Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, something I speak of with enormous pride because this bill goes to the heart of fairness, equity and recognition of the sacrifices that are made within Australian families. It represents a genuine step forward to ensuring that every single Australian can look forward to a dignified and secure retirement, especially women. This bill amends the superannuation legislation to give spouses the opportunity to split their collective superannuation balances evenly between them. The partner with the higher superannuation balance will be able to roll over an amount from their fund to their spouse's superannuation fund to make the two funds more even.

Financial security in retirement should reflect a lifetime of shared contributions, not just paid employment. This bill is a proactive measure designed specifically to tackle one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in our superannuation system, the gender super gap. While estimates vary, women retire with significantly lower superannuation balances than men, somewhere between 20 to 25 per cent lower. Why is this? It's rarely a result of personal choice; rather it stems from deep-seated structural realities in our society and in our superannuation system.

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, one-third of the gender super gap can be attributed to time spent caring for family and interruptions to full-time employment. Women are far more likely to take time out of the paid workforce to care for children or for elderly parents and to shoulder the responsibilities of unpaid work that keeps families and our economy running. When one partner, typically the mother, takes time away from work to raise children, her superannuation savings often halt for years, even decades, while her partner's continue to grow. This is the motherhood penalty in action, leaving women financially vulnerable in their later years. The Prime Minister himself has acknowledged that no mother should be penalised for taking time away from work to do the most important job there is.

Let's be honest. These decisions, these sacrifices, benefit both partners in a relationship. They're not individual choices; they're family choices. So why should the financial security that comes at the end of a working life reflect only one person's income rather than the partnership that made that life possible? This bill creates a simple, entirely voluntary mechanism for fairness that makes it possible for couples to split their balances evenly between them. The person with the larger can add to the super fund balance of their spouse using money that's already in their superannuation rather than through making additional contributions from outside of super. That way, they can both retire on an equal footing.

It's important to understand that this bill is specifically about splitting balances; it's not about superannuation contributions. This is an important distinction to make because that mechanism is one that already exists to make contributions on behalf of a spouse. However, the take-up of this mechanism is incredibly low. Only about 1.1 per cent of Australians used it in 2021-22. Why is that? It's because it's clunky, it's complex, and eligibility is very limited. There is a complete lack of awareness, and, critically, there is no real incentive for most people to use it.

This is about splitting balances, using a rollover from one fund to another, and it's a genuine structural change to our superannuation system that directly tackles the gender super gap, which is one of the systemic structural failures of our superannuation system. And it uses existing mechanisms to do this. Already in Australia, equitable splitting of superannuation is considered during divorce proceedings, so the rails are there. In the old days, this used to require a court order, but that's no longer the case. There are now standard forms and recognised tax treatments of a rollover amount from one partner's super account to the other's at the end of a relationship. So why not allow it to occur during a relationship? Why not make this proactive, voluntary planning an accessible part of the whole superannuation system from the very outset, allowing couples to make these decisions for themselves when it suits the couple to do so?

Let me be clear. This does not force a couple to do anything. It simply gives families an option to share what they've built together, in recognition of the unpaid labour, broken work patterns and professional sacrifices that so often fall to women. The tackling the gender super gap bill explicitly recognises the economic partnership that's at the heart of families. It empowers couples to plan for their retirement together, collectively, allowing for a more even distribution of superannuation during the accumulation phase.

To maintain integrity in the superannuation system, this bill includes guardrails and limitations on how the mechanism can be used. First—and this is very important—the amount transferred from one spouse to another spouse is not considered a contribution. Rather it's treated as a rollover; it's considered to be rolled over. This distinction is particularly important because it ensures that the amount transferred between spouses does not attract or avoid any additional taxes. Second, the amount that's rolled over from one spouse to another retains its original characteristics. Specifically, it retains the fund's proportion of concessional versus non-concessional components. This is an important guardrail because it means that, when someone dies, the amount that has been transferred doesn't have additional tax benefits to beneficiaries.

Third, the ability to roll over an amount from one spouse to another is only available to those transferring from or to a defined contribution scheme. It's not available to those that are in a defined benefit scheme; that is far too complicated and restrictive. Four, the ability to roll over from one spouse to another is only available to those couples that have one superannuation fund each. Five, again, both of those funds must be in an accumulation phase. Why this is an important integrity measure is that there may be unintended consequences in the calculation of how much can be rolled over from one account to another for persons that have multiple funds. These are the guardrails around this bill that will ensure its integrity.

Six, the amount that can be rolled over from one spouse to another is limited, and it's limited in two ways. Firstly, the amount that's rolled over from the original fund cannot leave the original fund with a lower balance than the receiving fund. It's all about evening up your balances; it's not about using this opportunity to roll everything from one account into another. Secondly, the amount that's rolled over cannot cause the receiving fund to have a higher balance than the transfer balance cap. The transfer balance cap is currently at $2 million, but it's an indexed amount. We don't want to attract additional taxes by having this mechanism in place.

