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

The Assistant Treasurer, Minister Mulino. On their behalf I will ask, 'Where are we with these people?' We have to raise the tempo on this. I thought that this would somehow get to a resolution. I commend Macquarie Bank, which has come out as one of the organisations involved with it and it paid the people out. There was one other whose name evades me. The people all need to be paid out.

What we have now is a process where some might possibly get $150,000. That's not going to get you very far. I will revert back to my accountancy days. As a very rough rule of thumb, you're going to live on about 10 per cent of what you've got in your super. If you've got $150,000, you have to work out what you're going to be doing on $15,000 a year plus the pension. That's a pretty meagre life. In fact, for some people that means a life in their car if they don't own their house. We will be making people destitute. Some of these people had more than $1 million in their funds. Quite a number of them that we spoke to had $300,000, $320,000, $400,000—diligent people who've worked hard all their lives. They were not financial advisers; they relied on other people who had licenses to deal in money to do the right thing. But these people who got their super money—even when accounts were frozen and the owners couldn't get access to their own accounts—the money was withdrawn by First Guardian and Shield and basically disappeared. It turned up as jewellery and cars and floated overseas. They were completely swindled out of their money.

The hope that the people and the groups have is that we, in this chamber, will continue to fight on their behalf. I've made it abundantly clear to my colleagues in One Nation that this is a fundamental issue that talks directly to the hearts of people around Australia, the western suburbs of Sydney and in regional towns. We have to try to do more. I won't delay the House, but I think it's important that people know that I haven't forgotten about this. There are other things happening around this building today, where people have a fascination about themselves, but we should have a fascination about the people who are really hurting. Because of a failure in the system, which was no fault of the people who invested in their super, we have put people into destitution and gone completely against all the principles that were just enunciated in the previous speech. Everything the member said about safety, security, reliability, not being able to steal from the balances—all that failed in regard to these people.

What should happen, to be quite frank, is that ASIC should pay all these super accounts out, reinstall the money. Then the government, which has vastly greater legal resources, should pursue the people who created the malfeasance, those who were associated with them and those who were paid a fee—a trailer free or an upfront fee—to hawk the business. Get the whole lot of them and line them up, and then the government can reclaim the money that it's paid out and hit them with costs on top of it. That's fair enough. They broke the law, not the people who put their money in super. If we don't do this, all the narrative and all the discussions about this issue are a total farce. It's a total farce because we haven't actually lived by the principles that we're enunciating in such things as the Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill. It's just an explanatory memorandum of piffle.

I call on the minister, the Assistant Treasurer, not to confound this with technicalities, legal principles, liabilities and this sort of amorphous regalia of legalese. Just pay the people out and then use the great resources of the Commonwealth of Australia to pursue those who committed the crime—those who defrauded Australians and have left people in destitution—for the money that they stole.

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