Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) | Hansard source

Every political party has problems, but the problem that the Labor Party has is the same problem it had a century ago, which was identified by Alfred Deakin when he said that the problem Labor has is that it's beholden to vested interests. The mother of all vested interests today is the union between the Labor Party, the trade unions themselves and the super funds. This enormous conflict of interest can be seen in personal terms, in flesh and blood, here in this building, where you see the National President of the Labor Party, Mr Wayne Swan, who is also the chair of the Cbus super fund. The most remarkable part of this is that, when Labor announced a dodgy housing policy which was designed to allow the super funds to take over the housing market, the only organisation that said that they would put their members' hard-earned savings into it was Cbus. Cbus is the only one that said it would do it, with Mr Swan at the apex of the Labor Party and the Cbus fund itself.

This is all about underwriting Labor's campaigning capacity and capability. In the last year $40 million was sent from the super fund off to the union and the campaigners. What was the first act of the financial services minister, Stephen Jones, in this parliament? His first act was to roll back the disclosures and the transparency that were passed in the last parliament so that people could see when their super fund was giving money to a union. What did Mr Jones say? He said: 'No, we don't want that. We don't want people to see it. We want it to be a secret.' Helpfully, the coalition worked with the crossbench to roll back that disgusting attempt to cover up $40 million in payments from super funds to unions and Labor affiliated organisations.

This is a huge problem for our country—to have one of the governing bodies over a barrel to these interests. So many of the bills of this parliament are designed to funnel more money off to these super funds. When you look at that $40 million, it's a lot of money in campaign terms. AustralianSuper, Cbus, Hesta, Hostplus, TWUSUPER and First Super have all given more than a million dollars in the last year.

The idea of any organisation arguing that any particular form of zero emissions energy is bad is fundamentally unscientific. You can have an argument about how you want to do it in different ways, but the idea that any of these funds will get further involved in politics should be very scary given they're already very involved here in this building. I think the Australian people expect that the laws that we enact here will be enforced. I don't think that's unreasonable. There was a law on the books that said these funds must operate only for their members—not for the big unions, not for any other political organisation and not for the big banks or the financiers. They're supposed to be holding this money in trust. These are trusts, and they have very clear laws. It's about the best financial interests of members, not the best financial interests of unions. This is a major problem that we are all sitting on here in this building—that the prudential regulator, APRA, is not enforcing the law.

I was very pleased to see at Senate estimates only a few weeks ago that APRA had announced that they were investigating one fund, or maybe a number of funds, for breaches of the best financial interest duty. I asked whether it was appropriate for the fund called First Super to have made four $700,000 payments to the CFMEU. APRA said that, because they have secrecy provisions, they couldn't answer on the floor of the Senate estimates meeting. But I expect that those laws will be enforced and that APRA will set a standard and say to these funds, 'You cannot give your money that belongs to the workers to the unions or to the banks, because that is not in the best interests of the workers.'

This parliament created this scheme of superannuation. It is not a very successful scheme. Most people will be on the pension beyond the middle of this century. It has been very successful at enriching bloodsuckers, leeches and rent seekers, who have made a huge amount of money in the financial institutions but mostly in the unions. This is keeping the unions afloat and it is a disgrace.