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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, and I commend Senator Hume for bringing forward this very important private senator's bill. It's something that I wholeheartedly support, and I encourage the Senate to do so. This bill works to ensure that the retirement outcomes for women and families are fairer and more flexible. The tackling the gender super gap bill 2025 is designed to address one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in the super system, the gender superannuation gap. In August 2025, a Super Members Council report said:

Women across Australia continue to miss out on super due to time spent out of the paid workforce to care for children and other family members. This contributes to an overall gender gap in super balances, which leads to working women in Australia retiring with a quarter less super than men.

This structural inequity also means women suffer more acutely from the scourge of unpaid super. The smaller your balance, the bigger a difference each dollar of unpaid super makes.

Missing out on super—which is a legal workplace entitlement in Australia—dramatically erodes women's super by retirement, magnifies existing inequity, and erodes women's future financial security.

The report highlights that the average affected working woman misses out on $1,300 in super each year, which can lead to more than $26,000 less in their retirement savings for that typical worker.

Labor's solution was to pay super on paid parental leave, investing $1.1 billion over four years. This was something that we supported, but it really doesn't go far enough to address the inequality that exists between women and men in relation to superannuation balances when it comes to their retirement. The paid parental leave measure will address the superannuation of women having children in the future, but it will not help women beyond child-bearing age. While estimates vary, women retire with significantly lower super balances—between 20 and 25 per cent lower—than men. The gap is worse for older women approaching retirement. That is to say that the change in relation to paid parental leave, while obviously welcome for young women having children, is not something that is going to assist older women at all. The gap is worse for older women when they approach retirement: 47.8 per cent for women aged between 55 and 59, and 42 per cent for women in the 50-to-54 and 60-to-64 age brackets.

The bill that Senator Hume has introduced will help to close the gender super gap by giving the partner with a higher balance, typically the spouse—a man—the option to transfer some of their balance to their partner to even up the accounts. The bill creates a simple and voluntary mechanism allowing couples to split their collective superannuation balances evenly during their relationship on an ongoing annual basis. Currently there is only one mechanism to make contributions on behalf of the spouse. This has an astonishingly low take-up, with only 1.1 per cent of Australians using it in 2021-22. Equitable splitting of superannuation balances is only currently considered in divorce proceedings. This bill uses the existing mechanisms already in place—that is, rollover with the standard form and recognised tax treatments—and it applies it proactively. If the economic partnership at the heart of most families is recognised in divorce by splitting super balances, then why shouldn't we allow the option of recognising it while the couple is still together? Splitting super balances using a rollover from one fund to another is a genuine structural change.

I might add that this could have the desired impact of helping to reduce the friction that often is there when couples are going through difficult times. When you take out the financial difficulty that a woman would face in terms of considering what her future would be like if they were to split from the relationship and whether or not there would be some sort of equitable settlement at the divorce and they can deal with that at the outset without having to go all the way through to divorce, it might actually give the couple a chance to be able to resolve their differences or potentially even reconcile the relationship and work it out without having that additional financial burden that often raises the tension within a household. This could have quite a significant impact, at least in addressing that disparity that often exists. Anything we can do to keep families together, particularly when there isn't domestic violence involved and there's simply a split that's occurring and friction within the relationship, is good for families. This could be a measure that couples could start while things are quite amicable and they're getting along. They say, 'This is the arrangement we're going to make to split our super,' potentially safeguarding against any future difficulty that could come as a result of that financial pressure. It's just a thought.

As we know, women are generally more likely to take career breaks or work part time, making noble and necessary sacrifices for the wellbeing of their families. If the super system does not reflect the value of the work that mothers do outside of the workforce, the gap will only continue to grow. As I've said already, the government has introduced superannuation on paid parental leave. It does not cover the nuances of every Australian mother's potential circumstances. After those six months of parental leave conclude, some mothers may not wish to return to full-time work or may return to a flexible arrangement as agreed with their employer. Families might get the paid parental leave for their first child, but, if they're having children in quick succession, then they have quite a period outside of work. They're not re-entering the workforce for a long enough period to be re-eligible for the paid parental leave, therefore they don't also get that benefit.

