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

Yes, absolutely. I hear those untruths from the other side that we don't support it. We do support it. But the emphasis we have on it is that it belongs to the people who have the superannuation funds. What we worry about is that the Labor Party tend to act like it's their money. It's not the government's money. Superannuation belongs to the people who have the superannuation funds. It comes out of their wages. They earn it. They work for it. On this side of politics, we've always tried to emphasise that, if it's your money, there needs to be a certain amount of freedom about what happens to it.

Many people's superannuation—everyone's superannuation, for that matter—is built over decades and decades of hard work, and the bar is rightly set higher for consent to make substantial changes. It should be. Labor tried to bypass that by making major structural tax changes without putting them clearly and transparently to the Australian people. Instead, this proposal appeared out of nowhere, with limited consultation and a rushed legislative timetable. The Labor luminaries didn't support it. From the ACTU, Sally McManus warned:

I do think it's got to be indexed because you've got to make sure eventually people don't end up there. But that's a very long time in the future.

Bill Kelty and Paul Keating, the father of modern superannuation, didn't embrace it. And now Labor's super policy is back.

I just want to have a think about the mindset of a team that decides that taxing unrealised capital gains is a good idea. I sit in question time here and I hear the Treasurer interject across the chamber, calling people 'geniuses' in a pejorative way—'Come on, genius,' or, 'Yes, genius!' or, 'Ask me another question, genius.' Well, what type of genius comes up with a tax plan to tax unrealised capital gains? There were so many unworkable issues with this. I had people asking: 'Am I going to have to get my farm valued every year or every three years? How are they going to work out what the value is? Do people understand how much it costs to value a farm?'

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