Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That these bills be now read a second time.

I seek leave to have the second reading speeches incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech es read as follows—

TREASURY LAWS AMENDMENT (BUILDING A STRONGER AND FAIRER SUPER SYSTEM) BILL 2026

Today, we are really proud to be introducing the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026 to the House.

This is all about making Australia's super system stronger and more sustainable.

We are making superannuation fairer from top to bottom to help disability and aged-care workers, retail and hospitality staff, and early childhood educators and nurses get the secure retirement that they need and deserve.

This bill does two key things.

Firstly, it boosts the low-income superannuation tax offset, or LISTO.

This will make sure low-income workers receive a fairer tax concession on their super contributions.

It's another important part of our government's plan to help low-income workers earn more, keep more of what they earn and retire with more as well.

Secondly, the legislation will reform super tax concessions, so that they are better targeted for large balances.

From July next year, we will increase the maximum LISTO payment by $310 to $810, and raise the eligibility threshold from $37,000 to $45,000.

These reforms will help deliver a more secure retirement for 1.3 million Australians, the majority of them women.

It will mean the total number of Australians eligible for the LISTO will increase to 3.1 million people.

Our changes will benefit all workers with incomes between $28,000 and $45,000, with an average increase in LISTO payments of $410.

These workers could receive a benefit at retirement of around $15,000, depending on an individual's income over their career.

The LISTO eligibility threshold and maximum payment amount will also automatically adjust in line with any future changes to income tax thresholds and the superannuation guarantee rate.

This will ensure low-income workers receive a fairer tax concession on their super contributions to align with the government's third round of tax cuts taking effect in 2027.

The other part of this bill reduces tax concessions available to individuals with total superannuation balances above $3 million.

This measure will affect less than half a per cent of all Australians and will take effect from July this year.

It will mean the concessional tax rate applying to future earnings on balances between $3 million and $10 million will be a combined headline rate of 30 per cent.

Earnings corresponding to balances below $3 million will continue to be taxed at 15 per cent in the accumulation phase, and earnings will remain tax free in the retirement phase.

The concessional rate applying to future earnings on balances above $10 million will be 40 per cent.

Both the $3 million and the $10 million thresholds will be indexed.

These reforms maintain the concessional treatment of superannuation, but ensure it is provided in a more equitable and a more sustainable way.

Here, I want to thank the superannuation industry and the broader community for their engagement and feedback on this legislation. And I want to thank my colleagues in the Treasury ministers here and behind me in our team for all of the work that has gone into these important changes.

Together, these changes will maintain concessional tax treatment for super across the board.

They make the system more sustainable by better targeting concessions for the biggest balances to help fund more super for people with the smallest balances.

Voting against this bill would be a vote against a fairer super system.

It would be a vote against more super for Australians on the lowest incomes.

And it would be a vote for bigger tax breaks for those who already have millions in their super.

The Australian Labor Party built our superannuation system.

And this bill is another important part of our agenda to make it stronger and fairer and more sustainable.

It's why we've legislated the objective of super—to provide income for a secure retirement.

We've increased the superannuation guarantee so it's finally reached 12 per cent.

We're paying super on government paid parental leave to help close the gender gap in retirement savings.

We've legislated payday superannuation starting from July this year.

We've expanded the coverage of the superannuation performance test from around 80 products to more than 800.

We've legislated to align financial reporting requirements by funds with those of public companies.

We've also announced mandatory service standards and we're reforming the retirement phase of superannuation as well.

And today we're introducing this legislation to better target superannuation tax concessions and increase the LISTO.

Our superannuation system is the envy of the world.

And these changes will make it even stronger and even fairer so it continues to deliver a more secure retirement for millions of working Australians today and into the future.

Full details of the measure are contained in the explanatory memorandum.

SUPERANNUATION (BUILDING A STRONGER AND FAIRER SUPER SYSTEM) IMPOSITION BILL 2026

Today I am also introducing the Superannuation (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Imposition Bill 2026.

This bill works in conjunction with the Treasury Laws Amendment (Building a Stronger and Fairer Super System) Bill 2026 to make our super system stronger, fairer and more sustainable.

For all of the reasons I outlined in my speech on that bill, I commend it to the House.

Full details, once again, of the measure are contained in the explanatory memorandum.

Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to 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.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The tax system in Australia is completely and utterly broken. For how abjectly broken our tax system is, exhibit A is the fact that the worst way to get ahead in our country now is to go to work every day to earn a living, and the best way to get ahead is to be so wealthy that you've accumulated a mountain of assets and you simply live off the proceeds of buying and selling those assets without lifting a finger to do productive work in this country. If you are a nurse, a cleaner, a bartender or a plumber, and you go to work every day, you are paying double the tax of someone who makes the same amount of money buying and selling properties. Let that sink in. That is how completely and utterly broken our tax system is. This is why economic inequality and wealth inequality are spiralling in Australia, because the super wealthy are getting even more rich while working Australians are working harder and harder and getting left further and further behind, because wages are not keeping up with inflation let alone the spiralling cost of mortgages, rents and real property in this country.