As an aside, something I think that we really should be looking at is the flexibility of the Paid Parental Leave scheme, the eligibility of that and making sure that we're not actually disadvantaging families that want to be able to have multiple children—which we need to have in this country, by the way. We've reduced our birthrate in Australia to 1.4 children per woman. There's a lot of talk about intergenerational economic impacts. One of the biggest intergenerational economic impacts that we have is that we're not replacing ourselves. We're not going to have a population coming in behind us to help us, particularly as we get older and end up needing the care of those that are younger than us. We're not going to have the population coming in behind us in the economy. These things are also important for those reasons.

Many households make decisions in relation to their finances, and they're not made lightly. Families weigh the needs of their children, workplace flexibility and financial pressures before deciding what arrangement works best for them. In many cases, part-time work and an extended break from the workforce is the best option for families with children in their formative years of life. With my role as choice in child care shadow minister, I now talk daily to families across the country who are saying to us: 'We want greater choice and flexibility. The current system is too rigid. It locks us into a particular path.' That path works for a lot of families, but it doesn't work for all.

For those that want to make that active choice, a choice that should be encouraged and supported in this country, to spend more time at home supporting their families—we should be doing everything we can to make sure that those families have got that support. It's not the choice that everyone's going to make, but for those that want to make that choice we need to make sure that the system is best set up for them, and why not allow people to use their own money to help provide that choice and flexibility? That's my view. It ensures, if we pass this bill, that mothers are not financially disadvantaged in retirement because they choose to prioritise the care and wellbeing of their families during the key stages of life. This is a role that cannot be replaced.

The ABS data shows that nearly 800,000 people—791,100 women—who experience violence by a previous partner while living together were pregnant at some point during their relationship. Heartbreakingly, 42 per cent of those women experienced violence during their pregnancy, including 17 per cent who experience violence for the first time while pregnant. These are devastating figures, and every one of those women is deserving of safety and security. The bill looks to develop that financial security for them. It helps to ensure that perpetrators cannot completely financially isolate their victims or set up for long-term financial disadvantage. Many women who have experienced economic abuse also experience reduced workforce participation or interruptions to their careers altogether as a result of that coercive control.

The HILDA survey, which studied a nationally representative group of women aged 18 to 64 showed that women who had experienced physical violence experienced an average loss of $3,180 compared to pre-violence earnings. This bill is protecting those women, too. It recognises that the temporary harm inflicted by those perpetrators should not have a permanent effect on a woman's quality of retirement. No woman should be subject to retirement insecurity owing to circumstances of violence and abuse. This bill is not just a retirement policy; it's a women's safety, dignity and autonomy policy.

Labor like to say that they invented superannuation, but it took a coalition government to make superannuation work for members by giving them the right to choose their superannuation fund. Instead of unions and super fund managers, individuals now have that choice. We want to provide that choice, through this bill, for families and couples to be able to work out their financial arrangements without the restrictions that are currently there. This bill provides more flexibility and it makes it fairer, particularly for women, making sure their hard-earned savings in superannuation are working for them and their families, not for Labor and their Labor mates.

Given some of the changes announced by the Treasurer last night, it would not be surprising if he decides to come after our superannuation next. The government is running out of money to spend. It needs another nest egg to attack. In 2024, the Treasurer said that he thought the $4 trillion super pool should help fund major economic and structural shifts, then he flagged it should be used for investment into housing. The Treasurer is confused. He thinks Australia's $4.3 trillion super industry is his money to repurpose. It's not his lotto ticket to fix other debt issues that he has created. We saw them come after Australians' wealth and equity last night in the budget. I've got no doubt that, if they had their chance at the next budget, we would see some changes in relation to superannuation. He is now intent on watering down the performance test so it can be vested outside of its current parameters. Labor wants to move to goalposts and make it easier for super funds to invest in projects that are Labor election commitments in energy and housing. The problem is that these projects don't stack up financially, otherwise super funds would already be invested in them.

