Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

This bill, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill , is about realisation. The Treasurer came to the realisation, after a strong campaign by those of us on this side of the House, the Nationals and the Liberals, that taxing unrealised capital gains is wrong. The Treasurer had it in his head that it would be okay to tax people on income they hadn't yet earned. In regional electorates represented by the Nationals, this would have hurt family farms first. The Treasurer claimed the impact on family farms would be minimal, but the National Farmers' Federation, thanks to the University of Adelaide's modelling, estimated that 3,500 farms would be affected. But critically, had the $3 million threshold not changed, another 14,000 farms would have been affected. Further, some 13,000 small-business owners would have been potentially affected by the Treasurer's initial tax plans.

On the farming front, let me put it in simple terms for those opposite. I am not sure that they want to understand. If your farm value goes up, your income doesn't necessarily go up. You don't get extra income as a farmer because land prices are going up. You are dependent on the weather, on commodity prices, on input costs which have risen, on logistical shocks, as we saw during the pandemic—and, indeed, might see shortly on fuel prices; in fact, today it's true—or on the vagaries of importing countries, such as, currently, Indonesia, with their sudden reduction on quotas for the importation of globe grapes from my region, leaving many table grape growers in my region reeling, with tonnes of grapes that have no home.

An increase in farm value does not mean you are earning more income. I just have to repeat that for those opposite, as they are slow to understand. Unlike residential property in metropolitan areas, it may not be practical, necessary or desirable to soon realise a capital gain purely because the land prices have gone up. Generational farming doesn't think or act like playing the property market. Yet again, Labor could not care one iota about how their policies play out in regional Australia.

But then, maybe through the Prime Minister's office or maybe thanks to polling, the realisation dawned on the Treasurer that taxing unrealised capital gains was actually a dopey idea. Had the Treasurer had his way, Australia would have been the first nation in the world to tax unrealised capital gains in this way. Even the Democrats baulked at the idea in the USA.

Straight after the election, the Treasurer said Labor's unrealised capital gains tax grab was 'an important way that we fund some of our other priorities'. Let me digress for a moment to say that those priorities are not in Mallee. About $87 million in grants, about one-third, have been stripped from Mallee over a comparable three-year period of coalition government versus the Albanese Labor government. Labor tried to pretend their unrealised capital gains policy was modest, but the Parliamentary Budget Office belled the cat. The first year of their policy was going to yield $300 million, but within 10 years Labor would have been rolling in $7 billion per annum taken from retirement nest eggs—Australians' hard earned super.

Speaking of realisation, Mallee voters are an intelligent bunch. I asked this question in Mallee's biggest survey last year: are you worried about higher taxes and the taxing of unrealised gains on retirement savings or superannuation? Guess what? Over 86 per cent of my voters said yes. My theory is that Labor just don't believe in private property ownership. Everywhere you look, they're attacking personal assets. How do the Marxist sayings go? Seize the means of production. The proletariat seizes the property of the bourgeoisie. Labor think they're so clever, masking socialism in tricky marketing and salami-slicing away property ownership and retirement nest eggs slice by slice by slice.

Everywhere you look, when you look at those opposite, there is faith in government and nothing else. There's no faith in our farmers, no faith in small business, no faith in families, no faith in individual liberty. The government knows best. What did George Orwell call it? Oh, yes—Big Brother. In the Treasurer's economy, the government manages everything and has its fingers in every pie. Arguably, the Treasurer has strayed from the teachings of his political master, Paul Keating, who built the compulsory superannuation system. Perhaps it was the former treasurer's intervention opposing unrealised capital gains that sealed the deal—that the idea was in fact a very bad one.

Another realisation that my Mallee constituents know all too well is that Labor loves to run a consultation while everyone's on holidays or, indeed, while southern cropping farmers are busy with harvest. Consultation on this bill occurred over December and January, true to form, almost as if it's designed to garner minimal opposition and sail through parliament.

