Senate debates

Thursday, 13 February 2020

Bills

Treasury Laws Amendment (Recovering Unpaid Superannuation) Bill 2019; Second Reading

1:42 pm

Photo of Tim AyresTim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No matter what moderate, reasonable language this is couched in, no matter how it's dressed up, an amnesty for superannuation theft is a terrible idea. It will reward bad employer behaviour. It will disincentivise employers who've got good governance and a good compliance record, and in fact put many of them at a competitive disadvantage. It will cover barely a fraction of the superannuation stolen and will, I believe, send a very clear message to employers and to workers about whose side the coalition government is really on. The coalition government aren't on the side of ordinary working Australians. They're not on the side of businesses—small, medium and large—who do the right thing, who work with their employees and with unions and demonstrate good compliance and good governance structures. This is a government that is on the side of the charlatans and the shonks: the criminals in the construction industry and the people who find noncompliance and underpayment is their business model. Their friends in the press are out there defending people who steal money from ordinary working people who are in a vulnerable position. Those are the characters who that side of politics back up every single time when it counts. It's always couched in the minister's reasonable language and moderate propositions, but that's because it's an act of deception, trying to encourage ordinary Australians to think that these people are on their side when in fact what they are really about is enabling corporate crime, enabling underpayments and encouraging bad employer behaviour. Their ultimate objective is to wreck the superannuation system itself. The Liberals have never understood superannuation.

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