This bill is all about providing that flexibility and that choice for families. This is their money. Superannuation funds are not the government's money. They're not a plaything of the government. This is about individuals and families. This bill is putting that choice as to who holds the balance of that super into the hands of couples—men and women, women and women, no matter what it is—to be able to provide that flexibility between each other. We think that is an honourable thing to do. I again commend Senator Hume for providing this bill for us to consider, and I hope we would see it supported by this Senate. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They can when they divorce.

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

Indeed, they can when they divorce. So why can't they make the choice to do that beforehand?

It makes me think about last night's budget. It makes me think about the many broken promises. It makes me think about the increased taxes. It makes me think about the higher debt—indeed, we will have some $1 trillion in debt next year. It makes me think about the declining living standards that Australians are facing every single day in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. And it makes me think about the fewer houses that Australians have and how that has impacted both the costs of mortgages and rents and the ability for people to access the housing market.

We make everything harder than it needs to be. This is a way to make one thing simpler: to make a decision about your own money and how you allocate that as a family unit between your super accounts. I can't understand why this government won't consider that. I don't understand why they don't see that this is an opportunity to provide additional security for a lower income earning partner—and, let's face it, that is usually a woman. Why is there a barrier to that? What is the systemic issue where you say you shouldn't be able to do that? What is the problem with this? Who will end up worse off? The super funds will still get their fees, the funds remain in a superannuation account—they haven't been taken out—and a family gets to make a decision about something that works best for them.

The only thing that I can think of that is that there's a view that there might be an ability to tax less on the lower balance account, so they don't want to see a distribution from the higher account to the lower account. That means that this is about the culture of this government that just wants to tax you more. Why do they—actually, that might be wrong. I think it's not that they want to tax you more; they have to tax you more because they have spent so much, they have lost control of our economy. They don't know what to do and how to plug those holes, so they have to tax you more. This is another thing that they do not want to consider.

We know that this is a historic pattern with Labor governments in this country. When they run out of your money, they come and ask you for more—or not ask you but come and get more of it via taxes. They come and get more. We can't forget that this government went to the election, in the lead-up to 2022, saying that there would be no changes to super and no new taxes. But the moment they were elected, they reneged on that promise and immediately announced an unindexed tax on unrealised capital gains. We know what that is: a tax on money you don't have yet but you might have in the future. 'We're going to calculate it on the basis that you're going to get it, but if things go wrong and you actually don't earn that money and we've taxed you on it and you lose that money, we're not going to give you the tax back.' That's what they wanted to do—an entirely unworkable proposition that was absurd and would see young people starting out on even average incomes today paying more and more tax into the future on top of the fact that they would never be able to afford to own their own home.

That is the culture of this government, and, frankly, we need to create a circuit breaker for it. It can't continue. Australians cannot continue to pay the price of this government and its inability to manage our economy. We need to draw a line in the sand and say Australians have a right to make choices about their own lives and their own money, and this is an example of that. If Australian couples wish to split their super amongst themselves, then they should be allowed to do it. They should be allowed to do it at a time of their own choosing, when it best suits their needs and when it best suits the needs of their family because—guess what? If their family were to break down, then it gets split anyway. So why can't they do it at the time of their own choosing? I'd like the government to be able to answer that question. I'd like them to explain to Australians why this is yet another decision that's been taken out of their hands, why this government won't allow families to make choices about their own lives, about superannuation, about child care and about aged care. This government wants to have control but has no idea what it's doing.

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on this private senator's bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025. I commend Senator Hume, who put this bill into this place, and it gives me great pleasure to follow on from the spectacular contribution that we just heard from Senator Kovacic about why this bill is really important. It's really important to Australia, but, most particularly, it's really important to Australian women. Tackling the gender super gap is a really important thing and something that I think we should all be trying to do, because the gender super gap is a reflection of the fact that Australian women, on average, throughout their lifetimes, earn less than men, so, by the very nature of that, they are likely to have less superannuation.

