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

I'm pleased to continue my contribution on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025. I've previously outlined that, in Tasmania, older women are in the fastest growing group at risk of homelessness. Last winter, in Hobart, a former boarding house was bought, not for profit but to give women with little super a safe place to live. That generosity highlights a deeper problem: women retire with significantly less super than men—around $30,000 less on average in Tasmania—after years of part-time work and caring responsibilities that families rely on but the system does not value.

Senator Hume's bill offers a sensible, voluntary fix. It allows couples, during their relationship, to even up super balances with strong safeguards, no new taxes and no public spending. It simply shares retirement security, the way families already share, work and sacrifice. It is a practical response to a structural inequity, which is why the bill has my support.

Let me be clear about the design. The bill amends the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act and the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Regulations to create an annual spousal superannuation redistribution opportunity. Trustees must process valid applications within 30 business days and exchange standardised information. The amount transferred is capped by a formula, known as the spousal redistribution limit, that ensures that neither partner ends up with less than the other and that the receiving spouse's balance never exceeds the transfer balance cap. The tax law is amended so that the amount is treated as a rollover, carrying the same taxed and untaxed, concessional and non-concessional proportions across, preventing gaming and keeping integrity intact. This is balance splitting, not contribution splitting. The tax has already been paid; the money has already been earned.

The existing spouse contribution settings are clunky and underused. The bill's approach is cleaner, fairer and more intuitive to couples who think in terms of 'our future' rather than 'my contribution versus yours'. Balance equalisation is not a silver bullet. This isn't a solution for everyone. Women's lifetime earnings still lag. Many women still step into low-paid, feminised sectors, and too many older women are exposed to housing stress. But policy is rarely about silver bullets; it is about using the strengths in the system to avoid people falling through the gaps. There are many gaps and this solution fills some.

Critics will ask: why intervene at all? Because people who made family-first choices should not face poverty-last consequences. Tasmania's relatively gendered superannuation gap coexists with legacy super gaps built over decades, and because even a small pay gap can produce a large retirement gap when magnified by compounding investment returns. A five per cent difference in earnings at age 35 can translate to a far larger difference at 65 when one account compounds uninterrupted and the other pauses for caring. And because the evidence continues to show the gap widens with age, by the time a woman is in her 50s, even female managers nationally, they are tens of thousands of dollars behind their male peers. That is why this bill is so important. It is a fix that will provide the mechanism to tackle the gender super gap and do it without raising taxes on others; instead, by just incentivising the current superannuation pool.

Others will ask about system integrity. The bill anticipates that concern. It excludes defined benefit schemes and retirement phase accounts, limits transfers to equalising balances without breaching the transfer cap. It retains the tax character of the funds, requires a single active account per spouse for access, and hardwires trustee timeframes and information exchanges. This is careful drafting, not a free for all. Will this help only affluent households? No. Bringing a $120,000 balance up to $170,000 can be the difference between selling the family home and staying put, between fear and flexibility, between needing a room at Hobart's Amelie House or having a lease of one's own.

This bill makes it easy for couples to share fairly what they built together, long before a court, a crisis or a separation forces the issue. The national conversation is alive to retirement equity. Paying super on paid parental leave is a positive step for future cohorts, but, as Tasmanian stories remind us, there is a generation of women already nearing retirement who need a lever that they can pull now. So what might this mean in reality on the ground across the country? It means a carer in Burnie can receive a rollover in the year she steps back to look after dad, preserving compounding that will otherwise be lost. It also means cultural permission to plan together. Too often, super is his account and her account. This bill says to Tasmanian and Australian families: your retirement can be shared, make your super reflect that, because sharing life choices is sometimes not a choice. It means when the unexpected happens, whether that is illness, redundancy or a decade that didn't go to plan, the a family's retirement doesn't depend on only one account's history.

This bill also focuses on simplicity. The provisions are user-friendly. They define who can access the mechanism, how to apply, how trustees must respond and how tax characteristics transfer. They set a clear ceiling, not a floor so couples can move at their own pace. And they do it by building on the familiar plumbing of rollovers, not inventing a new tax labyrinth. To those who say, 'not now', well, when? We have Australians who will commence retirement each year who will wish to have had this mechanism and others who would have had significantly higher balances if they did have it. National analysis warns of a looming crisis of older women retiring into poverty if policy doesn't move. Tasmania's headlines and service providers bring that national warning home. The sooner couples can start equalising, the more compounding can do it's quiet mathematical work for the next 20 years.

To the couple in Hobart who turned a private asset into 10 rooms of security, thank you for modelling the community we aspire to be. But it should not fall to individual generosity to fix structural gaps. Parliament can meet community halfway by making fairness the default in this aspect of superannuation. This bill says to every family mapping out the decade ahead: when you sit at the kitchen table with a pen and a super statement, when you are considering a new baby or an ageing parent or a course of study, you should have a simple, legal, well-designed way to keep your futures even.

Fairness in retirement is not a slogan; it is a sequence of small, deliberate choices made possible by law. With this bill, we make those choices available to every couple in Tasmania and across Australia who want their super to tell the true story of a shared life. I commend the bill to the Senate.