For example—and I'm using very big balances as an example, but obviously this is something available to anybody, no matter what their balance is—if person A had, as I say, a big balance of $5.5 million in their superannuation fund and person B had half a million dollars in their superannuation fund, that means that person A can roll over up to $1.5 million into person B's account. That brings person B's account up to that transfer balance cap of $2 million for the current financial year. Alternatively, if person A has $2 million in their superannuation account and person B has half a million dollars, $500,000, in their account, person A can roll over up to $750,000 to person B, and that brings both balances up to $1.25 million. This limits the amount that can be rolled over from one spouse to another, and they are ceilings, but they're not floors.

Spouses might choose, for whatever reason, to roll over an amount that is lower than that spousal redistribution limit. If it is within the rules, a couple has the opportunity to make their balances even, but it's entirely up to the couple how much they want to transfer between them. For instance, a couple could choose to do a one-off, single lump sum rollover or, alternatively, take the opportunity to utilise the mechanism each year to make a spousal redistribution rollover of smaller amounts, or they could choose to not do it at all. While the examples, as I said, are very large, they are certainly not limited to people who have low balances, because, let's face it, it might be a very attractive mechanism to those couples for whom equality and fairness is profoundly important.

It's all about choice. It's about allowing couples to manage their collective retirement savings to reflect their collective choices throughout their lives. The benefits of this reform are clear and far reaching. It's about more than just superannuation; it's about closing that gender super gap. Even though the gender pay gap on average weekly earnings has come down from around 18.5 per cent in 2014 to around 11.5 per cent now, the gender retirement gap remains stubbornly wide. Tax office data shows the difference between the average super balances of men and women over every age category was 26 per cent in 2014. In March of this year, the Minister for Women, Katy Gallagher, reported that women still have 21.3 per cent less superannuation than men.

When you unpack the tax office data further, the gap is even worse for older women—those women who are approaching retirement and who haven't had the benefit of part-time work or flexible working options or child care as part of their working life. This contributes to the alarming fact that women over the age of 55 are the fastest growing group experiencing homelessness in Australia, and members from both sides of this place have rightly observed that the relationship between lower retirement savings and homelessness in women is direct and clear. While the difference between men and women's super balances is lower for women in their 20s and 30s, between the ages of 40 and 64 that gap is much more pronounced, averaging between 23 and 24 per cent. It's hardly changed over a decade.

These are the structural inequities within our society reflected in our retirement outcomes. Let me be clear. The goal here is not to penalise men or privilege women. It's about acknowledging the value of care giving and ensuring those who take on those vital responsibilities are not financially disadvantaged in their retirement. A more equitable superannuation system benefits not only women but also families, communities and the economy as a whole. This is good for wives, good for husbands and good for families.

The gender super gap isn't going to close itself. It's not going to happen on its own unless we do something about it. It requires deliberate and equitable policy interventions, like the ones set out in this bill. The changes to superannuation that have been proposed and that are contemplated by those opposite are only about how the government can get their hands on more super—how they can tax your super more. Those sorts of changes do nothing to support the integrity of the system; they only risk the integrity of the system.

If Labor really wanted to do something for super, they should be looking at how to make the system fairer. They will tell you that they put superannuation on paid parental leave, but that's such a narrowcast policy. It only deals with women who are having children today. It does nothing for the women who have had children and are still of working age and within the superannuation system but are suffering from the gender pay gap. And let's be honest, it doesn't even touch the sides, yet it costs the budget around $2 billion.

This doesn't cost anything like that—nothing like that. This is all about couples using their own money, not taxpayer money, to make these decisions. It's a well-acknowledged fact that more work is needed to equalise super balances between men and women. There's a very intelligent woman named Rebecca Pritchard, who's a senior financial adviser with an organisation called Rising Tide. She has quite a high media profile in the financial advice industry. She said that more changes were needed. She said:

A lot can be done on the gender side of things. The gender superannuation gap is still—

she used the word 'hideous'.

This bill, the tackling the gender super gap bill, is an opportunity for our parliament to come together to genuinely improve the retirement outcomes for all Australians and help tackle the gender super gap—that intractable problem. Let's not accept a system that punishes women for caring for children. Let's not allow inequality in retirement to be inevitable. We can change it, so why not change it now? I urge this parliament to support this bill for a fairer, more dignified retirement for every single Australian but particularly for Australian women. I commend this bill to the Senate.

Lisa Darmanin (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whilst I agree with many of Senator Hume's comments this morning on the drivers of the gender pay gap and the need to tackle this 'intractable' or 'hideous' problem in our community, this bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, is not the answer. Tackling economic inequity is core business for this government, and of course closing the gender pay gap is part of this because women must have economic security to enable them to retire with dignity.

But the Albanese government is doing much, much more to address the gender pay gap than simply putting superannuation on paid parental leave, as was identified by Senator Hume. Whilst the Albanese government are legislating to pay super on paid parental leave, we are also legislating to expand the low-income superannuation tax offset, which will benefit 3.1 million people, and 60 per cent of those are women. That is why we are legislating to oblige employers to pay super on payday instead of six months later. The government introduced the legislation to deliver on payday super, which will particularly benefit women, who are overrepresented in lower paid, casual and insecure work and are likely to miss out when super is paid less frequently.

There have also been improvements in other key drivers of the gender superannuation gap. The gender super pay gap, which Senator Hume pointed out, has reduced from 22.8 per cent in 2021-22 to 21.1 per cent in 2023-24. Improving the gender super pay gap provides better outcomes for women both in their working life and in retirement. The Labor government is working at every point across a woman's life to make sure she is earning more and keeping more of what she earns across her lifetime. We want women to earn more and retire with more—because your retirement savings are a reflection of your lifetime's earnings.