We believe that it is our job as legislators here in this place to work to tackle that super gap to make sure that Australian women have the same opportunities at retirement that Australian men have, because we believe that we need to make sure that our superannuation system is fairer. We need to make sure that our superannuation system is more flexible and we need to make sure that our superannuation system has the capacity to respond to the realities of the challenges that Australians and Australian women face in their everyday lives. This particular bill is a practical reform measure that enables families' retirement incomes to better reflect the collective decisions that families make throughout their working lives on their journey through life as families.

As I said, your superannuation balance is a reflection of what you earn throughout your working life, and the reality is—it's not just an assumption; it's not just something we're saying here; these are the facts that our borne out by the statistics—that women are likely to earn less during their lives than men. They're more likely to work part time than men. They're more likely to take time out of the workforce when they're raising children, and they're more likely to take on caring responsibilities that affect their lifetime ability to earn and their retirement savings. This is what we sometimes refer to as the motherhood penalty, but it is a penalty that implicates women throughout their working lives, and the consequences are quite profound.

For older women who are approaching retirement, it is even worse. We see that, on average, women are retiring with a gap of between 20 and 25 per cent in their retirement savings when compared to men. But for older women, who haven't had the luxury of having superannuation guaranteed for their entire lives, we're actually seeing a much higher discrepancy, with the retirement superannuation gap at almost 48 per cent. The concerning thing is that, over the last decade, we have barely seen that gap change.

Unfortunately, this is contributing to the fact that women over 55 are now the fastest growing cohort experiencing homelessness in Australia. The government acknowledges this problem. I don't often quote the Prime Minister because I don't very often agree with anything the Prime Minister says, but I have to say that the Prime Minister was absolutely right when he said:

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

I think we all should be able to agree with that. Senator Gallagher, the Minister for Women, has also acknowledged that one-third of the gender pay gap can be attributed to the time women spend caring for families throughout their lives and the interruption that makes to full-time work. The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has himself admitted that women retire with about 25 per cent less savings than their male counterparts. Clearly, we absolutely agree with the statements of those three people, but the question that we need to ask today is: what is the government prepared to do about it?

This bill is something that we've put forward as a practical measure to do something about the problems that the government acknowledges exist. Labor's response so far has been to pay superannuation on paid parental leave. Whilst that's great—this is a policy that is worth about $1.1 billion over the four years—and might slightly improve women's retirement savings, it does very little in terms of the broader issue that is before us.

This bill seeks to take a different approach. It's structural, it's practical, and it's a measure that is before us that we can do something about today. It recognises the economic partnership that exists between women and men and in Australian families, however they are made up. It creates a simple voluntary mechanism by which families can distribute or split the superannuation that they're earning across the couples throughout their lives. It gives the person in the relationship who has the higher balance the ability to provide additional savings to the person in the relationship who has the lower balance.

This bill, importantly, uses mechanisms that already exist within the superannuation system. There is only a limited mechanism in terms of contributions to be made on behalf of a spouse. So far, we have seen a very low uptake of those provisions. Weirdly, contemplation of superannuation becomes very live when a relationship breaks down and you head to the courts for divorce. The obvious question this raises is: why on earth, if you can do this when you divorce, can you not do it when you are together? If we can recognise it when people are breaking up a relationship, surely we can recognise it when people are in a relationship.

So this bill applies existing rollover mechanisms proactively rather than retrospectively, but it has a whole heap of safeguards attached to it as well. The bill is not available for transfers from or to defined benefit schemes. It's not available to people already in pension and drawdown phases. Individuals can have only one superannuation account. There are clear limitations on the amount that can be transferred. The original fund balance cannot drop below the receiving fund's balance after the transfer, and the receiving fund cannot exceed the transfer balance cap. As an example, if one spouse had $300,000 and another spouse had $150,000, the maximum rollover would be $75,000, which would give each of the two partners $225,000 super each. Likewise, if one spouse had over $5 million in super and the other spouse had only $500,000, it would be capped so that the receiving balance could not exceed the transfer cap.

There are a number of other integrity measures that would be built into the system that this bill seeks to implement. The split amount retains its original concession—the non-concessional characteristics. Transfers are treated as a rollover, not a contribution, ensuring that the tax arrangements are not disadvantageous.