One big bone of contention with Labor's retirement tax grabs was also the lack of indexation of the $3 million threshold. At long last, after a sustained campaign from the coalition, the thresholds will now be indexed. Again, Mr Keating had noted that a young person today on average earnings would easily have more than $3 million in their retirement. The failure to index the figure was an affront to aspirational Australians. Indeed, Mr Keating had said that people contributing 12 per cent compulsory superannuation from 1 July 2025 would have balances over $3 million at retirement, which 'would reduce the call by the age pension on the Australian budget to two per cent of GDP in the 2050s.' On that front, I note the Association of Superannuation Funds estimates that, by 2050, half of all Australians will be fully self-funded in retirement, which, they estimate, keeps the pension burden at 2.1 per cent of GDP.

Is the Treasurer that out of touch with cost-of-living concerns and so desperate for money for a flailing budget that he persisted, until taken to task last year, with unrealised capital gains and refusing threshold indexation? Is he so out of touch he had to be taken to task by his leadership team, the Prime Minister or both? Somehow, during a cost-of-living crisis, the Treasurer thought it would be okay to tax farmers on paper gains only. Had that idea proceeded, farmers would have had to sell off parts of their farm to meet their unrealised capital gains tax liability each year. Farmers use self-managed super funds to prepare for the future, yet Labor—as they love to do—were planning to shift the goalposts to raid retirement nest eggs. That's one reason the coalition is vigilant about elements of this bill that might unfairly punish those who worked hard to prepare for their retirement.

The Nationals have been on the case for years. The first time was when the Treasurer came up with this thought bubble during 2024. I called it out in January 2024 as a broken promise from before the previous election. It was a new tax grab. It was Shorten-esque in its brazen nature. Labor had promised it would not make major superannuation changes in 2022, yet there they were, in 2024, proposing taxing unrealised capital gains. In November 2024, I called out how the plan to tax unrealised capital gains on self-managed super funds over $3 million was a disaster, and we on this side of the House kept on the case through the election campaign and beyond. Time and again, Labor act like feudal lords, treating farmers like peasants who really don't own their assets. They entice corporate raiders to take slices of the farm for transmission lines, energy or mining projects, or they eye off the farm nest egg that farmers have set aside for tough seasons.

Speaking of which, Mallee has been through some tough times of late, as has broader western Victoria. Labor was advocating this tax grab during both a cost-of-living crisis and drought conditions in our area. Worse still, Labor couldn't coordinate whether Albanese Labor or Allan Labor would hit farmers for money during a drought, so, true to form, they both went after the farmers. Albanese's Labor was after farmers' unrealised capital gains at the same time the Allan Labor government had the idea to jack up their so-called emergency services volunteer levy from the same farmers. Country Fire Authority volunteers have said 'not in our name'—in other words, 'Don't use us, as volunteers, as a basis for tax.' There are effigies of CFA volunteers with gratuitous advice for Ms Allan all over my electorate. I might say that today we hear that the Allan government has now put on hold the ESVF tax for three years. There must be an election coming! That's how on the nose the Labor brand is in Mallee. I could mention the sneaky con job they pulled on a $5 million childcare promise in Loddon shire when the money was going to Wedderburn for a two-year-old promise all along, but I would be straying off topic.

Let me explain why the Nationals are eternally vigilant in this area of retirement taxation. The sorry tale of Labor's chase of unrealised capital gains demonstrates that, in their core DNA, Labor do not understand the regions and are coming for family trusts next. It took a sustained opposition campaign to demonstrate that the Australian public do not support hitting hardworking Australian families' retirement savings. Labor will be back chasing your assets in the community, and the Nationals will remain eternally vigilant to protect the farm and hard earned retirement savings. The Nationals will always stand up for our farmers and farming communities, and that includes their assets. In fact, I look forward to the debate on whether Labor have snuck in a cunning death tax under their revisions to the consultation draft. We are always on the lookout for Labor's sneaky ways of punishing Australians for their hard work and for putting assets away for the future or for future generations.

The coalition supports the LISTO, the low-income superannuation tax offset, as it is a tax cut. However, I have to flag that it offers no immediate cost-of-living relief. The LISTO will boost superannuation balances for the future, not working families' pockets here and now, and that is a problem. All the people in regional Australia are fed up with not being looked after by the Labor government and with them coming after these unrealised gains. Capital gains are, generally, not in their interests, and they are very well aware of it.

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