We are investing in increased wages in our critical aged-care and early childhood sectors, where women predominate. We have consistently supported increases to the minimum wage, where women predominate. We are delivering tax breaks for every taxpayer, and this is working. Under Labor, women are earning $255.10 more a year on average now than when Labor came to power. That is addressing the gender pay gap, which is addressing the gender pay gap in superannuation. The gender pay gap is 11.5 per cent, the lowest on record, compared to 14.1 per cent when we came to government, and women's workforce participation is at an all-time high.

The Liberal Party has form on attacking super, so let's not be hoodwinked by this legislation. Their answer to many things is to raid your super, and one of their election policies was to attack super on paid parental leave—to support that contribution being cashed out instead of being preserved for retirement. That is why the Albanese government will not be supporting this bill. We are taking many, many actions to address the super pay gap because we are addressing issues to close gender inequity at its core. If we are serious about closing the gender pay gap, then that is what we need to focus on, and that is what we are focused on. All of this is part of our comprehensive plan to tackle gender inequality across a woman's lifetime.

This bill might nominally put a few more dollars in the pockets of a handful of women, but it would do nothing to change the factors that drive the gender inequity at the heart of the issue. The bill is nothing more than locking the stable door when the horse has well and truly bolted. It proposes allowing a person to top up their spouse's super balance in the name of fairness. Senator Hume used an example of a couple where person A has a $5.5 million balance in their fund and person B has $500,000. I think we can reasonably assume that person A is a man and person B is a woman, given that the title of this bill is 'tackling the gender super pay gap'. The bill would allow person A to gift the modest sum of $1.5 million from their fund to their spouse's fund. I've got one thing to say about that. A man is not a financial plan. Allowing a man to gift or to roll over $1.5 million to his wife right before retirement doesn't erase the fact that he earned a whopping $5 million more than she did in superannuation over the course of their careers. It means that, after spending her entire working life reliant on a husband, she will spend her retirement relying on him too.

Loosening the rules governing spouse rollovers and spouse contributions would provide the most benefit to a very small group of high-wealth and high-income individuals. It would allow these individuals access to more superannuation tax concessions, which would increase existing inequities in the income system in retirement. It would not benefit single people, including single older women, who are often the most disadvantaged and at risk of poverty in retirement. Allowing couples the scope to roll over existing super savings from the super fund with the higher balance to the fund with the lower balance to optimise tax treatment would also be a significant departure from the existing longstanding superannuation and tax system settings, which are generally based on an individual unit rather than a couple.

We know that the super gap happens in part because women more often take time away from work to raise children. This bill does not provide a solution to the motherhood penalty. It accepts it. It reinforces the idea that women's economic security is reliant on the goodwill of their husbands. I'll say it again: a man is not a financial plan. It feels positively archaic. It treats women like they're Charlotte Lucas in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudiceaged 27 with no money and no prospects, already a burden on their family and tired. Well, I'm tired. I'm tired of the sorts of approaches that those opposite have to superannuation, to women and to tackling gender inequality.

Giving men with super balances of $5.5 million the power to gift their wives a lump sum doesn't close the super gap. Our focus needs to be on accumulating and preserving the savings of workers today, as they are earned. The fact that we are talking about super balances of $5.5 million also sets off alarm bells in my head because these are not the people most impacted by the super gap. Most people don't get close to these amounts. In 2022-23 only 103,000 people had a super balance of $2 million or more. That is not the vast majority of women in our country. This bill might even the score between a small number of couples, but it would also allow them to partake in financial planning which also allows them to minimise their tax bill. A bill that makes it easier for wealthy couples to optimise their tax arrangements and game preservation rules just sounds like another way for the rich to get richer.

A bill that empowers the generationally wealthy cannot seriously be discussed as one that reduces gendered economic inequality. It would do nothing to benefit the older single women who are at the highest risk of poverty in retirement. That is why the government does not support this bill—because it is more about giving the wealthy a leg-up than it is about striking gender inequity at its roots and because we know that a man is never, ever a financial plan.

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025. On the surface, this bill sounds great. Tackling the gender super gap—okay, sign me right up. As Senator Hume said, we need action to deal with the structural gender inequality in our super system—a hideous gap, as the senator put it. But, of course, as with everything in the coalition, the devil is in the detail. This is a classic Liberal Party approach to financial equality in that it will do nothing for single women, nothing for single parents and nothing for women in low- or even medium-income households struggling to save for their retirement. What it will do is allow already very wealthy Australians to funnel even more of their wealth into their super.

The superannuation system was designed to provide a dignified retirement, not a tax haven. In effect, this is a policy that will allow a wealthy man to avoid paying tax in retirement by pre-emptively shifting part of his super balance into his spouse's account to avoid the transfer balance cap of $1.9 million.

The Greens want to restore super to its original purpose of providing a dignified retirement for all Australians. This bill won't do that. Tax minimisation for men does not equal economic opportunity for women. This is such a shameless attempt by the Liberals to present a tax minimisation strategy for wealthy couples as a way for women to get ahead. The super gap is a genuine issue for women. At its worst, for people aged 55 to 59, the retirement savings gap is a shocking 48 per cent. Just as people hit retirement, the gender super gap is at its worst.