This isn't about tax minimisation, and it's not about gaming the system. It's about fairness, and it's about recognising that unpaid care that underpins so many Australian families is important. Today, with this bill, we recognise that importance. It's about giving families the flexibility to manage their retirement savings in a way that reflects their shared decision-making throughout their lives together.

I think the coalition has a very strong record in this space. In fact, in 2021 the Women's Budget Statement outlined practical reforms to improve women's workforce participation and economic security—real retirement outcomes for Australian women. We invested in more affordable child care to help women return to the workforce and increase their hours. We removed the $450 super threshold so that low-income earners and part-time workers could accumulate superannuation in the same way everybody else could. We've funded women's safety initiatives, workplace participation measures and leadership opportunities.

We also, as part of our superannuation reforms—to make sure that they were fairer, more transparent and more effective in working for Australians—capped fees on low balances, banned fees on rollovers in investment switches, made insurance opt in for young Australians and introduced catch-up concessional contributions to help women who had taken time out of the workforce. We also introduced the bring-forward rule and the downsizer contributions. Today, Australians will be retiring with more because of the coalition reforms, but that needs to continue to improve.

Quite frankly, too often Labor treats Australians' retirement savings as if they are its money and are some sort of honey pot for government and political projects. We are already starting to see the Labor Party try and water down some of the strong provisions that we put in place, reforms that were designed to keep super funds accountable to members. We've seen Labor break promises on superannuation taxes. We've also seen proposals designed to shift superannuation away from its core purpose—that is, to deliver dignity and security for Australians in retirement. The fundamental difference between us and the Labor Party is we believe that your superannuation savings belong to you, and this bill is designed to make sure that we provide you with, once again, fairness, flexibility and the ability to reflect the reality of your lives by allowing you to split your superannuation within your family during your working life, making sure that we don't continue to see women disadvantaged when it comes to superannuation savings.

Tackling the gender super gap is the next step in making sure that superannuation is more flexible and fairer, particularly for women. Unfortunately, we continue to see often that this government says one thing and does something else, so we're saying to you: 'Don't say something and do something else when it comes to supporting women. Make sure they have as great equity when it comes to their superannuation balances at retirement as their male counterparts do.'

Last night's budget was a classic example of the government being quite happy to go out there and say something that they themselves know isn't true; it sounds good, but in reality it's actually not true. Last night, Labor made an incredible number of great, big promises, and the announcement's fine, but you've actually got to deliver. Last night we heard a whole heap about housing and about getting young people into housing, but even their very budget papers tell you that what they're attempting to do, with the changes they announced last night, will actually result in higher rents and fewer houses and make it harder for young people to save for a housing deposit. I'm not quite sure which part of that is actually delivering for Australians.

We have got an opportunity today, with this particular bill, for the government to put their money where their mouth is. If you genuinely believe that we want to break down the gender pay gap, which is the contributing factor to great discrepancies between men's and women's superannuation balances, then you should be prepared to back and support the bill that we have before us here today. It provides real and practical measures in order for us to do something to make a difference on the pay gaps and the superannuation balance gaps that we're seeing between men and women at retirement.

I would say this to the government: instead of trying to pit generations of Australians against each other and instead of lying to Australians about the outcomes that are likely to be achieved by measures that sound good at announcement but actually, in reality, do the complete opposite of what they're saying, why don't you do something that already has been done for you? It's been designed for you and it's already sitting here in front of you. I don't think anybody in the Labor Party could pick a hole in what this very practical piece of legislation is trying to achieve. Why don't you support the legislation and demonstrate to the women of Australia that you are prepared to do what it takes for them to be able to have an equity proposition when it comes to their retirement savings?

Superannuation sharing seems like a very small measure that you would be able to take. It's a very small gesture to say that you're not going to be bloody minded and disagree with this legislation just because it's been put forward by the coalition. Recognise the fact that this legislation is good, because even your prime minister, your minister for women and your treasurer have all acknowledged that there is a problem. Here is a practical solution, and I encourage you to support it.

Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to have the opportunity to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025 put forward by Senator Hume. The money in superannuation belongs to the owner of the super fund. The reaction should be about benefiting the investor, not the government, not the super fund—the investor. But Labor sees the money in super funds as something it can tinker with. It's going to have to find a way to plug the $3 trillion hole that its economic mismanagement has opened up. We know from their record that you can't trust them on anything. They don't do what they say they're going to do. They backflip and call it everything else. They don't like the word 'cuts', even though that's what they are. They don't like the fact that they're saddling Australians with an immense amount of debt, but you can't cover that up because it's Labor that's been in government for the last four years. This is owned by their economic mismanagement.

The bill is designed to tackle one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in the super system: the gender super gap. It continues the good work of the coalition in government to improve retirement outcomes by making superannuation fairer and more flexible, particularly for women and families. Many women run small businesses. This bill will help them. Many women take time out of work to stay with their children. This bill will help them. Many women find themselves with a relationship separation later in life for a range of reasons. This bill will help them. The evidence is clear, but, as we know, it doesn't matter what the evidence says. Labor is driven by ideology. Don't get in the way of that.

Women's experiences of work are very different from those of men. They're less likely to earn the money that men earn. They take time out of the workforce to raise children. They work part time. They take lower paying jobs to accommodate caring responsibilities, often referred to as the 'motherhood penalty'. That's a reality. That's been my experience, too. While estimates vary, women retire with significantly lower super balances than men—between 20 and 25 per cent lower. The gap is worse for older women approaching retirement: 47.8 per cent for women aged 55 to 59, and 42 per cent for women in the 50 to 54 and 60 to 64 age brackets. Over nearly a decade, that data has hardly changed. A woman who has worked hard and finds herself single should be able to re-establish herself after circumstances she might or might not have had control of. It's the women of Australia that will benefit from this bill, but Labor doesn't see them.

This policy will help close the gender super pay gap by giving the partner with the higher balance, typically men, the option to transfer some of their balance to their partner to even up the accounts. The bill creates a simple and voluntary mechanism allowing couples to split their collective superannuation balances evenly during their relationship, on an ongoing annual basis. It also allows them to maintain the integrity of the superannuation system because it includes several guardrails and limitations. This is not a reckless idea. This is a sensible idea that should be adopted.

The limitations are that it's not available for transfers from or to a defined benefit scheme, nor is it available to those already in a pension or draw-down phase, meaning a spouse's funds must be in the accumulation phase. Individuals can have only one superannuation account. There are also limitations on the amount that can be rolled over.

It's a structural change focused on splitting balances rather than relying on clunky existing contribution mechanisms. Currently, there is only a mechanism to make contributions on behalf of a spouse; however, its take-up is astonishingly low, with only 1.1 per cent of Australians using it in 2021-22. While equitable splitting of superannuation balances is currently considered only in divorce proceedings, this bill uses those existing mechanisms, such as rollovers with standard forms and recognised tax treatments, and applies them proactively.

Let me tell you about the coalition's record on superannuation. In the nine years the coalition were in government we made superannuation fairer, more efficient and more transparent. Australians will retire with more because of the reforms the coalition made to super. We capped fees on low balances; banned fees on rollovers and investment switches; made expensive insurance premiums opt-in rather than opt-out for young people; abolished the 450 rule—a deliberate design feature of super that Labor had embedded in 1992—so that low-income earners and women in particular accumulate super like everyone else; and allowed non-PAYG income to be used for contributions below the concessional limit, to attract tax deductions so that the self-employed can take advantage of super in the same way wage earners do—and we know, because women are significant operators of small business, that that will be particularly attractive to women.

We introduced catch-up contributions so that anyone who has not used their full concessional contribution cap can roll up five years of unused concessions, helping women who have taken time out of the workforce. We introduced the bring-forward rule so that three future years worth of non-concessional contributions can be made in any one year. We introduced the downsizer contribution that allows a couple selling their family home to put the proceeds into super—up to 300,000 per person or 600,000 per couple—without breaching any caps.

