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

Australians are sick of the laws around superannuation constantly changing, with the Labor government fiddling every step of the way and undermining the retirement security of millions of Australians. Labor change the rules, they fiddle with the standards, they add new taxes and they even put forward insane new taxes, including those that are going to apply an income tax on unsold assets. It's an assault on families, their long-term financial security and their retirement.

Too often, the benefit or the purpose of changing the rules is to benefit a select number of funds that the Labor Party, through the union cartel, control and therefore use at their whim to take cartel kickbacks and funnel money to themselves through marketing expenses, via the unions, to ensure that they can continue to manage the retirement savings of Australians. There's simply no basis on which any good minded Australian citizen can tolerate the continued corruption of the superannuation system under the Australian Labor Party. The Treasurer likes to carry on in question time and everywhere else about superannuation, as though they have some sort of wonderful legacy associated with it, but the practice is that this government, like Labor governments past, treat the Australian retirement savings system like it's their own plaything—a piggy bank designed to fund them, to finance their interests and, of course, to be corruptly used to the advantage of organisations like the CFMEU-Labor cartel.

There is no limit to the extent to which they want to be able to eat into the retirement savings of Australians, and the group they hate the most is Australians who take responsibility for their retirement security through self-managed superannuation funds. Labor hates self-managed superannuation funds because, when people control their own superannuation, they can slap the hand of the Labor Party as it tries to stick it into their retirement savings—because they know that, when Labor tries to get its hand into this SMSF cookie jar, they have a way to close the lid and stop the Labor Party from stealing their money.

So what's Labor's solution? They always come up with a new way of introducing a new tax that gives them an indirect pathway to apply a standard to SMSFs, but they don't apply it to industry funds because they stay compliant and they stay under their thumb. That's why we have to fight the agenda that Labor has to destroy the retirement security of millions of Australians who've taken agency over and ownership of their own future. That's why Labor wanted to introduce an unrealised capital gains tax, which would have applied an income tax to unsold assets held in super. They wanted to introduce an income tax on unsold assets to apply to SMSFs, but they weren't going to apply it to industry funds because they were compliant and stayed within the control of the Labor Party.

It was very amusing to watch Labor's plan for an unrealised capital gains tax play out in what has now become a periodic and regular episode in this parliament. The Prime Minister goes off and announces one thing. He turns to his Treasurer and says, 'Your job is now to introduce and deliver it,' and then he goes through a process of ritual humiliation of his Treasurer by then, eventually—as he can't make the case in the public square—changing the rules and the regulations around him. The ritual humiliation of the Treasurer by the Prime Minister has to be one of the sickest performances that I've ever seen in this parliament, but it's definitely one that's now a regular feature of this Labor government, where the Prime Minister makes sure that he sets his own Treasurer up for failure. Every time he encourages him to float a new tax, he ends up overriding his Treasurer after the Treasurer has failed to do the hard work to build out the case. But the Prime Minister gets to do it, so he makes the Treasurer look ridiculous in front of his own colleagues. But there is no clearer example of the ritual humiliation of the Treasurer by the Prime Minister than by forcing him to close down his unrealised capital gains tax, which would apply an income tax to unsold assets in superannuation.

But Labor now can't be trusted. Labor continue to introduce taxes they didn't take to the election. This bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026, proposes a new tax that was not taken to the last election and was not voted on by the Australian people. We know that Labor have other taxes that they're now floating amongst the community that were not taken to the last election, like their new tax on housing, which would increase the cost of new house constructions in Australia, and like their plan to fiddle with tax laws—they're going to start to apply taxes where Australians lose money. That's what's been happening with their proposals. They're getting modelled in the budget. Whenever something moves, they tax it. And, of course, they want to make sure they take more control over and more ownership of the wealth of Australians.

After the Prime Minister ritually humiliated the Treasurer on his unrealised capital gains tax proposal, they've come back with a different tax that they didn't take to the last election, which is to apply an additional 15 per cent tax on income above a threshold of $3 million. The Prime Minister has also humiliated the Treasurer by saying that that $3 million now needs to be indexed. Then, as a final form of humiliation, he has turned around and said, 'Let's have a 40 per cent tax on income above a threshold of $10 million.' We know full well that this was never the Treasurer's intent. He is consistently in a pattern of behaviour where he is overridden by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister likes to keep him under his thumb to give a warning sign to the rest of his frontbench and all the members in the back bench as well who dare challenge him. He knows full well he's got dirt files ready to bring out on them at any time.

This is a disturbing model of governance where you have a prime minister with so much control and timid and weak members of parliament afraid to stand up and challenge him. It is showing just how much the model of government we currently have in Australia allows things like public money to go to organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor cartel.

Labor have a problem. They don't have enough revenue, and, as we trend towards $1 trillion of debt in the coming weeks, Labor have only one answer, which is how to go after more Australians' money. But let's not lose sight of why Labor is going after more Australians' money. They have $15 billion to $30 billion of taxpayers' money to give to organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor cartel. The smart thing would be not to give that $15 billion to $30 billion to organised crime through the CFMEU-Labor cartel.

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