Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What would you call the offspring of communism, Marxism and fascism? Of course, the answer to that is superannuation. First of all, it's communism because in 1992 Paul Keating introduced superannuation that takes the workers' wages. He didn't give them a choice. It started at two per cent. He said, 'We're going to give it to someone you've never met, and there's no guarantee you're going to get it back when you're 60.' Just like the vaccine mandates. That money was taken from them. If Paul Keating had taken that to an election, do you think it would have got up? Absolutely not. If Paul Keating had said in 1992 that by 2025 you were going to have 12 per cent of your wages taken out—wages of workers, mind you, who build this country. This country was built by the battlers, not by the blowhards who are sucking $30 billion of fees out of superannuation ever year. It was built by the battlers.

I still argue it is a breach of the Constitution. You are taking away their property rights without any guarantee that they will get the capital returned to them when they are 60, discounted for present value. Communism. Marxism. What we've got now is industry super funds, and BlackRock and Vanguard in the private sector. I'm not doing this from an ideological Left versus Right platform. I'm doing this from the view point of the big guy versus the little guy: the little guys who get up every day, get out of bed and put their nose to the grindstone. They get the lowest wages in this country, and you're ripping off 12 per cent of their income to give it to someone they've never met so they can gouge $30 billion in fees every year. What you've done is taken that money, which is 'unelected' money, and there's no control over how it's spent. The superannuation boards are not elected by the members. That undermines all the powers of the individual in how their money is spent. Then the superannuation funds appoint their own directors to appoint their own ideological agendas.

When Senator McAllister says it's an ideological battle—can you say 'damn' or not? I won't say it. When Senator McAllister says it's an ideological battle, you're straight that it is You're very correct that it is, because the superannuation boards are using this to push their ideological boards. This is also fascism, because we've now got corporations that are that large. These superannuation funds have hundreds of billions of dollars under management, and they are now telling governments what to do. They are that rich and powerful—some of the money in these superannuation funds across the world mean these funds are bigger than countries' economies. The power of this centralised wealth is becoming a threat to democracy, because of the people running these things, like Larry Fink from Black Rock. Who holds that bloke accountable? Who holds the superannuation funds accountable when they decide they want to spend money on something? No-one. You do not even get to appoint the board members. Can I say—and I'm glad Senator Pocock raised this—the Productivity Commission found that $30 billion in fees are ripped out of superannuation every year. For what? Nothing but paper shuffling.

Do you want to know why we have a shortage of workers in this country? Because we have too many blowhards in this country pushing pens and shuffling paper when they should be out there building infrastructure, producing goods and services, rather than buying and selling shares on the stock market all day, which produces nothing—it produces nothing. This superannuation and the guys that rip off $30 billion a year make Al Capone look like Mother Teresa. This is the biggest racket since the prohibition in the 1930s, mate. If you want to get upset about bikie gangs, I tell you what: these superannuation funds, mate, they're extorting more money out of the workers' pockets every year than bikies ever do.

I'll tell you something else: $50 billion. You read the budget papers tonight, and it will be in the tax expenditure statement. There will be $50 billion in tax concessions for superannuation that mainly go to the upper 20 per cent of income earners. It goes to the same people in those wealthy suburbs that Labor are now mates with—the teals. If you want to talk about rorts and all the rest of it, what about the tax concessions that go to superannuation? You know what? What's the pension for? The people who get the pension are the bottom 70 per cent of earners, so the bottom 50 per cent of earners get a full pension and the next 20 per cent a partial pension. They get very little of those tax concessions. The tax concessions for the wealthy now cost more—or just about; they're one or two billion short—than the cost of the pension. I would rather have a universal pension that was—

A government senator: You introduced that legislation!

No, don't interject. This was introduced by Paul Keating and it was pumped up all the time. We shouldn't have pumped it up. I should acknowledge Senator Richard Alston, who fought very hard against superannuation when it first came in and we should never have opposed him. The Liberal Party coalition should have opposed it from the get-go—and I'll say that to my colleague Senator Cadell who's listening here—because it rips out 12 per cent of income from the regions and Western Australia and those magnificent towns in regional Western Australia, Senator Sterle, and it goes to the ivory palaces in Sydney and Melbourne, where they shuffle their paper and might come in and turn on their screens in the morning, then go and get a coffee and buy a zoot suit for this weekend's triathlon, come back and get a physio. These guys are not the people producing goods and services in this country, and there is way too much wasted on unproductive activity. That is why I totally reject superannuation.

But I haven't finished yet. Of that $3.3 trillion, over a trillion dollars is invested offshore in offshore infrastructure. This country is crying out to build more infrastructure. But do you know what superannuation funds do? They don't build infrastructure because they haven't got the patient capital. The only entity that can build long-term infrastructure is the government. For these guys, it's what they won't do, but they'll buy infrastructure.

You would have noticed that AustralianSuper went in and bought Sydney Airport last year. The Auditor-General was running a protection racket for Sydney Airport. They didn't want the Western Sydney airport built, so they came up with this bogus argument that somehow we paid too much for the land around Sydney Airport, which wasn't true. Anyone that knows accounting standard AASB-13 knows that paragraphs 29 and 30 say that you pay the highest market price regardless of valuation—even though it actually had zoning for an airport.

I should also add that this superannuation robs Peter to pay Paul. Since superannuation was introduced, the number of people who retire with a mortgage has increased from 10 per cent to 40 per cent. We now have people who retire at 60 or 65, pull their superannuation out as a lump sum, pay off their home loan and then go on the pension. Someone that I used to work with in Sydney, at Westfield, bought a $3 million house in Seaforth and had a million dollar deposit. He was 55. He was waiting to get to 65 and he was going to pull out his pension, pay off his mortgage at Seaforth—the other $2 million—and then go on the pension. So there are ways around this, where wealthy people milk the system. But I would say this: if you have a $500,000 mortgage and $100,000 in superannuation, you are getting clipped twice. You are getting fees on your superannuation fund and you are getting fees on your mortgage. It is much better to net off your investments rather than get shafted twice by financial institutions.

Ultimately, this comes down to transparency, and I commend Senator Pocock for actually raising this and trying to bring this disallowance into the chamber. I am going to watch what the Greens do here very, very carefully, because they always go on about transparency and accountability. I will be very disappointed if they do not support Senator Pocock in this motion. It will highlight their hypocrisy if they do not support this motion and it will show that they too are subservient to the union elites—not the members. We love the members. The members are the battlers of this country. I want to be very clear here: I am not going to attack unions per se. They have a role in this country to protect the battlers. But superannuation is not protecting the battlers; it is milking them dry.

I would just like to finish on that note and say to the Greens: this is your chance to stand up to Labor and show that you can think for yourself. I am never going to let you guys forget this if you don't support this. We need to stop the rorts, and there is no bigger rort in this country than superannuation.