Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) | Hansard source

I want to make some comments about the detail of the proposed legislation, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Putting Members' Interests First) Bill 2019, and the challenges that will be faced with the implementation of it. I say at the outset there are some matters of principle involved here which ought to be front of mind for senators and front of mind for members of the community who are considering this legislation. Industry superannuation is an achievement of the Labor movement that has made a very great difference to the lives of many millions of Australians. It was hard won. It was fought for in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with, in many cases, industrial action, detailed work with government and leadership from Australians who have made a very great contribution to the nation's future and our national savings. People like Hawke, Keating and Bill Kelty are rightly lauded publicly for the contribution they made. It was not a popular view at the time amongst employers or amongst those opposite. People over there tend to take credit for the development of the superannuation system as if they were supporters of it all along. They were not. But there were many other Australians who were involved in the building of the superannuation system—people such as Laurie Carmichael, Tom McDonald, Jenny George and Bill Mansfield. These people made an extraordinary contribution, over decades, of industrial and political leadership. With a sense of the long-term interests of workers and families, and of the nation, they delivered a system that is unequalled across the Western world.

The other contribution that is not often considered in the debate is the many thousands of people who, over the ensuing period, have worked hard in the industry superannuation system. The staff who worked for these organisations—the leadership of these organisations; the union officials and nominees; the employer representatives and employer nominees; and the independent representatives—who sit on these boards, have actually built a system that has integrity and decency, and delivers certainty in terms of retirement income for many, many millions of Australians and their families.

It seems to me that what's underlying this debate—it's important for senators to appreciate—is that, while there are issues of detail and there are ideological buzzwords attached to some of this, issues like choice and some of the framework that's been adopted by the government are really a proxy for a war on industry superannuation. It's because they hate the achievement that was made by the labour movement and by millions of Australian workers. They can't bring themselves to accept that it's now a mainstream, crucial condition for a future retirement strategy for millions of people.

Two objectives that we're dealing with here in superannuation are, firstly, retirement incomes and, secondly, the capacity of the superannuation system to use its scale to deliver low-price, effective insurance products for Australian workers and their families. I just don't buy for a second the student-politics obsession that underlines the drive to wreck the superannuation system that's coming from senators opposite, who will never have to worry about their own retirement incomes and who will never be in a position where they need a superannuation system that's got scale and support across the Australian economy.

The bill seeks to amend the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 and the Superannuation (Unclaimed Money and Lost Members) Act 1999 to improve the default insurance arrangements for superannuation. It aims, it claims, to protect the superannuation savings of younger members and members with low-balance funds from being eroded by insurance premiums. It does this by removing the default life insurance option for these accounts.

Labor support this aim. However, we believe that the bill requires some amendment in order to be able to properly achieve those objectives without what we see at this stage as unintended consequences, although unintended consequences does presuppose that the actual intent of the senators opposite is benign and actually supportive of the future operation of an effective, decent superannuation system. I suspect that what they're actually about is their mates in the retail super system. They're opposed to the existence and the effectiveness of the industry superannuation system, and they will do whatever they can in this place and in the other chamber to undermine those objectives.

When this bill was introduced into the Senate in early July, the Senate referred it to a committee inquiry with a reporting date of mid-October. Stakeholders and experts had suggested that there were implementation issues and potential unintended consequences arising from the quite technical amendments proposed in the legislation. The long reporting timetable would have given the committee the time to engage deeply with these issues, to hear from those affected by the bill and to actually take evidence from experts.

Instead, the government-chaired and government-controlled committee decided to set a closing date for submissions of 15 July; just 11 days after the bill was referred. Just imagine: a trillion-dollar superannuation system, major changes that affect the operation and governance of the system, and the answer of the characters opposite is 11 days for the industry to consider the impact of the legislation. You would only do that if you didn't care. You would only do that if your real objective was creating as much chaos in the system as was possible. It was an incredibly tight time line for submitters, and I think that was—