Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution on 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. Australians deserve stability in the rules that govern our retirement savings. They deserve confidence that when they work hard, when they save diligently and when they place their hard earned income into superannuation the government will not constantly change the rules of the game. But what we have seen from the Albanese Labor government with this legislation that we are debating today is the exact opposite.

This legislation sits within a broader pattern of behaviour from this government, creating instability and unpredictability in our superannuation system. Instead of viewing superannuation as Australians money held in trust for their retirement, this government treats it as a fiscal reservoir and something that it can dip into whenever its spending ambitions outrun its revenue. That is why the opposition has been so forceful in opposing the original format of these laws and will indeed be opposing these laws coming through the Senate today. The original proposal that the Labor government came up with represented one of the most radical and dangerous departures from the principles of Australian taxation policy and Australian superannuation policy that we have seen in decades.

These bills that we are voting on today, and the original proposal from the government in relation to superannuation changes and tax changes, are questions that Australians never voted on. That makes this a question of trust—a trust in this government. It makes it a question of whether what they had taken to the election in May last year is actually what they intend to deliver on for all Australians. As I said, this tax was never put to the Australian people. At the last election, Australians weren't asked whether they supported a new tax on their superannuation balances structured in this way. They weren't asked whether they supported a new regime under division 296. They weren't asked whether they supported a new threshold tax on retirement savings. This proposal was not part of the platform put before voters. That matters, because major structural tax changes in Australia should be grounded in a democratic mandate.

Let us not forget that the federal election last year was not that long ago; it was less than 12 months ago. Less than 12 months ago, the Labor government went to the Australian people and said, 'This is our series of policy proposals that we are putting forward,' and the Australian people voted for that. We respect that. That's part of the democratic process. But, as I said, this proposal that we are debating today was not a proposal that went to the Australian people, and it is forming a pattern of behaviour from this government.

Look at some of the other issues that they are floating around publicly at the moment: changes to capital gains tax, changes to negative gearing, changes to the trusts that manage savings for families or savings for small businesses. When this government runs out of money, it comes after yours. That's something that we say very, very often. It is incredibly disappointing for us here on the opposition benches and, I think, for all Australians to see that, less than 12 months after the last federal election, the government has already seemingly run out of ideas that it took to the Australian people at the last election. It has realised, perhaps—far too late in my opinion—that the budget is in trouble, and it's now clawing around, looking for anything to tax to bump up the budget bottom line and deal with the fact that it has a spending problem.

When governments introduce sweeping changes to the tax system, particularly changes that affect long-term retirement savings, as any change in relation to superannuation does, the expectation should rightly be that those changes are clearly explained to the Australian people before an election—not quietly introduced afterwards. Superannuation isn't a short-term policy lever; we all know that. It is a system that Australians contribute to over decades. People make financial decisions based on the expectation that the rules governing their retirement savings will not be rewritten without warning, and plenty of young Australians I speak to are rightly concerned about that. Because they have many decades left in the workforce, they want to know that the superannuation they are putting away now will remain in a setting that will be somewhat untouched by government by the time they want to retire. That is why trust matters so much in this debate. But, once again, this government has broken that trust.

Australians accept difficult reforms when they believe that governments are being honest with them. They accept changes when they are consulted, when they are informed and when those changes have been clearly explained before they cast their vote at the ballot box. But when governments introduce major new taxes after the election—whether it's on superannuation or anything else—taxes that were never disclosed beforehand, then that erodes trust and sends the message that the rules of the system can change at any time. Once that trust is broken, it is incredibly difficult to rebuild, and I'm sure that this government is going to find that out in the longer term.

The government may argue that the number of Australians affected by this legislation that we're debating here today is relatively small, but the issue isn't just about who is captured today. Like I say, the issue is whether Australians can trust that the rules governing their retirement savings will remain stable, whether it's tomorrow, whether it's next month, whether it's next year, whether it's in a decade or whether it's in 50 years time. Once governments establish the precedent that they can introduce new taxes on superannuation without seeking a mandate from the Australian people, the door is open for future governments to go further. Today, it might apply a particular threshold; tomorrow, the threshold might move or expand even further. Australians will begin to ask the very simple questions: 'What rules are going to change next? How can we save for the future when we don't know what rules will govern those future savings?' Like I say, this is a debate that ultimately comes down to trust—trust in the stability of retirement savings and the system that governs them, trust in the promises that governments make before elections and trust that Australians' retirement savings will not be treated as a convenient source of new revenue when government spending runs ahead of its means.