This bill does nothing to address the structural issues that cause women's retirement savings to be so much lower than men's. Women do the vast majority of unpaid care work—child care, housework and looking after ageing relatives—which has lasting impacts on their capacity to do paid work. They're also more likely than men to work part time and to work in industries and jobs where they earn less than men. Current super tax settings magnify these differences in lifetime savings.

When they were last in government, the Liberals created carry forward contributions, deceivingly presented as an achievement for women's economic security. That policy change allowed people to retrospectively top up their super over the previous five years, ostensibly to make up for the time women spent out of the workforce, but the data shows it is high-income men that this policy is benefitting the most.

There is one technical detail that shows that there has been some consideration for women in the drafting of this bill in that the women receiving any transfer would have to consent to it. This at least addresses concerns about financial control through unsolicited gift-giving, which is sometimes an avenue through which domestic violence and coercive control is perpetrated.

I understand the sentiment, and I support the bringing forward of ideas to assist women's retirement savings. This bill, however, is not the solution. If a relationship breaks down, then, under law, mothers are rightfully entitled to their share of their partner's superannuation. This bill could actually complicate those calculations, when couples split. This bill doesn't constructively add to either of these two scenarios; it just adds opportunities for tax minimisation.

If Senator Hume and the Liberals want to address the structural issues of the retirement savings gender gap, then they should advocate with the Greens for part-time and low-income earners to receive the same tax benefit on super contributions as higher income earners. Take the LISTO, for example. The government's recently announced changes purport to benefit low-income earners by ensuring the tax they pay on super is not higher than their income tax. But it doesn't address the longstanding regressive features of our super system that mean that someone on $200,000 can reduce their income tax by spending more of their pay into their super, giving them a 30 per cent benefit for every dollar, while someone below $45,000 and eligible for LISTO gets no tax benefit at all. This is all wrong and it's a structural problem we need to fix.

The punitive interaction of income tax, childcare and family support settings means that women with kids in early childhood education and care who want to return to the workforce face an effective marginal tax rate of 80 per cent. Meanwhile, someone selling an investment property in their self-managed super fund enjoys an effective tax rate of just 10 per cent. The system is set up to fail women and uphold and reinforce the gender pay gap and the gender super gap.

I'd like to acknowledge that Senator Hume did have carriage of the bill to remove the $450-a-month rule that punished low-income women's retirement savings, so I know she's previously worked to reduce the structural issues causing the ongoing gender super gap. But there's plenty more to do, and this bill does not address the many issues that we need to in order to deal with the structural inequalities that drive the gender super gap. There's so much that can and needs to be done to fix the gender disparity in both income and super tax so women aren't retiring into poverty. The Greens are ready and willing to tackle this issue and genuinely close the gender gap in wages and super, but both the Liberal and Labor parties need to get serious about it.

Leah Blyth (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Stronger Families and Stronger Communities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm going to start by addressing some of the remarks made by Labor and the Greens which are really quite extraordinary, and there were some that I personally found quite offensive, that a man is not a financial plan. Nowhere in this bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, does it have any kind of connotation that a man is a financial plan, and unless Labor and the Greens have some kind of magic solution that is going to mean women like me—I've had three children, which have necessitated me having to take time off work to have those children. Unless Labor and the Greens can solve that issue for women, why shouldn't a family—a man and wife, a wife and wife—decide that, for the care of children, they will actually share their super contributions and make that decision on an annual basis? What it tells me about Labor and the Greens is that they don't value the unpaid work that happens in child care and child raising that happens within the family—that they don't value that and they don't respect that. Rather than coming up with actual issues with the structure of this bill, all they are doing is throwing out very crazy, reckless ideas that somehow women are dependent on men asking for this.

I can tell you that in my family situation, even though I was the one who had time off work, my super balance is actually higher than my husband's, because he's self-employed. I was very lucky to have a high super. Why couldn't I do it the other way and share with him? Why are Labor and the Greens assuming that this only goes one way when it comes to super? Of course my situation is probably not what most Australians experience, but there would certainly be a lot of people in that situation. What this bill is trying to do—and I congratulate my colleague Jane Hume for introducing this bill to the parliament, because we all know that women aged over 55 are the largest growing group experiencing homelessness in Australia. That is largely because they have less super. When there is a marriage breakup or a relationship breakdown, it is women who are financially significantly behind. A lot of them might have taken time off work to raise children. It might be that they're now empty nesters and have spent that time doing the care work around the house. It's difficult to find employment. You might not have a very large super balance. These women are now disproportionately showing up in our statistics for homelessness. This bill is trying to address that.

Rather than finding frivolous reasons why to not do something—because you want to do something and fix everyone's problems—why don't we tackle this one particular problem, which I think this bill actually does, making the superannuation system fairer for women and enabling families to make a choice of what they would like to do with their money? What we hear from Labor and the Greens is that they hate Australians having choice. They don't want you to be able to decide what you can do with your money. They want to tell you what will happen, and—let's be honest—superannuation accounts are just a piggybank for Labor. When they run out of money, they will absolutely come after yours. They will come after Australians' superannuation balances, so the idea that we're actually going to start making the superannuation system fairer for women, in particular, scares them a little bit. Labor's solution to this problem—and they've given us a long list of things that they say they're going to do—is that, just by addressing the pay gap, it will magically fix super. Once again, I would say that unless there is a solution whereby women don't have to take time off work for childbirth—and, I can tell you, after having three natural deliveries, I was very grateful to have some time off work, and it certainly exceeded what my sick leave allocation would have been—addressing the gender pay gap is not sufficient. That is not a sufficient measure to address what is happening in the reality of superannuation in this country.

