Treasury Laws Amendment (Strengthening Financial Systems and Other Measures) Bill 2025

Mr JOYCE (New England) (19:21): As soon as we talk about ASIC, I will take the first opportunity I have to come in on behalf of the people of the Shield fund and First Guardian. These are superannuants who lost up to, I think, $1.2 billion. The money was basically stolen.

Now, I know Macquarie Bank has now come in to bat for one of them as one of the proponents who put these forward, but this was a classic example of red flags being thrown up that were never picked up, of pressure salespeople coming in. There are people who woke up and had lost over a million dollars worth of their savings. We had people who were ready to retire and now basically have to go back to work.

For how long? For as long as they can possibly work. This is a sign of the incompetence of this system to pick these things up.

First Guardian and Shield were approved by four super fund trustees but rejected by others. There should be a minimum standard for a superannuation fund and limits on exposure to one. These mass-marketing campaigns—ASIC should have been looking at them and finding out what was happening.

I want to give a big shout-out to Melinda Kee and the work that she's been doing on behalf of these people. I told these people that I would go in to bat for them. I know that Minister Mulino has now seen them, but they sent over 4,000 emails to him, and he never replied.

Now he has, but it's taken a while. What these people want is—they're saying, 'If you're the policeman, if you're looking after this, if you have the oversight of this, how did this happen to us?' What should be happening now is these people should be paid, and you go out and recover the money as best you can. But what we see here is sort of a silence.

Macquarie Bank have come in, but it's silence from the government on the rest. It's funny how the government can find all these billions and billions of dollars for domestic billionaires and international companies for intermittent power and then, when their own workers are put out and have basically had their retirements smashed, it all becomes too quiet. I have been waiting.

Maybe the minister might want to give a statement or come to the dispatch box and answer a question. I thought that that would have to happen. You would imagine that a lot of these people voted for Labor.

When you blow between $1.2 billion and $1.4 billion, you would expect that it might strike a feature—as we used say in accounting terms—in your reporting back to the parliament, but no such luck. We have lost $1.2 billion from these two funds. How do we know it's not going to happen again?

Why don't we have the minister come out? I hear he's an honours graduate. I think he went to Harvard.

He's obviously a capable person. He should be given a question by the Prime Minister. Come up and give us a little yarn about how you are going with this.

I know that Melinda Kee and all the other people in Save Our Super—that's the support group—really want to hear what's going on because they haven't heard much from this chamber. In fact, they've heard nothing. They've heard absolutely nothing.

As I said, we also have other issues. I'll give you one. Even though they have lost their money, the people aren't eligible for the age pension because Centrelink sees their super balances as still existing.

Can you imagine that? You've got no money; your money has been stolen. They went out to find some of these people, and they found safes full of jewellery and cash and property disappearing overseas.

People say, 'You can go on the age pension.' No, they can't, because they still deem that they have super balances. It is incredible that this has been allowed to happen. We obviously also have health impacts.

People woke up, and they thought that something was not quite right. They were trying to get their super out, and, all of sudden, it was frozen. Then they found it was not there.

That can affect people emotionally—finding out you're bust. It can hurt people to find out: 'Oh, hang on; I'm broke. I've got no money.' I'm thinking of the case of one bloke who had over a million dollars in super.

He blew it. Another lady had $600,000. She'd been working diligently and woke up with no money.

It was just gone! ASIC has oversight of this, and they have been bereft of competency, capability and an explanation as to what has happened. We should be holding the Assistant Treasurer to account.

There should be an explanation to this House about exactly how this happened and some guarantee or warrant that it's not already happening again because I haven't heard one. Maybe I've been missing in these exorbitant and exciting question times, but I haven't heard anybody talk about this. I think it's about time they do.

I say to Melinda and the others, 'Yes, come to Sydney.' After I've kicked up a big stink about intermittent power, I'll start kicking up a big stink about them as well and try to help them out because they need help. We want to see what happens in the complex AFCA complaints process. We want to make sure that this gets to some form of resolution.

We want to make sure that even the tax and superannuation complication issues that have been brought up by this are resolved. I'm sure the assistant minister has the academic acumen to deal with this, but I haven't seen the delivery of dealing with this. Once more, I acknowledge that he has now had a meeting with Melinda Kee, and I appreciate that.

His apparent approach was very empathetic, as I read in Melinda's notes, but it can't stop there. Empathy goes so far but doesn't go as far as restoring your superannuation balance, and that's what we need. Macquarie Bank has done the right thing.

They've said, 'Okay, we had our fingers in this, and we are going to have to pay these people out.' Good! What about the rest? They had their fingers in it too.

They got their commissions and their trailing fees. They made money out of it and put it in their pocket. They didn't do it for free.

If they've made their money out of it, if they've received their commissions, then I think they're responsible for exactly what happened to their clients' money. This is going to be—let's see, maybe this week. One day has gone, and there are two days to go.

Let's see if it gets through the tactics committee of the Labor Party to do a dorothy dixer. I want to put it on Facebook and show Melinda and show the others that you are actually as good as your word. Debate interrupted.