Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to give strong support to this bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, and compliment my colleague Senator Jane Hume for bringing it forward. I support this bill because it treats husbands and wives as the teams that they should be. I definitely try and do things with my wife. I love her greatly, and it's the greatest thing in my life to be part of her team, and we do everything together. I'm away from her a lot in this place, unfortunately, but I try and do everything together with her, and it does seem strange to me that we can't manage our retirement funds together.

What this bill does is allow husbands and wives, spouses, to work together on their retirement plans and to share the financial benefits that one or the other is able to achieve. I think most married couples who are earning money are putting money towards superannuation so they can help each other when they ultimately reach that retirement age. So we need to do more in our laws to treat a family as one unit, as together, because the more that our laws recognise that fact, the more, we would hope, those teams—those families—can stay together, and that's a good thing. Not all marriages can stay together. It's a little sad when marriages don't stay together. So the more we can have our tax laws, our superannuation laws and our family benefits laws treat families as one unit, the better it will be for Australian families and the stronger our whole country will be. It's good for children as well.

It's a very simple change. This bill would simply allow a spouse, one partner, to transfer superannuation to the other partner, and it uses the existing provisions of the superannuation law to do that. At the moment, you can transfer money between superannuation accounts in your own name—you have been able to do that for some time—and this law simply piggybacks on that mechanism to say, 'If this other account is in your spouse's name, you're able to make that transfer.'

When Senator Hume first mentioned it to me, it was one of those ideas where I felt, 'Why didn't I think of that first?' It seems so logical and so simple. Why haven't we done this already? Given that that's been, I think, the common reaction from my colleagues since Jane briefed us on it a week or so ago, it seems like: 'Let's pick it up, guys. Let's do it.' I hope the government and other parties aren't too proud to say, 'Just because someone from a different political party has come up with this idea—why not just do it and get this done? As I said, it's very simple and will help families manage their own finances.

It is an important issue that many others have raised in this place, and I heard Senator Collins raise it earlier—that there is a gap between the superannuation balances that men typically have and the superannuation balances that women typically have. Obviously, there are some natural reasons for that. Women often have to leave the workforce to look after children. I don't really want to say 'have to'. It's actually a great blessing to have children; it's the greatest thing you can do in your life. For me, it's been the greatest joy. But it does come with a sacrifice. Having children requires sacrifice, and quite often it is the mother, particularly of young children, that is left to leave the workforce while they have significant duties of breastfeeding and looking after the child. It's hard to maintain full-time work while that's happening.

That's certainly what happened in my family. We've had five beautiful children. We're very lucky. We made the decision early that it would be good, it would be nice, if my wife could stay home and look after the children when they were young. As I said, it came as a sacrifice to my wife's career. I have great admiration for the sacrifices she's made for us to do that. Of course, it came with a financial sacrifice as well. It's quite the opportunity cost, but we're lucky enough to be able to bear that. The consequence of that, of course, has meant that, as I've maintained full-time work and my wife has not, our superannuation balances have diverged. There's nothing I can do about it. It seems very strange to me that we have joint bank accounts, joint mortgages, joint credit cards—everything is together—but, when we calculate what we've got with superannuation balances, they're in separate names. If this bill passes—I'll make this public commitment to my wife right now—she's getting half or whatever I can do. I'll make sure it's equal because I see no reason why she shouldn't—she definitely deserves it—have half of what I've been able to earn in paid employment. That would—at least for our own family and I think for many Australian families—automatically fix the gender gap for superannuation.

As I said, there have been many contributions in this chamber about this issue. It's an issue that there is this gap between men and women in their superannuation balances. It's been, to date, a hard one to fix—because we continue to speak about it. If it is an easy fix, why hasn't it—I mean, it's just been done. As I said, there are some natural reasons it occurs. Here is an opportunity to, with effectively one stroke of the pen, solve this problem for many families. Not everybody will be able to do it; not everybody may do it. It's obviously going to be voluntary, but it would make a big dent, I would say, in the superannuation gap between men and women. So, again, why don't we just do it and get on with it? To me it seems so simple.

