Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Before I left the chamber, I was talking about some Labor luminaries named Bill Kelty, Paul Keating and Sally McManus, who had all said that the previous iteration of this legislation was so dire that they were recommending that the government withdraw it. Thank goodness the government heeded that message! But I was looking, just as I was leaving the chamber, at the name of this legislation—'building a stronger and fairer super system'. What a misnomer this is! Let's face it, because this legislation—the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026 and the Superannuation (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Imposition Bill 2026—is simply a tax. It's just more tax, and that seems to be the solution that Labor has to every single problem.

When the coalition was in government and we dealt with superannuation legislation, we tried to make the system fairer and stronger. We did things like getting rid of fees on low balances. We abolished fees for switching investments or for switching funds. We made sure that young people weren't being forced into taking life insurance that they didn't need, which simply subsidised those older cohorts that were drawing upon it. We made life insurance opt-in rather than opt-out for young people. We made sure that we got rid of multiple accounts. We introduced stapling so that your superannuation fund followed you from job to job rather than your employer simply opening up another account and another account and another account every time you started a new job, which then created two sets of fees and two set of insurances. We made sure that there was transparency in superannuation and that you could compare and contrast performance of different default funds—different MySuper funds—on the ATO website in a verifiable way so you were comparing apples with apples rather than apples with oranges. And, of course, we introduced the best-financial-interests duty to ensure that there wasn't some sort of mission creep for superannuation funds in deciding what was, in effect, best for their members and that any investment that they made was in the best financial interests of their members, with no other purpose.

As you can see, none of those reforms that were introduced by the coalition had anything to do with tax. They had everything to do with a stronger and fairer super system but nothing to do with imposing a new tax on superannuants. Yet that was the first thing that this Labor government did when it came to office. After promising that there would be no changes at all to superannuation, its first duty was to impose a new tax on super. Why is it doing that? Let's face it. The government is hunting for new pools of capital for one good reason: it has a spending problem. It needs to plug its own hole. Labor has failed to find savings in its own budget. It's failed to curtail that natural urge that Labor seems to have to keep spending more and more of other people's money. Because it's run out of ideas, it's now coming after your savings. It's coming after your superannuation to fill its budget hole.

This isn't just about numbers on a spreadsheet; there are real human consequences for this. There is a cloud of uncertainty, particularly around surviving spouses at their most vulnerable moment, because this legislation introduces the removal of the effective 'death tax exemption'. Tax has to be paid after somebody has died. There's also the introduction of the LISTO. The government says increasing the LISTO is a great thing, but the only reason the LISTO has to be increased is that when the government offered its paltry 70c a day tax break, as an election sweetener, it seemed to forget that meant our lowest and most vulnerable Australians would be paying more tax in superannuation than outside superannuation.

This is a terrible piece of legislation. It's one that should never have seen the light of day. We will continue to stand against these ideological experiments and protect the retirement security of every single Australian.