This legislation, 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, unfortunately does not change this equation. As an example, a superannuation account with $5 million in it—by the way, no working Australian who hasn't been able to rely on inherited wealth or significant capital investment, no working Australian who is simply going to work and putting in their usual superannuation contribution out of their wages, can ever hope to have a superannuation account worth $5 million. But as an example, you've got five million bucks in your superannuation account and you're an extremely wealthy Australian. It will still, even after this legislation passes, only face a tax rate of 14 per cent on capital gains, while someone who is a bartender or nurse working part-time, earning $20,000, will face a tax rate of 16c for every extra dollar earned over 20,000 bucks. Let that sink in: even after this legislation, someone with $5 million in their superannuation account will pay less tax than a nurse or a cleaner who works part-time and earns $20,000 a year. How cooked is our tax system? You could stick a fork in it and it would come out dry. It is completely and utterly cooked.

Under the changes in this tax bill, those holding the 10 biggest superannuation accounts in the country, which average $423 million, will still face a lower rate of tax, when they sell shares or investment properties, than every full-time worker in this country, including those on the minimum wage. How cooked is our tax system that the 10 Australians with the biggest superannuation accounts, averaging $423 million, will pay a lower rate of tax than the nearly three million Australians who are going to work and earning the minimum wage.

I might add, as an aside: that there would be even one superannuation account with a balance of $423 million shows how far away from its original intended purpose our superannuation system has drifted over the decades. It was brought in by then treasurer Paul Keating as a mechanism to provide for a dignified retirement for working Australians, and that is a good thing. That is an absolutely desirable objective, and, by and large, the original design of the superannuation system actually delivered on that aim. What we have seen over the ensuing decades, though—mostly, I might add, under coalition governments—is that original aim, that original system designed to provide for a dignified retirement for working Australians, change completely into a wealth-management and estate-planning vehicle. That's why we've got people with hundreds of millions of dollars in their superannuation accounts. No-one needs hundreds of millions of dollars to have a dignified retirement in Australia. The reason we've got superannuation scheme accounts worth hundreds of millions of dollars is that people are using the obscene tax breaks to manage their wealth and plan their estate. No wonder there is so much frustration amongst Australian workers, who are working harder and harder and falling further and further behind. Some people are working two, three or even four jobs, watching their wages decline in real terms and watching the great Australian dream of owning their own home disappear off into the never-never.

What the examples I've been through today show clearly is that this bill does not structurally solve any of the great wealth inequality and tax inequality issues facing Australia today. It is tinkering at the edges in classic Labor fashion. But it does tax multimillionaires just a tiny bit more, and that is a good thing. At the moment the superwealthy Australians using their superannuation as a sophisticated tax shelter are paying only 10 per cent tax on capital gains. This bill increases that, which is one of the reasons the Greens will support it. The bill marginally increases the tax that some of the wealthiest Australians will pay. Critically, it will deliver more retirement income to low-income earners, through the low-income superannuation tax offset, or LISTO. Importantly, two-thirds of the people that will benefit from the LISTO are women, who already face significant disparity in their earnings and their retirement savings, compared to men.

So the Greens will support this bill unamended, but I want to be very clear. We are supporting this bill as a down payment on broad, deep, ambitious and progressive tax reform, and we expect to see that broad, deep, ambitious and progressive tax reform in Labor's upcoming budget. There is a massive Labor majority, a stonking majority, in the House of Representatives, and Labor plus the Greens is enough to deliver any legislation through the Senate. The opposition is an absolute rabble, and the numbers are there in both houses of this current parliament for broad, deep, ambitious and progressive tax reform as long as the Labor Party is prepared to show courage and ambition. The only obstacle to genuinely deep, progressive and ambitious tax reform in the upcoming budget is Labor's political courage.

On behalf of the millions upon millions of Australians who are being done over by our current tax system, which is designed to favour the one per cent, the super-rich, the superwealthy in this country, I say this and the Greens say this. We cannot afford to waste three more years tinkering at the margins with bills like this one. If and when this bill passes, superannuation will still be used by the megawealthy as a tax shelter, a tax dodge, and for estate planning. However, this bill does allow and provide for some small, stuttering steps in the right direction in terms of increasing the taxation rates on the superwealthy and super-large superannuation accounts, and it does, critically, deliver more retirement to low-income earners through the LISTO.

But I want to leave senators with this thought. Our tax system—capital gains tax, negative gearing and the way that taxes operate in relation to trusts, superannuation and share dividends compared to the way we heavily tax income from work—is turbocharging intergenerational inequality. Young people are getting absolutely done over by our tax system. They are loaded up with HECS debt, the dream of owning a home is disappearing off into the never-never and they are watching superwealthy people who have already had a good crack at it and have accumulated mountains of assets get taxed far too lightly, while they, young people, who are massively overrepresented in the workforce, are paying more and more tax, working harder and harder and falling farther and farther behind.

Just to take the capital gains tax discount, only four per cent of the benefit of the capital gains tax discount goes to people under 35. It is an intergenerational disgrace. It is diabolical for young people. Along with so many other elements in the tax system, it's biased towards older Australians and wealthy Australians and biased against younger Australians, poorer Australians and working Australians.

This bill won't meaningfully correct the trajectory we are on, but it is a small step in the right direction. The genuine opportunity for the Australian Labor Party is the upcoming budget. The Greens have been very clear that we expect to see delivered in this budget strong, deep, progressive, meaningful tax reform that benefits young people, that benefits working Australians and that makes the one per cent, the superwealthy, pay their fair share of tax.

Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to 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.

Matt O'Sullivan (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Choice in Childcare and Early Learning) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Hume, I'm compelled to move on to the next item of our business, which is two-minute statements. You will be in continuation.