Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, something I speak of with enormous pride because this bill goes to the heart of fairness, equity and recognition of the sacrifices that are made within Australian families. It represents a genuine step forward to ensuring that every single Australian can look forward to a dignified and secure retirement, especially women. This bill amends the superannuation legislation to give spouses the opportunity to split their collective superannuation balances evenly between them. The partner with the higher superannuation balance will be able to roll over an amount from their fund to their spouse's superannuation fund to make the two funds more even.

Financial security in retirement should reflect a lifetime of shared contributions, not just paid employment. This bill is a proactive measure designed specifically to tackle one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in our superannuation system, the gender super gap. While estimates vary, women retire with significantly lower superannuation balances than men, somewhere between 20 to 25 per cent lower. Why is this? It's rarely a result of personal choice; rather it stems from deep-seated structural realities in our society and in our superannuation system.

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, one-third of the gender super gap can be attributed to time spent caring for family and interruptions to full-time employment. Women are far more likely to take time out of the paid workforce to care for children or for elderly parents and to shoulder the responsibilities of unpaid work that keeps families and our economy running. When one partner, typically the mother, takes time away from work to raise children, her superannuation savings often halt for years, even decades, while her partner's continue to grow. This is the motherhood penalty in action, leaving women financially vulnerable in their later years. The Prime Minister himself has acknowledged that no mother should be penalised for taking time away from work to do the most important job there is.

Let's be honest. These decisions, these sacrifices, benefit both partners in a relationship. They're not individual choices; they're family choices. So why should the financial security that comes at the end of a working life reflect only one person's income rather than the partnership that made that life possible? This bill creates a simple, entirely voluntary mechanism for fairness that makes it possible for couples to split their balances evenly between them. The person with the larger can add to the super fund balance of their spouse using money that's already in their superannuation rather than through making additional contributions from outside of super. That way, they can both retire on an equal footing.

It's important to understand that this bill is specifically about splitting balances; it's not about superannuation contributions. This is an important distinction to make because that mechanism is one that already exists to make contributions on behalf of a spouse. However, the take-up of this mechanism is incredibly low. Only about 1.1 per cent of Australians used it in 2021-22. Why is that? It's because it's clunky, it's complex, and eligibility is very limited. There is a complete lack of awareness, and, critically, there is no real incentive for most people to use it.

This is about splitting balances, using a rollover from one fund to another, and it's a genuine structural change to our superannuation system that directly tackles the gender super gap, which is one of the systemic structural failures of our superannuation system. And it uses existing mechanisms to do this. Already in Australia, equitable splitting of superannuation is considered during divorce proceedings, so the rails are there. In the old days, this used to require a court order, but that's no longer the case. There are now standard forms and recognised tax treatments of a rollover amount from one partner's super account to the other's at the end of a relationship. So why not allow it to occur during a relationship? Why not make this proactive, voluntary planning an accessible part of the whole superannuation system from the very outset, allowing couples to make these decisions for themselves when it suits the couple to do so?

Let me be clear. This does not force a couple to do anything. It simply gives families an option to share what they've built together, in recognition of the unpaid labour, broken work patterns and professional sacrifices that so often fall to women. The tackling the gender super gap bill explicitly recognises the economic partnership that's at the heart of families. It empowers couples to plan for their retirement together, collectively, allowing for a more even distribution of superannuation during the accumulation phase.

To maintain integrity in the superannuation system, this bill includes guardrails and limitations on how the mechanism can be used. First—and this is very important—the amount transferred from one spouse to another spouse is not considered a contribution. Rather it's treated as a rollover; it's considered to be rolled over. This distinction is particularly important because it ensures that the amount transferred between spouses does not attract or avoid any additional taxes. Second, the amount that's rolled over from one spouse to another retains its original characteristics. Specifically, it retains the fund's proportion of concessional versus non-concessional components. This is an important guardrail because it means that, when someone dies, the amount that has been transferred doesn't have additional tax benefits to beneficiaries.

Third, the ability to roll over an amount from one spouse to another is only available to those transferring from or to a defined contribution scheme. It's not available to those that are in a defined benefit scheme; that is far too complicated and restrictive. Four, the ability to roll over from one spouse to another is only available to those couples that have one superannuation fund each. Five, again, both of those funds must be in an accumulation phase. Why this is an important integrity measure is that there may be unintended consequences in the calculation of how much can be rolled over from one account to another for persons that have multiple funds. These are the guardrails around this bill that will ensure its integrity.

