Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This entire motion shows the complete economic illiteracy of the opposition. They believe in magic pudding economics. I am sure we have all read the story of the magic pudding with Bunyip Bluegum, Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff and the pudding thieves and of how the magic pudding would reform itself every time they would eat it and they could eat it again.

The obvious thing they seem to completely fail to understand is that if you increase superannuation that money has to come from somewhere, and, as your current leader said, the increase in compulsory super comes out of people's wage rises. So it simply means that if you have a compulsory increase in super that means that real wages—what people get in their pocket and what they take home—becomes lower. That may well work when the economy is growing, when the budget is in surplus, when we do not have a national debt costing $1 billion a month in interest repayments alone. When those things are happening, yes, you can compulsorily take some wages from the workers and compulsorily put that into superannuation. But we do not have that now.

The question that I ask my good friend, the member for Fowler, is: would a typical constituent in his or my electorate that might have a current credit card debt on which he is paying 17 per cent interest be better off getting extra money in his pay and paying down that 17 per cent interest rate or having that money compulsorily taken out of his pay, given to the superannuation funds and invested where he might get three or four or five per cent. Or take the young couple with a child who are struggling to get a deposit together so they can take a mortgage on. What would be best for that young couple? Is it best to have more money in their pocket to help them put together that deposit, or to take that money off them, put it in their superannuation account and tell them they can have it at 65. Or take someone that is a worker who decides they want to have a go by themselves and decides they would like to start their own small business and wants to scrape together a bit of capital to start that business up. How would they be better off?

Would they be better off with money in their pocket today to go an invest in that start-up business or would they be better off with the government compulsorily taking that away and putting it in their super funds? The answer is simple. No-one, with the changes we are making, will be worse off. Workers will have the right, if they think they would be better off putting more money into their superannuation from their wages, to do so. If they think that they would be better off paying off their credit card or putting that money towards a deposit on a house or putting that money towards scraping up the capital to start a small business then that is what we are allowing them to do.

We know the member who moved this motion was not part of the previous six years of mess and chaos that many of us here experienced. If that member was, she would know about the unexpected negative changes and about the complete hypocrisy of that motion. It was under the previous Labor government that we saw $9 billion worth of unexpected tax increases raiding the superannuation accounts of the people of this nation. And they come in here crying crocodile tears pretending that the workers are going to be worse off because we are giving them the choice to either increase their superannuation if they want or to put that money into a real wage increase.

The other thing on the subject of superannuation, which seems to have gotten not a lot of front page recently, is the Future Fund. Thankfully, we now know there is $100 billion in the Future Fund that Peter Costello set up when he previously paid off that $96 billion worth of Labor's debt and started those surpluses rolling in. He put that money away to account for that unfunded superannuation liability. But in the last budget that unfunded superannuation liability has now blown out to $150 billion. It still has to be paid sometime in the future. The budget estimates that by 2020 that will be $200 billion and by 2050 it will be something like $350 billion. If we are to be honest with the Australian people, we need to fully account for all of that unfunded superannuation and the liability this government has going forward.

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