Australians work hard. They save diligently. They place income into superannuation so that they can support themselves in retirement and reduce reliance on the age pension. I note that they don't do this voluntarily. There is an element of compulsion that exists within our superannuation system; Australians have to set aside a certain percentage of their income each year to put into superannuation. The least that these Australians deserve—that working Australians deserve—in return is honesty from the government that the rules that apply to those savings are not going to change. When the government went to the last election saying, 'No, we're not looking at any changes to superannuation; we're not looking at changes to capital gains tax or negative gearing'—or whatever it might be—Australians rightly and fairly believed that the government were going to do that. But what we are seeing here today—and, as I said, this is a pattern of behaviour from this government; it's not just about this legislation but about everything leading up to this budget process—starts to demonstrate that this government has complete disregard for the trust that Australians have put in it. That is why this issue goes to the very heart of the credibility of the government's economic agenda, and it is why Australians are right to question it—and they are starting to question it.

In my time as shadow minister for finance, I have already spoken several times in this place about the budgetary struggles that this government is facing and its inability to be honest and upfront about those struggles and about the fact that it doesn't have a plan to get that spending under control. That is what we want to see from this government. We want to see this government getting its spending problem under control, and that is why our leader, Angus Taylor, has gone to the government and said, 'Let's set up a taskforce to start looking at government spending and figure out how it can be reined in.' That request was refused by the Labor government, and I think that is incredibly disappointing, because the flip side of this is that, if we have a government that says, 'Okay, we don't want to look at the spending side; we don't want to reduce the high levels of spending that we are addicted to,' the only way that it can ever hope to get the budget back under control is to start taxing everyday Australians. This legislation we are debating today and, as I said, the plethora of other ideas that are being floated in the lead-up to the May budget are just further grabs at the hard-earned savings and income of Australians, to try and patch up the government's own budget black hole. The reason they are doing that is that they can't get their own spending under control. They completely lack the discipline to do that.

The heart of the government's original policy in relation to superannuation, the proposal to tax unrealised capital gains—which is where this legislation that we're debating today originated from—was an incredibly extraordinary proposal. Again, it is not something that mandates were sought for in the lead-up to the election. It meant taxing people on income that they hadn't even received yet. That is a pretty huge deviation from how the taxation system has worked in this country. When I say how remarkable it is this government is clearly so willing to go after people's savings and incomes and to increase taxes to fix the budget because it has its spending addiction, this goes even beyond that because, as I say, the government made a proposal to tax people on income that they hadn't even made yet. That really is completely crazy, and that is not how income tax works in Australia. For more than a century, the fundamental principle of our tax system has been that tax is paid when income is realised or crystallised—when there is a transaction that actually produces income. The government's original proposal completely abandoned that principle, and that isn't just bad policy; it is a fundamental distortion of how taxation should operate. That is why Australians should rightly be concerned about some of the proposals that this government is putting forward when it comes to our tax system, because, as I say, it is making radical changes, or seeking to make radical changes, in relation to the taxation system because it needs to get more revenue into the budget because it can't get its own spending under control.

In the couple of minutes I have to conclude my contribution, I note that, as I said, the original format of the laws that we're debating here today represented a fundamental break with longstanding principles of Australian taxation. It involved taxing unrealised gains, refusing to index thresholds, destabilising long-term retirement planning and introducing major structural changes without a clear mandate from the Australian people. Those flaws were exposed because the opposition and the Australian community demanded better. Australians deserve a superannuation system that is stable, predictable and fair, that encourages saving, that rewards responsibility and that governments respect, rather than repeatedly rewriting the rules to meet their own fiscal needs—and, to be very clear, those fiscal needs have only come about because the government has a spending problem.

That is why we will continue to oppose policies that undermine the integrity of Australians' retirement savings, like this legislation we are debating here today does. People's super should belong to the Australian people of this generation and the next generation. Superannuation doesn't belong to the government. It is not their pot of gold from which to extract when they find themselves in a tricky budget situation. If you find yourself in a tricky budget situation, find a way to rein in your wasteful spending; don't go after the retirement savings of hardworking Australians to try and bump up your own budget bottom line.