Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I listened to the remarks of the honourable member who just concluded about keeping things safe, about dignity and about making sure that people can get their super and that no-one intrudes on it. That all sounds like marvellous stuff, except for people who were with the First Guardian and Shield funds, where $1.2 billion went missing. There's still well in excess of about half a billion dollars that they're looking for. They were just the people that the member was talking about. These were the schoolteachers. I know one very well—my former wife. The money has gone. It's just disappeared—hundreds of thousands of dollars, reflecting their life as a teacher. It's not just one but multiple people—about 12,000 people. We're expecting these people to become KCs, King's Counsellors, in pursuit of their money.

I've asked Minister Mulino, who I know has been talking to Melinda Kee—that's good—if we can give these people a break. Rather than have them go through this—they have to go to AFCA to get to CSLR and then they've got to go back to the trustees and countersue them and find out the liabilities that reside there. These people did what they were asked to do. They put their money in a super fund. They didn't go wild on the London Stock Exchange; they put their money into super and went back to their jobs. These people are going to have to continue working—I don't know, maybe waiting tables—because they have no money.

What should be happening, if we really believe in supporting superannuation and other measures, is ASIC should pay these people out and then they do the footwork and the legal work to recover the money. That would be a generally decent thing to do, but instead we're going through this bureaucratic fiasco. We're putting people in hospital with stress. I followed this up last year, I'm following it up again now, but there has to be some resolution to this. I am very disappointed, and I put the minister on notice that at the first opportunity I get in question time—I managed to get one question in the last two years; it's a reflection of how things were going for me—I will ask them what we are doing about this. For those who are sitting back in their rooms, Minister Mulino, at the next opportunity I'm going to ask you about where we are with this process.

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