Maria Kovacic (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator O'Sullivan: I think you've summed that up beautifully. This is about choice, and the coalition wants Australians to have choice in their lives. We don't think the government should tell you how your family should work its finances out. Last night's budget was an example of that. The Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025 is designed to deal with one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in the super system, and that is that women persistently and consistently have less super than men. There are a lot of reasons for that. The primary reasons are that women have babies, women tend to stay home with their babies and women have more care responsibilities, and that impacts their ability to earn income. Women tend to work part-time more than full-time, and women tend to take more time out of the workforce, whether it's caring for their children or caring for relatives.

That has an impact. If your spouse has more super than you, and they want to share that super with you, why shouldn't they be able to? You share everything else. If you were to divorce, that super would be shared; it would become part of the marital pool of assets. So why can't you make that decision when the family unit is intact and together? Why can't you have the choice to make that decision? Why are the rules structured in such a way that if you want to do that you're not allowed to?

As Senator O'Sullivan rightly stated, the money in the super funds belongs to Australians who have earnt that money as a part of their income. That money does not belong to the government. It is not something the government has given to Australian workers; it is something Australian workers have earnt, and that money has been set aside. I think that is one of the most fundamental things we have to clarify here: this is not a gift of government; this is an outcome of the work of Australians, and they should be able to make a choice about how that super is distributed in their families. This bill brought forward by Senator Jane Hume continues the good work of the coalition when in government to improve retirement outcomes by making superannuation fairer and more flexible—and I've talked about that a lot here—particularly for women and families. I've talked about the fact that women should be able to access their super to buy housing. Why not?

We understand the housing crisis. It's the same thing: why can't you choose what you do with your money? Women over 55 are now the largest-growing cohort of homeless people in this country. I think you've heard me say that dozens of times in this chamber. This is a mechanism by which that can be mitigated. Why wouldn't we allow that to happen? Why should we create a scenario where a woman has to fight for that share if there is a failure or a breakdown in a marriage but, when things are going as they should and a family makes a decision that they want to split that and share that amongst themselves, they can't?

I don't understand that. I don't get why that's not okay. If someone wants to split their super balance and give it to their spouse, why can't they do that? It makes the superannuation system fairer for women and enables a family's retirement outcomes to reflect the collective decisions they have made together as a family, not for the woman to feel that she is not an equal contributor just because she hasn't been in the paid workforce for as long as her spouse has because she is the one who's made the decision—or collectively they've made the decision—for her to stay home or work less in order to raise a family. That is a reality. If people don't want to accept that that's true, that's a matter for them, but that is real.

I know that it's my own experience. I spent many years at home with my children as they grew. I had three small children in under four years. It was not possible for me to work. I made that choice. But I didn't have the benefit of something like this. And, when my marriage broke down, I didn't have the benefit of any super, so I had to start from zero. There are many other women like me who have experienced just that. Why should they be in that position when there is an option here for that to be different?

I know that those on the other side talk about how super is a reflection of them because it was a Labor government that introduced super, that created this nest egg for Australians. But I think they also forget our record on super and the things that we have done in order to improve this system. We capped fees on low balances so that super funds couldn't eat into your small super balance with ongoing and high fees. That's something that we did. We banned fees on rollovers so that when you moved from one super fund to another it wasn't costing you money to do that. We made the expensive insurance premiums that were embedded into superannuation funds opt in rather than opt out, for young people. Do you see a pattern here? We're making a system fairer, simpler and easier to use for the people that have to use it.

We abolished the $450 rule, which was a deliberate design feature of the super system that Labor embedded in 1992 so that low-income earners, particularly women who were perhaps working casually or part time, weren't able to accumulate super like everybody else, because they earnt too little. We changed that. That was something that we did in order to reduce the gender pay gap in super. We allowed non-pay-as-you-go income to be used for contributions below the concessional limit to attract a tax deduction so that self-employed people could also take advantage of super in the same way that wage earners did. That was another important change that created choice but also mitigated the super pay gap.

We introduced the bring-forward rule so that three future years worth of non-concessional contributions could be made in one year. That was another important change that we made to make the super system fairer and better. We also ensured that workers' funds would follow them from job to job, rather than allowing companies to open a new account in their fund, charging more fees each time you changed jobs and charging fees on multiple accounts.

Do you see the pattern here, the change and the shift in how we have tried to continually make the system better and fairer and provide that choice for Australians to make? That is what we are doing here. We are not saying that everybody has to do this. We are not saying that this is the right thing. We're not telling people how to live their lives and how to manage their finances. We're saying that Australians should have the choice to do this if they want to.

Whilst Labor might like to say that they are the ones that invented superannuation, it has taken coalition governments to make superannuation work better for members instead of making it a bigger honey pot for super fund managers. As I said before, this money does not belong to super funds and it does not belong to government. It belongs to the Australians who earnt it. If a higher earning spouse wants to give it to their lower earning spouse, tell me why they can't do that.