foundations of enterprise, initiative and hard work rather than the socialist model of top-down corporatism and statism.

So, yes, we're moving this amendment because we clearly believe in it. We proudly believe in it. We believe strongly in backing small business every step of the way and in fighting for small business every step of the way. We will be unrelenting in standing up for small business every step of the way. If the government had any rational thought, they would be backing the amendment every step of the way.

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