Labor don't value family, they're not valuing the unpaid work contribution that Australians make within their own family situation, and they don't value Australians having that personal responsibility and that personal choice to do it. I will say that the example of the, I think, $5.5 million, was just to demonstrate the guardrails that are in place for the bill. That's not saying that Australians have that super balance and that it is a normal balance; it's just to demonstrate that there are guardrails that have been put into this bill to show that you can't just transfer whole balances over from one partner to the other. I think it is a little disingenuous to say that it's a disturbing number and that a man is not a financial plan.

After the care that women across our country put into raising children and having children, why shouldn't they be able to split superannuation? Couples might split the electricity bill; they might split the mortgage payments. You're able to split superannuation and, legislatively, you're required to aggregate superannuation at the time that a relationship or a marriage dissolves. Why can't you choose to do that when you're happily together? Why does it have to be only on the dissolution of a relationship that there is some equity that's put into the superannuation system? What this bill does is create a way for one partner to say to the other, 'I'm valuing what you're doing, staying at home, raising and caring for children, and we can split the super so that it's fair.' One partner can say to the other, 'I accept,' and it is usually the woman—or the mother—who stays at home to raise the children. The other partner says: 'That's great. I'm valuing what you're doing by staying home and not being in the workplace. I accept that you may not be getting paid for that work.'

There are a lot of reasons why Labor have said they don't support the bill. What I haven't seen is a good reason not to. This is really about giving individuals the opportunity to decide what works best for them and their families. I think the coalition has a fantastic record on superannuation. Unlike Labor over there, who use it as a piggy bank—it's run for their union mates—the coalition, in the time we were in government, made superannuation far fairer, more efficient and more transparent. We capped fees on low balances; we banned fees on rollovers and investment switches; we made expensive insurance premiums opt-in, rather than opt-out, for young people; and we abolished the $450 rule. On this side of the chamber, we in the coalition certainly have a very, very strong record when it comes to making our super system in Australia fair. This isn't also necessarily for older people. Younger people can choose to opt in to this scheme as well. The coalition has the Your Future, Your Super reforms. That ensures that workers' funds follow them from job to job so that young workers don't have to join a new super fund every time they change employers. It is like Labor to say that they invented superannuation, but it took a coalition government to make superannuation work for members instead of the unions and super fund managers. Tackling the gender super gap is the next step to ensuring that superannuation in Australia is more flexible and fair, particularly for women, and making sure that your hard-earned dollars in your superannuation accounts are working for you and your family and not for Labor and Labor's mates.

Jessica Collins (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak in support of Senator Hume and the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025. This bill amends existing legislation, including the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 and the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 to provide couples with the opportunity to evenly share their superannuation balances.

I fully support this bill, and I commend my colleague, Senator Hume, on bringing it to the floor of this chamber. The reason is this: it sends a message to the Australian people that families are best placed to make financial decisions that best suit their own households. This bill does this by creating a simple mechanism to allow couples to split their collective superannuation balances evenly during their relationship on an ongoing annual basis. It gives spouses the option—it gives them the choice—to split their collective superannuation balances evenly on and ongoing annual basis. To ensure equity between couples, the bill contains a spousal redistribution limit to ensure that the transferring spouse does not end up with less money in their fund than the receiving spouse after the rollover.

Why are we doing this today? There are very few things that I agree on with those on the other side, but on these points I can agree. Let me share a little quote from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on 12 September 2024. He was speaking to the Paid Parental Leave Amendment (Adding Superannuation for a More Secure Retirement) Bill 2024. He said:

No mother should be penalised for taking time away from work to do the most important job there is.

I wholeheartedly agree with that; being a mother is the most important job a mother can do.

Katy Gallagher, on 20 March 2024, in response to questions without notice said:

It's part of the fact that, throughout their careers, paid and as family carers—primarily carers in families—they have either had career breaks or been out of the workforce for long periods of time, and during that time when they've not been earning, when they've been caring, they have not been accumulating superannuation.

Let's turn to Senator Jess Walsh. On 18 September 2024 , also in response to the paid parental leave amendment bill, she said that the inequality and the gender superannuation gap are linked to two major factors: the gender pay gap and the career interruptions that are caused when people, predominantly women, take time out of work to raise children. So here we are with this important bill, trying to address these issues.

The important part of the bill, to ensure a spousal redistribution limit, levels the playing field for families where one parent has taken time out from the workforce to raise children. As I said, this is one of the most important jobs a parent will ever do. We in the coalition respect that. It's also a mechanism that prevents spouses from unfairly taking too much of their partner's savings. This is an equalisation measure. To ensure that the amount transferred from one spouse to another does not attract or avoid any additional taxes, it's treated not as a contribution but as an amount rolled over. This is fair. This bill assures couples that they will face neither penalty nor financial disincentive to transfer money from one account to the other. Again, this tax provision signals to parents that they should not be penalised for making choices about who goes to work and who stays home to raise children—because we are the party for families.