Labor like to say that they invented superannuation. But it took a coalition government to make superannuation work for members instead of unions and super fund managers. I said earlier in my speech in this parliament that super is there for the people that earnt it, not for the super funds and not for the Labor Party to use it as their honey pot to prop up the next bright idea. It is there for the benefit of the people who earned it, and its only purpose should be to maximise returns to the person that worked hard for it.

We all know that, when Labor run out of money, they come after yours. Yes, we saw that last night in the budget. We saw that Australians will pay an extra $50 billion in taxes over the next four years. The budget last night was full of broken promises, higher taxes, more debt, lower living standards and fewer homes for Australians. It's exactly what Australians don't need.

Labor wants to move the goalposts to make it easier for super funds to invest in projects that are Labor election commitments in energy and housing. The problem is they don't stack up financially; otherwise, the super funds would already be investing in them. The only projects that super funds should be investing in are funds that will maximise returns to the hardworking investors that earnt those funds. Even with the record revenues from inflation-driven bracket creep and high commodity prices, Labor still can't manage the budget.

I wish to thank Senator Hume for this bill to make super fairer for women. It's an important bill; it supports women.

Sarah Henderson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Digital Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the (Tackling the Gender Super Gap) Bill 2025, a very important bill being brought forward by Senator Hume, which is all about fairness to tackle one of the most persistent and unfair challenges in the super system: the gender super gap. This government says it cares about women. Well, if it cares about women, it will support this bill because this bill is about fairness. This bill is about giving women a leg-up—particularly those who have not worked for all of their adult life, because they were raising children and raising their families. It continues the very good work of the coalition in government to improve retirement outcomes and make superannuation fairer and more flexible, particularly for women and families.

Boy oh boy, I contrast this bill with the shocker of a budget handed down last night—a budget of broken promises, higher taxes, more debt, lower living standards and fewer homes for all Australians; a budget that cripples older Australians; a budget that is fundamentally unfair. It confirms that this incompetent prime minister is only interested in taxing Australians out of any sort of certain future, particularly for their retirement. What a disgrace at a time when older Australians and younger Australians need hope. They need incentives to invest in their future. This is an assault on aspiration. Already this morning, the airwaves, the newspapers and social media are full of people saying: 'Why would I want to start up a business in this country? Why would I want to invest in this country? Why would I want to bank on this government when it does this to us?'

This shocking budget is in stark contrast to the gender super gap bill that we're debating this morning, which is all about fairness and all about justice. It gives spouses the option to split their collective superannuation balances evenly between them on an ongoing annual basis. It makes the superannuation system fairer for women. It gives women confidence in their retirements, in their futures and in their families. It gives women the confidence to say: 'Yes, I can properly take time off work to raise my children and stay at home. We don't have to, as a family, both be working full time just to pay the bills and make ends meet.' If this bill is passed, we will have a superannuation system that supports families.

Look at what families are enduring now in this country. Last night's budget just made things so much tougher. It made things so much more difficult for families. The cost of living is killing families. You go to the supermarket, and people are walking around in a daze. They cannot believe the cost of food or the cost of bills. Electricity, gas and power are up some 40 per cent, and now there's this horrendous budget. I heard the Treasurer talking this morning about how debt is going down and how this is a responsible budget. What a joke. This budget confirms that Labor cannot manage money. We're facing a decade of deficits worth $150 billion. We're just about to go over $1 trillion in debt, and this budget confirms that we are heading towards $1.25 trillion of debt at a time when we are being hit with so much unfairness and so many broken promises on negative gearing and on capital gains tax, which is going to mean fewer houses delivered in this country. What a joke! This government is crippling young Australians. They have the same right to invest in their futures. At the very least, after what this government is doing to this country, this government could support this bill, because superannuation is fundamental to the security of every Australian.

I cannot even believe that any Australian now has any confidence in anything that this lying government says. How can anyone have confidence with the lies that we've heard from Labor, the lies left, right and centre? It is a shocking betrayal of Australians. This bill elevates women. This bill elevates families. This bill makes it fairer. This bill needs to be passed by this Senate. Superannuation balances—

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

Thank you, Senator Henderson. The time for consideration of this matter has expired.