I do support this simple change which would help achieve the beneficial outcomes of equalising wealth between men and women in this country, but I also think—at some point, given how good this idea is—we should look at why people can't have a joint superannuation account. As I said, this bill doesn't quite do that. I still think we should do this one because it's simple and easy and can make a difference straight away. I have mentioned to Senator Hume, as we've been talking about this, that it would also be great to have a joint account. Why not? I've a joint bank account. I get paid my salary into an account my wife has full access to, and I've had no problems with that. Why can't I have a joint superannuation account with my wife where she automatically has equal footing with me without having to transfer or anything like that. I know that would be a more complex change to the superannuation law than what's before us today. That would take some time to work out. I believe we have accounts in the accumulation phase; I think there might be something in the draw-down phase. So yes, we're doing more work on that. But, again, anything we can do to unite Australian families, to unite wives and husbands, is a good thing, because we should be encouraging families to stick together through good times and bad.

This bill raises the broader question here about how our tax law and family law treat families. We have a strange situation now that I've always found quite bizarre. When you go to calculate your family benefits after you have children—you calculate whether you get FTBA or FTBB or some other different benefits—you have to put forward your joint income. You are assessed on your joint income. There's no problem with that. I don't have a problem with that; that's how it works. But when you go and put your tax form in every year, you have to file individually. Your tax status is not assessed on a joint basis. This leads to quite perverse outcomes in our tax system right now.

I use the opportunity to put on the record again how inequitable our tax system is in treating families with the same household income extremely differently. Take an example of two families, both with a total household income of $150,000 a year, and both with two kids. They're in the same financial situation and same family situation, but in one of those families, let's call it Family A, just one spouse is in full-time work and earns $150,000, and in Family B they both work; one spouse earns $100,000 and the other earns $50,000 in a part-time job. The families still have the same total income, but let's compare the tax outcomes of those two families. In the case of Family A, the single-income family, the tax bill comes in—I'm using round numbers—at roughly $40,000 a year. In the case of Family B, they split their income and file individually, and because of how that interacts with our progressive tax system they pay just $30,000 a year in tax. So you've got two families earning the same amount, with the same number of kids, and there is a $10,000-a-year difference in tax. It's not a small amount; $10,000 is a good family holiday every year. It's almost half of a reasonably priced car. That should be smacking us in the face—this inequality that should be fixed. On top of that, the Family B case is probably also accessing the childcare system when the spouse in part-time work is at work, and there are extra subsidies there as well. They can sometimes be $7,000 or $8,000 a year on top of the $10,000-a-year tax difference.

From my first day in this place, I've remarked on how strange that seems to be. There have been some fledgling attempts to fix this. I do think this bill, as I say, helps push the case to treat families equally, but we should look at fixing other inequalities in the system as well. At a time when our childcare system is already under enormous strain, we are effectively encouraging—forcing, in some senses, with the way our housing system works right now—families to both work and use an institutional childcare system, that's clearly putting enormous strain on that system, and it has led to some horrific examples of abuse of our youngest, most vulnerable Australians. It seems to me that it would make more sense here to recognise and encourage the work of what people refer to as stay-at-home mums. It would be better to reflect their value to our society in our tax system, and to courage them to keep doing the great work they do and take the pressure off our institutional childcare system so we can maintain higher standards than we have today.

People call them stay-at-home mums, but I hate that term. Whenever I have had to stay at home and look after my children, I invariably end the week thinking, 'Jeez, I can't wait to get back to work; it's a lot easier.' So I like to call my wife a work-at-home mum because she has been working at home since before it was cool. It's very, very hard. It's the most important work of any person. I am very proud to be a senator for Queensland and represent my country, but it is nothing in comparison to the value and worth of my wife and her role as a mother or my role as a father. Those professions are so much more important.

Indeed, as CS Lewis said, the homemaker is the ultimate profession because every other job in our society is in the service of them. Everything we do is to support our homes. Everything we do is to support the people who ultimately make our homes a beautiful place, who raise our children and who make our society the great place it is. Everything we are doing here is ultimately aimed at protecting those homes and providing health services and education services to those people in those homes, helping them have a job and provide for themselves. As much as our defence forces do great work and make sacrifices, ultimately what are they there for? They're there to defend our homes. Their job is to defend the homes of Australians. So they are in service of our homemakers, too.

I would just love to see us more regularly recognise the great value of those people who work so hard at home doing what is sometimes denigrated: 'If you just stay at home, you're not really contributing and not really working.' But it's the most important work. Reading a story to your children at night is the most important thing you'll do in any day. Sometimes getting angry at them because they've done the wrong thing, lashing out and maybe disciplining them is still really important because you need to teach them that there are certain ways of acting and certain ways of doing things.

Providing love to our children is the most important thing any of us can do during any day. I strongly support this bill because it makes a small step in recognising the great value and service of those people who make our homes.