It's important to stress this bill only gives couples the option to share their superannuation balances. It does not force them to do so. The bill is not about dictating how couples are to manage their superannuation funds, because we are also the party for choice. Importantly this bill does not prescribe how much superannuation money a couple can transfer to each other. Aside from the rule on the spousal redistribution limit, which limits rollovers to equalisation, the transferring spouse can transfer as much or as little as they like. The bill reinforces the liberal principle of choice, by giving the couples the freedom to share the savings of their respective superannuation accounts with as little impediment or financial disincentive as possible.

This bill recognises the importance of family. It makes it easier for spouses to manage their superannuation finances at all stages of their relationship. It ensures any parent can be financially rewarded for the unpaid domestic work that they do for their family. Given that women typically shoulder the domestic responsibilities of caring for children or elderly parents, they are more likely to take time out of the paid workforce. As a result, they generally accrue less superannuation than men over their working lives. While estimates vary, women retire with significantly lower superannuation balances than men—between 20 to 25 per cent lower. The gap is worse for older women approaching retirement, and this bill aims to address that. Over nearly a decade of recorded data, these gaps have hardly closed, despite progress on many other fronts, including average weekly earnings.

I would like to acknowledge, alongside my colleague Senator Blyth, the alarming fact that women over 55 are the fastest growing group experiencing homelessness in Australia. I call on the Albanese government to ensure that all homes released under the Housing Australia Future Fund go first to vulnerable women and children. If anything good is going to come from the HAFF, surely this should be it. I did ask in Senate estimates, just a few weeks ago, whether this would be the case, but we got no answers on that.

Back to Senator Hume's bill, facilitating the sharing of superannuation balances between spouses ensures that more parents can retire on an equal financial footing, giving choice back to families. The coalition has a proud history of contributing to better design of the superannuation system, starting with the significant contributions of the late senator John Watson in the early 1990s to ensure that the impending superannuation scheme worked for all Australians not just the unions.

Amongst other things, our superannuation reforms in government ensured that the workers' funds followed them from job to job without incurring more fees to the worker. This is what we're trying to do within the family and within the household, recognising that the household is the best place to make financial decisions that work for them, and they should not be penalised in doing so, which is why one of the qualifiers in this particular bill is to ensure that any rollovers between spouses do not incur any additional taxes or fees. We also made superannuation funds performance more transparent by listing their fees and performance on the Australian Taxation Office website—again, promoting the choice of the worker.

I want to talk a little bit about Labor and what they do with superannuation. Labor likes to claim that they invented superannuation. If anybody had the privilege of listening to the condolence speeches on the late senator John Watson, just a few months ago, you would have heard about the very, very significant contributions that he and the coalition made to ensuring that superannuation, as I said before, worked for all Australians. The problem is that the superannuation system that Labor has taken a hold of has invented a system that has structurally disadvantaged women. When Labor tied superannuation to wages, lower super balances for women became a deliberate design feature of the super system, and so this is where we're at now, and we are trying to rectify that.

The government solution to attempting to close the superannuation gap is by paying super on paid parental leave. This comes at a cost of $1.1 billion over four years, and it's only going to slightly improve the gender super gap. So what we're trying to do here—and what Senator Hume is trying to do here with this private member's bill—is provide an equitable solution, an intervention that will address the gender super gap and something which addresses this structural disadvantage for women. But, importantly, it's a choice for households to take up if they choose to and if it works for them.

I highly commend this bill to the Senate. I think Senator Hume has done a terrific job on bringing the conversation back to families and households. The Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill is the next step in ensuring that Australian superannuation is fairer and more flexible for parents and, particularly, for women. It will make sure that their hard earned savings and superannuation are working for them and their families. I believe that this bill quintessentially reflects the Liberal Party's values of personal choice and family. I am proud to support it, and I commend it to the house.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to give strong support to this bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, and compliment my colleague Senator Jane Hume for bringing it forward. I support this bill because it treats husbands and wives as the teams that they should be. I definitely try and do things with my wife. I love her greatly, and it's the greatest thing in my life to be part of her team, and we do everything together. I'm away from her a lot in this place, unfortunately, but I try and do everything together with her, and it does seem strange to me that we can't manage our retirement funds together.

What this bill does is allow husbands and wives, spouses, to work together on their retirement plans and to share the financial benefits that one or the other is able to achieve. I think most married couples who are earning money are putting money towards superannuation so they can help each other when they ultimately reach that retirement age. So we need to do more in our laws to treat a family as one unit, as together, because the more that our laws recognise that fact, the more, we would hope, those teams—those families—can stay together, and that's a good thing. Not all marriages can stay together. It's a little sad when marriages don't stay together. So the more we can have our tax laws, our superannuation laws and our family benefits laws treat families as one unit, the better it will be for Australian families and the stronger our whole country will be. It's good for children as well.

It's a very simple change. This bill would simply allow a spouse, one partner, to transfer superannuation to the other partner, and it uses the existing provisions of the superannuation law to do that. At the moment, you can transfer money between superannuation accounts in your own name—you have been able to do that for some time—and this law simply piggybacks on that mechanism to say, 'If this other account is in your spouse's name, you're able to make that transfer.'

