Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025. On the surface, this bill sounds great. Tackling the gender super gap—okay, sign me right up. As Senator Hume said, we need action to deal with the structural gender inequality in our super system—a hideous gap, as the senator put it. But, of course, as with everything in the coalition, the devil is in the detail. This is a classic Liberal Party approach to financial equality in that it will do nothing for single women, nothing for single parents and nothing for women in low- or even medium-income households struggling to save for their retirement. What it will do is allow already very wealthy Australians to funnel even more of their wealth into their super.

The superannuation system was designed to provide a dignified retirement, not a tax haven. In effect, this is a policy that will allow a wealthy man to avoid paying tax in retirement by pre-emptively shifting part of his super balance into his spouse's account to avoid the transfer balance cap of $1.9 million.

The Greens want to restore super to its original purpose of providing a dignified retirement for all Australians. This bill won't do that. Tax minimisation for men does not equal economic opportunity for women. This is such a shameless attempt by the Liberals to present a tax minimisation strategy for wealthy couples as a way for women to get ahead. The super gap is a genuine issue for women. At its worst, for people aged 55 to 59, the retirement savings gap is a shocking 48 per cent. Just as people hit retirement, the gender super gap is at its worst.

This bill does nothing to address the structural issues that cause women's retirement savings to be so much lower than men's. Women do the vast majority of unpaid care work—child care, housework and looking after ageing relatives—which has lasting impacts on their capacity to do paid work. They're also more likely than men to work part time and to work in industries and jobs where they earn less than men. Current super tax settings magnify these differences in lifetime savings.

When they were last in government, the Liberals created carry forward contributions, deceivingly presented as an achievement for women's economic security. That policy change allowed people to retrospectively top up their super over the previous five years, ostensibly to make up for the time women spent out of the workforce, but the data shows it is high-income men that this policy is benefitting the most.

There is one technical detail that shows that there has been some consideration for women in the drafting of this bill in that the women receiving any transfer would have to consent to it. This at least addresses concerns about financial control through unsolicited gift-giving, which is sometimes an avenue through which domestic violence and coercive control is perpetrated.

I understand the sentiment, and I support the bringing forward of ideas to assist women's retirement savings. This bill, however, is not the solution. If a relationship breaks down, then, under law, mothers are rightfully entitled to their share of their partner's superannuation. This bill could actually complicate those calculations, when couples split. This bill doesn't constructively add to either of these two scenarios; it just adds opportunities for tax minimisation.

If Senator Hume and the Liberals want to address the structural issues of the retirement savings gender gap, then they should advocate with the Greens for part-time and low-income earners to receive the same tax benefit on super contributions as higher income earners. Take the LISTO, for example. The government's recently announced changes purport to benefit low-income earners by ensuring the tax they pay on super is not higher than their income tax. But it doesn't address the longstanding regressive features of our super system that mean that someone on $200,000 can reduce their income tax by spending more of their pay into their super, giving them a 30 per cent benefit for every dollar, while someone below $45,000 and eligible for LISTO gets no tax benefit at all. This is all wrong and it's a structural problem we need to fix.

The punitive interaction of income tax, childcare and family support settings means that women with kids in early childhood education and care who want to return to the workforce face an effective marginal tax rate of 80 per cent. Meanwhile, someone selling an investment property in their self-managed super fund enjoys an effective tax rate of just 10 per cent. The system is set up to fail women and uphold and reinforce the gender pay gap and the gender super gap.

I'd like to acknowledge that Senator Hume did have carriage of the bill to remove the $450-a-month rule that punished low-income women's retirement savings, so I know she's previously worked to reduce the structural issues causing the ongoing gender super gap. But there's plenty more to do, and this bill does not address the many issues that we need to in order to deal with the structural inequalities that drive the gender super gap. There's so much that can and needs to be done to fix the gender disparity in both income and super tax so women aren't retiring into poverty. The Greens are ready and willing to tackle this issue and genuinely close the gender gap in wages and super, but both the Liberal and Labor parties need to get serious about it.