Wendy Askew (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, a bill that is seeking to ensure we secure the retirement of vulnerable women across Australia. This is a critical issue, particularly in my home state of Tasmania.

In Hobart, this winter Richard and Jan Gould bought a former student boarding house with their own savings. They didn't buy it for profit. They bought it to give older women, many with modest super and nowhere to go, a safe home. But to these women it was a small place of their own—10 rooms of dignity, provided out of compassion. That is Tasmania at its best, and it is also Tasmania sounding an alarm about the gender superannuation gap and the risk of homelessness among older women. Older Tasmanian women are the fastest-growing group at risk of homelessness, and the Gould's project is a local, urgent answer to a national structural problem in super balances.

Across the state you'll meet women who did what families needed. They worked part time, cared for parents and stepped back when children arrived, and their partner's super kept growing while theirs stalled. By their 50s, the gap isn't an abstraction. Nationally, women retire with about a quarter less super than men do. On average, Tasmanian women have $30,000 less in their superannuation account compared to men. That shortfall is a rent payment not made, a power bill deferred, a dream downsized. And it is the reason that the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025 is so important.

The bill that has been introduced by my colleague Senator Hume looks to solve the problem in an ingenious way. It doesn't raise taxes, it doesn't spend public money and it doesn't make the system unfair. It simply allows people to use the money in the system and get it to where it needs to go, closing the gender gap in superannuation. The bill does something simple and powerful. It allows spouses to even up their super balances by rolling over an amount from the higher-balance partner to the lower-balance partner during the relationship, deliberately and with clear guardrails. It recognises that families make shared choices and should be able to share retirement security. It creates a voluntary once-per-year opportunity for a spouse to transfer part of their accumulated super to their partner's fund, up to a limit that equalises balances but never breaches the transfer balance cap.

The rollover keeps its concessional and non-concessional proportions. It's treated as a rollover, rather than as a new contribution, for tax purposes, and it's not available to defined benefit schemes or to accounts already in the retirement phase. It is a structural fix to a structural inequity, and it mirrors what already happens at the end of many relationships, when super is routinely split, letting couples do fairness at the start and middle, not just the end. The mechanism uses existing super law architecture, adds integrity measures and gives families a tool they can actually find and use.

While the gender pay gap in Tasmania has narrowed in recent years under the Liberal government, there is more work to be done. The Tasmania government's 2024-25 Gender Budget Statement reported a five per cent gap in May 2024, down from 8.3 per cent in May 2021. That is a testament to Tasmanian employers and workers, but a narrower pay gap does not erase the super gap that accumulates over decades of part-time work and career pauses. In Tasmania, the data has long pointed to the compounding issues such as women having a greater share of part-time work and caring roles. These are choices that are sometimes made out of necessity, but that necessity should not dictate the financial security of these women. Instead, we should welcome solutions that are simple, voluntary, and targeted at the actual mechanics of the gap. That is exactly what this bill does.

Debate interrupted.