When Senator Hume first mentioned it to me, it was one of those ideas where I felt, 'Why didn't I think of that first?' It seems so logical and so simple. Why haven't we done this already? Given that that's been, I think, the common reaction from my colleagues since Jane briefed us on it a week or so ago, it seems like: 'Let's pick it up, guys. Let's do it.' I hope the government and other parties aren't too proud to say, 'Just because someone from a different political party has come up with this idea—why not just do it and get this done? As I said, it's very simple and will help families manage their own finances.

It is an important issue that many others have raised in this place, and I heard Senator Collins raise it earlier—that there is a gap between the superannuation balances that men typically have and the superannuation balances that women typically have. Obviously, there are some natural reasons for that. Women often have to leave the workforce to look after children. I don't really want to say 'have to'. It's actually a great blessing to have children; it's the greatest thing you can do in your life. For me, it's been the greatest joy. But it does come with a sacrifice. Having children requires sacrifice, and quite often it is the mother, particularly of young children, that is left to leave the workforce while they have significant duties of breastfeeding and looking after the child. It's hard to maintain full-time work while that's happening.

That's certainly what happened in my family. We've had five beautiful children. We're very lucky. We made the decision early that it would be good, it would be nice, if my wife could stay home and look after the children when they were young. As I said, it came as a sacrifice to my wife's career. I have great admiration for the sacrifices she's made for us to do that. Of course, it came with a financial sacrifice as well. It's quite the opportunity cost, but we're lucky enough to be able to bear that. The consequence of that, of course, has meant that, as I've maintained full-time work and my wife has not, our superannuation balances have diverged. There's nothing I can do about it. It seems very strange to me that we have joint bank accounts, joint mortgages, joint credit cards—everything is together—but, when we calculate what we've got with superannuation balances, they're in separate names. If this bill passes—I'll make this public commitment to my wife right now—she's getting half or whatever I can do. I'll make sure it's equal because I see no reason why she shouldn't—she definitely deserves it—have half of what I've been able to earn in paid employment. That would—at least for our own family and I think for many Australian families—automatically fix the gender gap for superannuation.

As I said, there have been many contributions in this chamber about this issue. It's an issue that there is this gap between men and women in their superannuation balances. It's been, to date, a hard one to fix—because we continue to speak about it. If it is an easy fix, why hasn't it—I mean, it's just been done. As I said, there are some natural reasons it occurs. Here is an opportunity to, with effectively one stroke of the pen, solve this problem for many families. Not everybody will be able to do it; not everybody may do it. It's obviously going to be voluntary, but it would make a big dent, I would say, in the superannuation gap between men and women. So, again, why don't we just do it and get on with it? To me it seems so simple.

I do support this simple change which would help achieve the beneficial outcomes of equalising wealth between men and women in this country, but I also think—at some point, given how good this idea is—we should look at why people can't have a joint superannuation account. As I said, this bill doesn't quite do that. I still think we should do this one because it's simple and easy and can make a difference straight away. I have mentioned to Senator Hume, as we've been talking about this, that it would also be great to have a joint account. Why not? I've a joint bank account. I get paid my salary into an account my wife has full access to, and I've had no problems with that. Why can't I have a joint superannuation account with my wife where she automatically has equal footing with me without having to transfer or anything like that. I know that would be a more complex change to the superannuation law than what's before us today. That would take some time to work out. I believe we have accounts in the accumulation phase; I think there might be something in the draw-down phase. So yes, we're doing more work on that. But, again, anything we can do to unite Australian families, to unite wives and husbands, is a good thing, because we should be encouraging families to stick together through good times and bad.

This bill raises the broader question here about how our tax law and family law treat families. We have a strange situation now that I've always found quite bizarre. When you go to calculate your family benefits after you have children—you calculate whether you get FTBA or FTBB or some other different benefits—you have to put forward your joint income. You are assessed on your joint income. There's no problem with that. I don't have a problem with that; that's how it works. But when you go and put your tax form in every year, you have to file individually. Your tax status is not assessed on a joint basis. This leads to quite perverse outcomes in our tax system right now.

I use the opportunity to put on the record again how inequitable our tax system is in treating families with the same household income extremely differently. Take an example of two families, both with a total household income of $150,000 a year, and both with two kids. They're in the same financial situation and same family situation, but in one of those families, let's call it Family A, just one spouse is in full-time work and earns $150,000, and in Family B they both work; one spouse earns $100,000 and the other earns $50,000 in a part-time job. The families still have the same total income, but let's compare the tax outcomes of those two families. In the case of Family A, the single-income family, the tax bill comes in—I'm using round numbers—at roughly $40,000 a year. In the case of Family B, they split their income and file individually, and because of how that interacts with our progressive tax system they pay just $30,000 a year in tax. So you've got two families earning the same amount, with the same number of kids, and there is a $10,000-a-year difference in tax. It's not a small amount; $10,000 is a good family holiday every year. It's almost half of a reasonably priced car. That should be smacking us in the face—this inequality that should be fixed. On top of that, the Family B case is probably also accessing the childcare system when the spouse in part-time work is at work, and there are extra subsidies there as well. They can sometimes be $7,000 or $8,000 a year on top of the $10,000-a-year tax difference.

