Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on this matter of public importance which has been moved by my friend the member for Casey. It is on a very important issue, which is the ongoing negative impact of the government's superannuation tax rises. When you get out into the community, as I did last weekend, what you find is enormous concern about what the Labor Party are doing, yet again: shifting the goal posts on superannuation. And it is one of the commonest things that you hear from self-funded retirees and people who are approaching retirement: they just want some certainty and some stability in the area of superannuation.

Superannuation is a very important part of our retirement income framework. What we have is a system whereby you have an old age pension, which is targeted, income tested and asset tested; you have the compulsory superannuation; and you have additional savings on top of that. The old age pension is the ultimate safety net. But the important thing is that for most people it is going to be compulsory superannuation—but that will not be enough to retire on; what you need is incentives for voluntary contributions to super to ensure that as many as possible can look after their own retirement rather than rely on the pension.

When we were in government and we had intergenerational reports looking at this, they found that the Australian system—of a targeted pension, a compulsory system of super, and additional voluntary savings—was a good system and that we were unlikely to have the pressure on future budgets from increases in age pensions that a number of comparable countries like the United Kingdom and Canada were going to have.

There are estimated to be half a million self-funded retirees in Australia. In my electorate of Boothby almost 20 per cent of residents are aged over 65, and every one of these superannuants will be adversely affected by the government's constant tax hikes on super. Thirty-nine per cent of the electorate are over 50—that is more than 50,000 people—and all of them are putting money towards superannuation. What this government has done is to make it harder, not easier, for people to make a contribution to their retirement incomes.

The problem, really, is that, since the government has come in, we now have a budget which is in such disarray that they now look for easy targets to tax to pay for all of their spending. Private health insurance is just one. Medical research is another one which has been targeted. And now we read in the Australian, 'Private super in frame for tax hit'. Many people see superannuation as their nest egg. The Labor Party has always seen it as a golden egg which they need to repair their budgets.

People doing the right thing and saving for their own retirement so that they will not create an additional burden on taxpayers in the future need to be encouraged and supported, and instead the government always wants to punish them. Labor, as the previous speaker said, will say one thing before the election and do another thing after. When they came to power they were not going to change super; they were not going to touch super—not one jot; not one tittle.

It was Peter Costello, Australia's greatest treasurer, who summed it up perfectly, recently, when he said, 'Let us be clear—

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