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

Thank you, Deputy Speaker Scrymgour. I am under no illusion that I am an inadequate replacement for the member for Casey. However, in the spirit in which he has appeared in the chamber, I am honoured to nonetheless follow him. It is important to speak on this piece of legislation because the Labor Party wants this legislation to be about, somehow, making the case that they're being generous on the issue of superannuation, but let's be very clear about this. This bill is an omnibus bill. It is running about 10 different agendas under the banner of thinking that it is justified because it has the word 'superannuation' in it.

There is a component in this legislation where the government is saying they're supporting superannuation choice. The problem is it isn't the choice of Australians; it's the choice of the fund managers. Today the modern Labor Party is not a party of organised workers. It is a party for organised capital, where they seek to entrench the vested interests of industry funds, particularly the funds that profiteer and take from people's retirement savings. They take that money. They funnel, siphon, launder or wash—whatever word you want to use—then pass it on through kickbacks to the Australian Labor Party and its campaign coffers. It's either that or the trade union movement. The bigger the volume of money, the more they can just shave money off the top and use it towards ill-gotten and corrupt gains. That is the basis on which this legislation is put before this parliament. It's a way to maximise the revenue in the funds they control. It's a way to maximise their grab, their take and their pathway to get money into the kickback cartel cycle of life, to provide the liquidity for the modern Labor Party to campaign so they can sit in office.

You just need to understand how the cartel kickback circle of life works. You have the trade union movement that takes money from workers' wages. They then, through law, compel people to be in funds that they control. They then campaign and fund the Labor Party to sit on the treasury bench. Once they're on the treasury bench they try and take as much money as they can from Australian workers' wages and force it into funds that they control. And then they use that money to launder it—to drive it through marketing mechanisms or whatever it is—so that it goes back into the campaign coffers of the Australian Labor Party to keep them entrenched. They always want to take more of Australians' money because they want to control Australians. At a state level, state Labor governments propose projects. Those projects are then used to siphon money and raise the expectations of taking money from people's superannuation funds, again. so that the beneficiaries can be those who are members of the unions. It's the cartel kickback circle of life.

Where has it been enlivened more than the CFMEU? We found out all about that today, about what's been going on, in the Wood inquiry in Queensland, which has directly exposed the CFMEU-Labor Party cartel of corruption. We've heard about the problems through what's been voiced in Senate estimates today. There's what's been going on in the Queensland parliament, the scrutiny today. Then, of course, there have been the nonanswers that the minister has provided in the House of Representatives today. She won't give simple bits of information like whether she requested reports from the CFMEU administrator. She won't address the allegations of corruption in the CFMEU. It could be a choice of wilful blindness because she didn't want to see corruption—and didn't want to hear about corruption—because then she wouldn't be accountable for the corruption. She won't even reveal to this place the report that was handed to her by the CFMEU administrator.

The Labor Party oversees the cartel kickback corruption cycle of life, where they take Australian workers' money and shove it in funds. Those funds then finance projects where they can skive money off the side. Then they also make sure that that funding is then used for marketing expenses, to ensure that Labor stays in government. Literally, the Mafia could not have designed a scheme as sophisticated and sanctioned in law as has been done by the modern Labor Party. And Australians are the ones who pay.

Any time there is a threat to the power structures that sit behind the cartel kickback circle of life, they will fight endlessly to keep it in place. If they don't, they know the revenue sources they need to sit on the treasury bench will dry up. More importantly, they will then have to justify, on democratic grounds, why they should be able to legislate their agenda.

Labor doesn't represent organised workers anymore; it hasn't represented them for a long time. It represents the people who work the public sector and how much they can extract from the taxpayer. The other thing they represent is organised capital and they try and push as much money into that system—no matter how many times the facts are put out there, they won't accept that they're taking too much of Australians' money.

Think about the absurdity of the situation we now face. The retirement income system has three pillars. The first pillar is homeownership. The second pillar is retirement savings through a set retirement savings scheme, which is superannuation. The third pillar is pensions, which are publicly available to those who need it. Ninety-three per cent of people's principal today is left in their superannuation when they die. People have more super than they need to retire with dignity and they're passing on with nearly their total principal intact. That says to me we have our priorities wrong. Young Australians cannot afford to get into the property market and increasingly have huge volumes of savings available at their disposal to get into the market earlier and cheaper, but the Labor Party never wants Australians to access that money, because, if they start putting their own interest from their working life and retirement into homeownership first, they will become far more independent through their working life and in retirement.