From my first day in this place, I've remarked on how strange that seems to be. There have been some fledgling attempts to fix this. I do think this bill, as I say, helps push the case to treat families equally, but we should look at fixing other inequalities in the system as well. At a time when our childcare system is already under enormous strain, we are effectively encouraging—forcing, in some senses, with the way our housing system works right now—families to both work and use an institutional childcare system, that's clearly putting enormous strain on that system, and it has led to some horrific examples of abuse of our youngest, most vulnerable Australians. It seems to me that it would make more sense here to recognise and encourage the work of what people refer to as stay-at-home mums. It would be better to reflect their value to our society in our tax system, and to courage them to keep doing the great work they do and take the pressure off our institutional childcare system so we can maintain higher standards than we have today.

People call them stay-at-home mums, but I hate that term. Whenever I have had to stay at home and look after my children, I invariably end the week thinking, 'Jeez, I can't wait to get back to work; it's a lot easier.' So I like to call my wife a work-at-home mum because she has been working at home since before it was cool. It's very, very hard. It's the most important work of any person. I am very proud to be a senator for Queensland and represent my country, but it is nothing in comparison to the value and worth of my wife and her role as a mother or my role as a father. Those professions are so much more important.

Indeed, as CS Lewis said, the homemaker is the ultimate profession because every other job in our society is in the service of them. Everything we do is to support our homes. Everything we do is to support the people who ultimately make our homes a beautiful place, who raise our children and who make our society the great place it is. Everything we are doing here is ultimately aimed at protecting those homes and providing health services and education services to those people in those homes, helping them have a job and provide for themselves. As much as our defence forces do great work and make sacrifices, ultimately what are they there for? They're there to defend our homes. Their job is to defend the homes of Australians. So they are in service of our homemakers, too.

I would just love to see us more regularly recognise the great value of those people who work so hard at home doing what is sometimes denigrated: 'If you just stay at home, you're not really contributing and not really working.' But it's the most important work. Reading a story to your children at night is the most important thing you'll do in any day. Sometimes getting angry at them because they've done the wrong thing, lashing out and maybe disciplining them is still really important because you need to teach them that there are certain ways of acting and certain ways of doing things.

Providing love to our children is the most important thing any of us can do during any day. I strongly support this bill because it makes a small step in recognising the great value and service of those people who make our homes.

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

I rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, a bill that is seeking to ensure we secure the retirement of vulnerable women across Australia. This is a critical issue, particularly in my home state of Tasmania.

In Hobart, this winter Richard and Jan Gould bought a former student boarding house with their own savings. They didn't buy it for profit. They bought it to give older women, many with modest super and nowhere to go, a safe home. But to these women it was a small place of their own—10 rooms of dignity, provided out of compassion. That is Tasmania at its best, and it is also Tasmania sounding an alarm about the gender superannuation gap and the risk of homelessness among older women. Older Tasmanian women are the fastest-growing group at risk of homelessness, and the Gould's project is a local, urgent answer to a national structural problem in super balances.

Across the state you'll meet women who did what families needed. They worked part time, cared for parents and stepped back when children arrived, and their partner's super kept growing while theirs stalled. By their 50s, the gap isn't an abstraction. Nationally, women retire with about a quarter less super than men do. On average, Tasmanian women have $30,000 less in their superannuation account compared to men. That shortfall is a rent payment not made, a power bill deferred, a dream downsized. And it is the reason that the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025 is so important.

The bill that has been introduced by my colleague Senator Hume looks to solve the problem in an ingenious way. It doesn't raise taxes, it doesn't spend public money and it doesn't make the system unfair. It simply allows people to use the money in the system and get it to where it needs to go, closing the gender gap in superannuation. The bill does something simple and powerful. It allows spouses to even up their super balances by rolling over an amount from the higher-balance partner to the lower-balance partner during the relationship, deliberately and with clear guardrails. It recognises that families make shared choices and should be able to share retirement security. It creates a voluntary once-per-year opportunity for a spouse to transfer part of their accumulated super to their partner's fund, up to a limit that equalises balances but never breaches the transfer balance cap.

The rollover keeps its concessional and non-concessional proportions. It's treated as a rollover, rather than as a new contribution, for tax purposes, and it's not available to defined benefit schemes or to accounts already in the retirement phase. It is a structural fix to a structural inequity, and it mirrors what already happens at the end of many relationships, when super is routinely split, letting couples do fairness at the start and middle, not just the end. The mechanism uses existing super law architecture, adds integrity measures and gives families a tool they can actually find and use.

While the gender pay gap in Tasmania has narrowed in recent years under the Liberal government, there is more work to be done. The Tasmania government's 2024-25 Gender Budget Statement reported a five per cent gap in May 2024, down from 8.3 per cent in May 2021. That is a testament to Tasmanian employers and workers, but a narrower pay gap does not erase the super gap that accumulates over decades of part-time work and career pauses. In Tasmania, the data has long pointed to the compounding issues such as women having a greater share of part-time work and caring roles. These are choices that are sometimes made out of necessity, but that necessity should not dictate the financial security of these women. Instead, we should welcome solutions that are simple, voluntary, and targeted at the actual mechanics of the gap. That is exactly what this bill does.

Debate interrupted.