Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Senate is being asked this afternoon to reaffirm the importance of transparency and accountability in Australia's superannuation sector and to support measures that ensure that superannuation funds provide better information regarding how they manage and spend members' money. The Greens could not agree more with those sentiments.

Just after the election the new Minister for Financial Services, Mr Jones, gave what I dare to suggest is a pretty optimistic take on how this new parliament was going to deal, broadly, with the issue of superannuation. Mr Jones is quoted in the Australian Financial Review as saying:

The spear carriers have left parliament, so there is now an opportunity to sign a treaty to end the super wars.

We here in the Greens very much appreciate that sentiment, but I'm sorry to say to Mr Jones that the end to the super wars is very clearly nowhere in sight, because the opposition has a deep reserve of spear carriers and they are committed to fighting the super wars. That, colleagues, is exactly how we find ourselves having this debate today.

This debate is cloaked in very respectable language and, in fact, language which the Greens support, and we will support the question being put about the need for transparency and accountability in superannuation and for measures to ensure that super funds provide better information regarding how they manage and spend members' money. We look forward to supporting that. But this is, of course, in the context of the government's new regulations that establish a set of rules for what information is provided by super funds in their annual members' meeting notices. The opposition has put forward this debate today precisely because Senator David Pocock has postponed his motion to disallow these regulations. The fact that it's Senator Pocock's disallowance, not the LNP's disallowance, is an incisive insight into the mercenary nature of the spear carriers inside the LNP. If the spear carriers inside the LNP are so confident of their case that the new government's regulations should be disallowed and the old regulations should stand, why are they relying on Senator Pocock's good name and reputation to lead the argument for them? Why doesn't the LNP put up its own disallowance?

I'm going to answer the question I've just put to the chamber. The reason that the opposition is so keen for Senator Pocock to lead the charge in this battle is that the transparency and accountability regime that the LNP put in place when they were the government was designed to target the unions. It was designed to target industry super funds while going soft on for-profit retail super funds. That's because the LNP is full of spear carriers who want to fight the super wars. It's also full of spear carriers for whom the very idea that organisations that represent a collective of workers would have access to large amounts of capital is actually hell on Earth.

The idea that working people can have a say on how large amounts of capital are distributed in our society is a complete anathema to the LNP. The opposition's idea of transparency and accountability is a line-by-line itemised account of payments by super funds to unions but nothing whatsoever—this is the critical part—on the payments of dividends or other proceeds for profit by retail super funds to their parent companies. You want to make the industry super funds declare payments to unions, but you don't want the retail super funds, the for-profit super funds, to declare their payments, their dividends, to their parent companies. If you want to talk about hypocrisy, go and take a good look in the mirror. That's all I have to say to the LNP.

The previous government's regulations provide lopsided transparency because—this is the critical part—they were designed to provide ammunition for those on the side of profit in the super wars. Those regulations were drafted under the Morrison government, a government that was the absolute living embodiment of crony capitalism. That crony capitalist government spent every day of its existence fighting organised labour as hard as it could and defending the rent-seekers as hard as it could. That is what you are doing when you saddle up Senator Pocock to take the lead in this battle.

The Greens are not interested in playing along with the spear carriers in their war on industry super. What we are interested in, and what we are working to deliver, is meaningful transparency. We want to see an annual super transparency report, published by the regulator, APRA, that tables all of the relevant expenditure, including expenditure for political purposes and expenditure for profit. We want that all together in one space so cross-comparisons can be made by members. Members would get a better understanding of how their super fund rates relative to other funds, and it would enable institutional scrutiny from the media, from NGOs and from parliamentarians on expenditure and profit-making by super funds. That is far more likely to bring about meaningful change than either of the regulations that the LNP want us to choose from.

We are in discussion with the government, and we hope that we can land in a place which will provide a far more meaningful transparency regime than either the LNP's old regulations or the Labor Party's new ones.