Instead, the Labor vision has become this sick joke where young Australians can't afford to buy their first home and they're increasingly trending towards having a mortgage at the point of retirement in which they're able, over many years, to garnish off people's superannuation funds as much money to feed the cartel kickback circle of life that they are beneficiaries of. It is a perversion of the best interest of Australians and it's all done under the annex of claiming virtue. But they are directly assaulting the pathway for young Australians to own their own home. If you had have said to anybody before 1992, 'Do you think it is logical to buy your home first before you focus on your retirement?' everybody would say, 'If you don't think that, you need your head read.' Well, what this government has done, and what successive Labor governments have done, is prioritise the size of somebody's 67th birthday cake over whether they can buy a home earlier, younger and cheaper, and they are paying the price.

It affects women—who desperately want to get ahead and be independent and, in particular, those who are post divorce—and young Australians the worst. Frankly, it corrodes the very basis of the Australian aspiration and the Australian dream for homeownership. But that's fine for modern Labor because it means that they get to control your life. It means that, increasingly, they want superannuation funds to become the new fundie-feudal lords—to buy and build the houses to rent to you for life. The sick idea, and it is sick, that they would deny young Australians a pathway to buy their home earlier and cheaper with their own savings but they're quite happy for those funds where those savings are held to go and build and buy housing to rent back to those young Australians who can't get into the property market is a complete perversion and a deliberate act of economic social engineering to try and turn Australian society on its head.

The debate about housing has always been central to the type of country that we want to be. Australia has always been a land of great promise where young Australians can go on and, if they work hard, save and sacrifice, buy their first home. This is not just some sort of economic idea; it is fundamentally central to the type of nation we are. Because, when people own their own home, they are in a position to be more financially independent, they're more likely to be able to form a family and support them and they're more likely to be in a position to have the foundations and pillars for retirement security. At every stage of life, if you buy your home earlier and cheaper, you will be in a stronger and better position—not just to save on rent but to then go on and build the foundations of the success of a life and to be confident in doing things like becoming self-employed or setting up a small business. But Labor has turned around, torn that social contract up and said: 'We know how to run your life better. We know how to design the rules and regulations so that it benefits our mates over you.'

More importantly, they're increasingly rigging the structure of the Australian economy to benefit themselves. It is the very model of corruption that we should be seeking to expose, and the unions and industry funds are actively ensuring that it is perpetuated. Of course, every member of the Labor Party in some way is a direct beneficiary of the cartel kickback circle of life. If they sit on those Treasury benches, they sit on the Treasury benches because the financing of the campaign increasingly comes from Australians' retirement funds, which are shaved off and laundered all the way through the system under the banner of 'marketing expenses' to the point where they end up in the campaign coffers of the Australian Labor Party.

When this government extols the virtues of this bill, what they are extolling is—I can assure you it is not a virtue—the argument for their cartel kickback circle of life, where private funds for the retirement security for millions of Australians find their way laundered into the campaign coffers of the Australian Labor Party. Any pathway that frees people up to take control of their funds through self-managed superannuation funds, they seek to shut down. You just need to look at how the Assistant Treasurer right now is making the case for why self-managed superannuation funds who aren't exposed or don't create the consequences of the compensation scheme of last resort—they are deliberately, maliciously targeting self-managed superannuation funds, just like they did with the retiree tax on refundable franking credits and just like they wanted to do on their proposed unrealised capital gains tax.

Every avenue they have to attack self-managed superannuation funds, they will absolutely take, because they want Australians to take their money out of SMSFs and put them in the industry funds that they can then control, because when they do that, they don't just control your retirement; they control your working life. They are trying to undermine that spirit of independence that has made this country great. More importantly, the trade union movement—particularly the CFMEU, the corrupt CFMEU—is one of the biggest beneficiaries of this cartel kickback circle of life. When the CFMEU gets control of Australians' money, we now know from public reports that have been tabled in the Wood inquiry, it's used to sanction and perpetuate violence, harassment of women and the demonisation of people who are prepared to stand up.

Absolutely we oppose this corruption. What's scandalous is that this Labor government runs interference when we do simple things like try and table a report into CFMEU corruption in this parliament, as the Leader of the House did before question time. There is a time where good people of decency, I would hope, are prepared to stand up and call out the behaviour of this Labor government and the correlation of their behaviour and what they have engaged with. Sitting behind it is a fundamental compromise situation, where the Labor Party is actively participating in a deeply distrustful and deeply dishonest range of conduct for which every Australian is paying.

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