Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We'd all be quite happy to jump over and define the future of this nation, rather than just wait patiently for the Prime Minister to—

Exactly, it's not clear.

But here we are. Labor's delays have had consequences. There haven't been changes to the legislation. We are now changing that legislation. We support these reforms for simple reasons: they provide certainty, they prevent discrimination and they support better health outcomes for Australians. It's really important because, under this government, there has been so much confusion around financial services. I know this isn't necessarily a topic that keeps everybody awake at night, but financial services are so important for the strength, endurance and capacity of Australians to be empowered to live out their best lives. And what we've consistently seen under the government is they have completely mishandled financial services. This includes the problems of financial advice, which is also a subject of this bill, all the way through to, of course, doing anything they can to fatten the pig of industry super along the way.

You've got to hand it to the Labor Party. The Labor Party do understand who it is they're elected to serve; it's just not the Australian people. Once upon a time, the Labor Party were elected to serve blue-collar workers, but they don't really seem to care about them anymore. They were then elected to serve public servants, but, even when public servants wages started to outstrip private sector wages, they're weren't actually that interested in serving public servants anymore. These days, the primary purpose of the Labor Party is to serve organised capital. It's not organised workers; it's organised capital and particularly industry super funds. As we mentioned before, the former assistant treasurer has gone off to the OECD—he was probably paid off to go there so that the Labor Party could avoid having to continue dealing with him—but I imagine industry super is not that happy about it because they've lost one of their biggest advocates in this parliament.

Labor exists now to advocate for the case of organised capital to create slush funds that ultimately they influence and control. If you look at financial advice, their approach is: 'Well, how do we give all this power to industry super funds? We don't really care what the impact is on workers—people who've saved or sacrificed. It just means that we can suffocate everybody else and stop them from doing anything else to be financially independent.'

I absolutely believe in making sure that we have Australians who are financially independent, and you do that by making sure Australians have choice, agency and ownership over their future—they're not merely beaten into submission by the Labor Party to go into a select number of funds. The Labor Party pool capital, they get marketing expenses and they shower it upon themselves for their campaigning activities so that they can send members to this parliament. They can then garnish the wages of more Australians—

See this speech in context