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

I rise also to speak 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. But, before I get into that, I do want to say I think that that contribution by Senator McKim belled the cat for all of us. We should fear every single day the idea that the Greens have opened the floodgates to Labor's agenda of higher taxes on all Australians, whether it be higher taxes on residential property, higher taxes on investment properties, higher taxes on family trusts, higher taxes on superannuation, higher taxes that abolish negative gearing or higher taxes that are going to affect all Australians every single day. There is no problem that exists in the economy right now that Labor doesn't think it can solve by creating higher taxes. Well, how about Labor gets a little bit more creative and winds back its spending ambitions—its spending ambitions that are pushing up inflation in this country? Why is it that every problem needs to be solved with a tax? The Greens have just opened the floodgates to allow Labor to do exactly that—an 'ambitious, progressive tax reform agenda'. I fear what is in store.

Today is a day that Australians never thought was going to happen. Why? I hear you ask that question. It's because, prior to the 2022 election, Australians were told very clearly and very unambiguously that there would be no changes to superannuation under a Labor government. Yet here we are not just changing superannuation but truncating debate on those changes to superannuation too. Why would Australians have believed them? The Prime Minister said it. The Treasurer said it. Every single Labor candidate said it. There would be no changes to superannuation under this government. Mind you, they also said there were going to be no changes to capital gains tax. They said there were going to be no changes to negative gearing. They said there were going to be no changes to family trust tax. All of these things are on their way.

Just as they promised you $275 off your energy bills and reneged on that promise the moment they were elected, this is another broken promise. Here we are. We're about to witness that promise being broken. We're witnessing it in a truncated debate. If it weren't bad enough that Labor teamed up with the Greens to get this legislation passed, we've now seen them shut down all discussion, all scrutiny, of this very, very important legislation. The Greens, the champions of transparency, have assisted—aided and abetted—the government in this mission. I know that I came here because of a contest of ideas. If you can't have a contest of ideas—if you're not up for a contest of ideas, if you want to shut down that contest of ideas—you don't deserve to sit on government benches.

We had a whole series of questions that we wanted to have asked the government about this legislation—questions about the treatment of your superannuation, your retirement savings, your nest egg—and you deserve to know that. Australians deserve to know the answers, but thanks to Labor and the Greens we will now never know the answers to those questions. It's important to highlight this has not been an easy road for the government. Let's face it. The bills that are before us today are certainly not the ones that were proposed in the last parliament. The product that's in front of us is not the legislation that the Treasurer wanted to pass. It's quite different, and can I say thank goodness for that. Thanks to the sustained scrutiny of the coalition, the superannuation sector and indeed everyday Australians who were worried about their nest eggs and worried about what Labor was going to do with them, Labor has been forced to abandon the most outrageous elements of its superannuation tax proposal. That was specifically their plan to tax unrealised capital gains and to freeze indexation on the way through.

This backtrack is very much a victory for common sense, but let's be very clear about why this happened. That proposal wasn't just an attack on retirees. That was the way it was framed. It was framed that, 'Oh, these rich old people don't deserve the money that they have saved.' That's what the framing was. Certainly, the Greens have helped fan those flames. The proposal was a calculated attempt to steal the future of younger Australians but without their knowledge. The original design represented a fundamental break from very longstanding principles of the taxation systems. For generations, Australians have understood a simple truth—that you pay tax when it's realised. When the gain is crystallised, when the cash is in your hand—that's when you pay the tax.

Proposing to tax simply paper gains on a volatile asset is a very dangerous structural shift that would have set a precedent right across our entire tax base. Just imagine that you buy a share today for a dollar and that next year, in 12 months time, it's gone up by 20 per cent. What Labor were saying was, 'We will tax you on that 20c gain.' You would say: 'But I haven't the sold the share yet. I haven't got the 20c. It's still a theoretical profit, not an actual one.' They would go, 'We're going to tax you anyway.' You would say, 'Where am I going to find the money to pay that tax?' They would say: 'That's not my problem. That's your problem.' You would ask: 'What happens if the share goes down in value? What if it goes down to 90c next year?' They would say: 'That's alright; we'll just give you a credit for that.' You would say, 'You're not going to give me the money back if it goes down, but you're going to make me pay it to you if it goes up?' That's exactly what Labor had in mind, and it wasn't accidental. It was entirely intentional. Don't think they haven't got this idea in their back pocket; it's still there.

Equally concerning was the refusal to index the $3 million threshold. What this meant was that, over time, bracket creep would have captured more and more Australians, not because they became wealthier—far from it. You wouldn't necessarily have needed to become wealthier. But, because inflation erodes the value of savings, it would have meant more and more Australians would be captured in Labor's net. It wasn't flawed policy; it was intentional. It was deliberate. It was a tax grab, and it was young people that would have paid the price.

Labor's backdown demonstrates one thing very clearly. This was never a policy grounded in principle; it was grounded in opportunity. It was an opportunity to take more money from unsuspecting Australians. It was sold as something so simple: 'We're going to take money from the rich, and we're going to put it back for budget repair.' No, this was taking money from ordinary Australians, and it would be more and more as each generation matured. I think that's absolutely outrageous.

Why does this matter? All of this matters because superannuation is not the government's money. It's your money. It's Australians' money. It's your savings. It's the product of decades of hard work, discipline and saving. Australians make financial decisions based on the rules that governments put in place. They plan their retirement around those rules. They trust that governments will not simply change the goalposts, particularly on tax, after the game has begun.

Let's face it; superannuation is a contract. It's a contract that says that if you put your money away and you quarantine it—potentially for up to 40 years for young people—then we will give you a tax benefit for doing so. That's what the deal is with superannuation. If Labor change the goalposts halfway through and say that they're going to tax you more—you've put your money away, trusting your government would do no such thing. When they breach that trust, that's on them. You would have made an entirely different decision about what to do with your money if you had known that the tax was going to be higher, but they don't give you that option. That's why this is so important.

Australians make financial decisions based on the rules that governments put in place. This is exactly what this government is changing. It's changing the rules, moving the goalposts halfway through the game, and it's young people that pay the price. Superannuation has always relied on one crucial ingredient, and that is trust—trust that the system will be stable, trust that the rules will not be constantly rewritten, trust that governments will not raid Australians' retirement savings to fix their own budget problems. That's what they're doing. Labor has broken that trust, and the truth is that this is a Labor government that cannot be trusted.

At the last election, Labor did not tell the Australian people that they were fundamentally going to alter their superannuation settings or strip away indexation. In a democracy, those major structural changes must be put to the people transparently, and, instead, this proposal appeared out of the blue after limited consultation. Even Labor's own traditional allies called these 'fibs'. When Sally McManus, Bill Kelty and Paul Keating all agree that a tax policy is a bad idea, you can pretty much guarantee that it's a disaster. Sally McManus herself warned that thresholds must be indexed so that everyday people don't get caught in the net. Bill Kelty, the giant of the superannuation movement, warned that taxing unrealised gains is 'bad policy' and would destroy super. Paul Keating, the self-proclaimed father of the superannuation system, noted that ordinary workers would be caught up in this the net. These are Labor figures. These aren't Liberals; these are Labor figures.

While the government claimed it would only hit a few, industry analysis showed that this simply wasn't true. It was set to hit 1.8 million Australians, including and specifically many small-business owners.