Six, the amount that can be rolled over from one spouse to another is limited, and it's limited in two ways. Firstly, the amount that's rolled over from the original fund cannot leave the original fund with a lower balance than the receiving fund. It's all about evening up your balances; it's not about using this opportunity to roll everything from one account into another. Secondly, the amount that's rolled over cannot cause the receiving fund to have a higher balance than the transfer balance cap. The transfer balance cap is currently at $2 million, but it's an indexed amount. We don't want to attract additional taxes by having this mechanism in place.

For example—and I'm using very big balances as an example, but obviously this is something available to anybody, no matter what their balance is—if person A had, as I say, a big balance of $5.5 million in their superannuation fund and person B had half a million dollars in their superannuation fund, that means that person A can roll over up to $1.5 million into person B's account. That brings person B's account up to that transfer balance cap of $2 million for the current financial year. Alternatively, if person A has $2 million in their superannuation account and person B has half a million dollars, $500,000, in their account, person A can roll over up to $750,000 to person B, and that brings both balances up to $1.25 million. This limits the amount that can be rolled over from one spouse to another, and they are ceilings, but they're not floors.

Spouses might choose, for whatever reason, to roll over an amount that is lower than that spousal redistribution limit. If it is within the rules, a couple has the opportunity to make their balances even, but it's entirely up to the couple how much they want to transfer between them. For instance, a couple could choose to do a one-off, single lump sum rollover or, alternatively, take the opportunity to utilise the mechanism each year to make a spousal redistribution rollover of smaller amounts, or they could choose to not do it at all. While the examples, as I said, are very large, they are certainly not limited to people who have low balances, because, let's face it, it might be a very attractive mechanism to those couples for whom equality and fairness is profoundly important.

It's all about choice. It's about allowing couples to manage their collective retirement savings to reflect their collective choices throughout their lives. The benefits of this reform are clear and far reaching. It's about more than just superannuation; it's about closing that gender super gap. Even though the gender pay gap on average weekly earnings has come down from around 18.5 per cent in 2014 to around 11.5 per cent now, the gender retirement gap remains stubbornly wide. Tax office data shows the difference between the average super balances of men and women over every age category was 26 per cent in 2014. In March of this year, the Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, reported that women still have 21.3 per cent less superannuation than men.

When you unpack the tax office data further, the gap is even worse for older women—those women who are approaching retirement and who haven't had the benefit of part-time work or flexible working options or child care as part of their working life. This contributes to the alarming fact that women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing group experiencing homelessness in Australia, and members from both sides of this place have rightly observed that the relationship between lower retirement savings and homelessness in women is direct and clear. While the difference between men and women's super balances is lower for women in their 20s and 30s, between the ages of 40 and 64 that gap is much more pronounced, averaging between 23 and 24 per cent. It's hardly changed over a decade.

These are the structural inequities within our society reflected in our retirement outcomes. Let me be clear. The goal here is not to penalise men or privilege women. It's about acknowledging the value of care giving and ensuring those who take on those vital responsibilities are not financially disadvantaged in their retirement. A more equitable superannuation system benefits not only women but also families, communities and the economy as a whole. This is good for wives, good for husbands and good for families.

The gender super gap isn't going to close itself. It's not going to happen on its own unless we do something about it. It requires deliberate and equitable policy interventions, like the ones set out in this bill. The changes to superannuation that have been proposed and that are contemplated by those opposite are only about how the government can get their hands on more super—how they can tax your super more. Those sorts of changes do nothing to support the integrity of the system; they only risk the integrity of the system.

If Labor really wanted to do something for super, they should be looking at how to make the system fairer. They will tell you that they put superannuation on paid parental leave, but that's such a narrowcast policy. It only deals with women who are having children today. It does nothing for the women who have had children and are still of working age and within the superannuation system but are suffering from the gender pay gap. And let's be honest, it doesn't even touch the sides, yet it costs the budget around $2 billion.

This doesn't cost anything like that—nothing like that. This is all about couples using their own money, not taxpayer money, to make these decisions. It's a well-acknowledged fact that more work is needed to equalise super balances between men and women. There's a very intelligent woman named Rebecca Pritchard, who's a senior financial adviser with an organisation called Rising Tide. She has quite a high media profile in the financial advice industry. She said that more changes were needed. She said:

A lot can be done on the gender side of things. The gender superannuation gap is still—

she used the word 'hideous'.

This bill, the tackling the gender super gap bill, is an opportunity for our parliament to come together to genuinely improve the retirement outcomes for all Australians and help tackle the gender super gap—that intractable problem. Let's not accept a system that punishes women for caring for children. Let's not allow inequality in retirement to be inevitable. We can change it, so why not change it now? I urge this parliament to support this bill for a fairer, more dignified retirement for every single Australian but particularly for Australian women. I commend this bill to the Senate.