Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026 and the related bill. I think the best thing we could say is that Labor's super mess is back, but this time it's not the original; it's a sequel. I'm trying to forget the original because that was a horror movie. But the sequel's worse. When the original came out, audiences recoiled in fear, not just at the fact that it was an unfair tax grab but at the sheer unworkability of the legislation.

People in my electorate, who work hard and smart to get ahead financially—and a lot of those are farming businesses and family businesses—faced a tax on unrealised capital gains in their superannuation. To propose taxing paper gains isn't a minor tweak; it is a structural shift that would have set a dangerous precedent across the entire tax base. Equally concerning was the government's refusal to index the $3 million threshold. Over time, more and more people would have been caught up, because bracket creep, something that the current government has refused to address, was part of the design. People were going to find themselves in a situation of having $3 million of unrealised capital gains.

Labor failed to understand that, for many farming businesses across Australia and in my electorate of Nicholls, the main asset in their superannuation is the farm. The farm might go up in value, but it won't be realised. The farmers want to keep farming. There will be some years that they make a profit, and there'll be some years that they make a loss. If they make a loss but the farm value has gone up, how are they supposed to pay the tax that would be created for them because, on paper, their asset base has gone up? The agriculture sector has one of the highest retirement ages in Australia, at around 68 years of age. This flawed policy was just a sneaky trick to take their money, to take their hard-earned savings. We on this side often say, 'When Labor run out of money, they come after more of yours.' On this side we fought hard and, with the help of community pressure, we forced Labor to abandon the taxation of unrealised gains and an indexation freeze. Thanks to the sustained scrutiny from the coalition, the superannuation sector, small-business owners and just everyday Australians who could see what a mess this was, we forced Labor to step back from the most outrageous elements of this proposal. The government backdown tells us that this was never a principled policy decision. It was a blatant grab for revenue to prop up their budget.

There's a question of trust here too. At the last election, Australians were not presented with a policy to tax unrealised capital gains in superannuation and here were Labor trying to legislate it. They were not told that longstanding superannuation settings would be fundamentally altered, but it was there in black and white in legislation before the parliament. They were not warned that indexation would be stripped away, but Labor tried to do it anyway.

Superannuation is not a windfall gain. It's a nest egg. We support superannuation. We do.

See this speech in context