Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Bill 2025, Superannuation Guarantee Charge Amendment Bill 2025

Ms PENFOLD (Lyne) (12:13): These two bills, the Superannuation Guarantee Charge Amendment Bill 2025 and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Bill 2025, introduce the government's payday super reforms, announced way back on 2 May 2023. Why there has been such delay in bringing these effective and relatively simple changes to this place is something for this government to answer.

Even so, in the electorate of Lyne, with the oldest age demographic in the country—30.1 per cent of our population is aged over 65 compared to the rest of New South Wales with just 17.5 per cent over 65—superannuation policies are a very important matter. Our average age is 51, compared to 38 across the country, and, with the employment base being principally in the services and small-business sectors, the payment of superannuation entitlements is also a major hot point.

Unpaid super remains a significant issue, with around 2.8 million Australians missing out on an estimated $5.1 billion in superannuation each year. Because payments are only made quarterly, unpaid super often goes unnoticed for months, by which time the employer may have become insolvent or the employee may have moved on. The Super Members Council has presented to me data showing that 28 per cent of workers in the Lyne electorate were affected by not having their super entitlements paid in 2022-23.

Over 16,600 of these workers didn't get an average of $1,600 each, totalling $27 million across the electorate. Lower-income workers—young people and those people in insecure work—are most likely to be caught out by unpaid super. The reforms will incentivise employers to pay their employees' superannuation guarantee contributions at the same time as salary and wages so that contributions will reach employees' super funds within seven business days of the employees' payday, starting from 1 July 2026.

That's a good thing. We know that the government originally planned to introduce this legislation in late 2024, which would have allowed an 18-month transition period for employers, software providers and super funds to prepare. By delaying the introduction until October 2025, the Albanese government has effectively halved the implementation window.

That's definitely not a good thing. Businesses are being given just eight months—and eight months not from when the laws are passed but from the day the bill was introduced. That's a reckless, unrealistic and irresponsible timeline.

The rollout of this is rushed and poorly planned and risks chaos for small businesses right across the country, including in my own electorate of Lyne. This is a familiar story from this government: the big announcement is more important than the policy detail and actual outcomes—from Jim Chalmers's failed and overruled attempt to touch up superannuants with his ploy to tap unrealised gains to this half-baked rollout of payday super.

The Albanese government delayed this legislation for a full year and, in doing so, cut the transition time for business in half. What was the hold-up? The government is expecting small business to pick up the slack and wear the cost and the trouble when they're least able to do so, which goes to the heart of this iteration of the Australian Labor Party's problems.

Not one member of Labor's cabinet has ever run a small business, and Labor sees superannuation as a pot of gold that can be touched up when the Treasurer's books aren't looking so good. Bob Hawke would be turning in his grave, and we know what Paul Keating thinks. I note that numerous superannuation funds and their representative organisations have welcomed the introduction of these bills.

On the other side of the ledger, the business side, I also note that numerous bodies support the concept of payday super in principle but are concerned, like us, about the increased administrative burden, especially for small businesses who are not aware of the changes and whose payroll systems and software may not be ready for the changes. I appreciate that the ATO has released a draft compliance guideline outlining its intended approach for the first year of payday super next July, but the government and the ATO will need to be mindful and flexible to allow an orderly and manageable uptake of these changes for small businesses.

But all of this assumes that the community is sailing along quite nicely and can accommodate changes while getting on with the daily routine. Well, if it were only that simple! In Lyne, we are now six months on from the worst floods in recorded history.

Towns were swamped and bridges swept away. Houses and farms, dairies and sheds, shops and other businesses, workshops, offices and schools were inundated. My home town and my region are still struggling through the consequences.

People are still not back in their homes. Businesses have either closed up for good or been weighed down by debt. There's been no cat D funding for small business or community infrastructure.

Now, on top of this, the New South Wales government is shutting down the local timber industry, prioritising its promise to the Greens to create a so-called great koala national park over hundreds of direct jobs and, maybe, hundreds more indirect jobs. While the conservation estate has been increased for no good reason, our imports of timber products have nearly doubled in the last 20 years.

We now import nearly 50 per cent of sawn timber products. We are losing our sovereign right and our capacity to be self-sufficient in timber production. What comes with that is a loss of jobs.

Some timber mills on the New South Wales Mid North Coast will become unviable and will have no choice but to close. Communities will be gutted, and they will be less safe because the equipment and the skilled workers who are able to operate the heavy machinery in times of bushfire crisis will be a memory. These people won't have a job to generate some super from, and their employers won't have to worry about ATO compliance guys or updating their software and payroll systems, because they won't be in business.

There's the great shame and the woeful irony—on one hand, correcting a superannuation oversight to make it better and fairer but, on the other, looking away when people lose their jobs or business after a natural disaster or a payback for a preferences deal. Talking about looking away, which is the reality on the topic of energy—the cost of the government's reckless renewables rollout and its relentless pursuit of the symbolic net zero—I expect the owners of the Tomago Aluminium smelter in Newcastle will be looking away from the news forlornly.

The owners, Rio Tinto, have made it clear that they are looking at closing the smelter down, putting over 1,000 direct and over 5,000 indirect Hunter jobs at risk. Why? Rio Tinto has made it clear that its decision is a hundred per cent due to the cost of energy.

The Minister for Climate Change and Energy comes into this place and spins many wheels to deflect the fact that Tomago and Rio are making this decision under his watch and under this government's energy policy, a policy of reckless pursuit of weather-dependent energy for base-load power. The government is simply not pursuing the cheapest forms of energy. This government isn't committed to ensuring Australians and our industrial base are supported by reliable and affordable power: nuclear, HELE coal and gas.

Manufacturing's share of the Australian economy fell to just five per cent of GDP in the June quarter of 2025. ASIC insolvency statistics reveal that over 1,400 manufacturers nationally have collapsed since 2022-23. Australia's deindustrialisation sees us now ranked on the index of economic complexity at a lowly 105th out of 145 nations—down from 70th in 1998.

This is all due to this government's energy policy. Without affordable and reliable power, our manufacturing industry will continue to shrink, and so will the jobs. Tomago's decision has enormous, economy-wide implications for Australia.

The Tomago plant is critical for the industrial and manufacturing industry that we have in this country—or, I should say, that we have left in this country. The Tomago plant is one of just four smelters in this country. It's located in Newcastle for the port facilities and the proximity to energy from Hunter Valley coal.

It supplies an array of domestic and export markets with aluminium in all shapes and sizes. It is fundamentally part of a far bigger manufacturing sector that supplies our everyday goods. A prime example is the Jamestrong precision packaging facility in Taree, in the heart of the Lyne electorate, which I have visited on many occasions.

For over 30 years, Jamestrong has been producing and supplying food cans and aerosol cans in Australia. The Jamestrong plant in Taree employs over 80 people—it's Taree's second-largest private sector employer—and produces 104 million cans per year. It has recently invested more than $8 million in an advanced production line to restore in-house capacity, reducing reliance on imports and allowing recycled aluminium to be incorporated into its process.

Its energy prices have gone up 65 per cent in just four years under this government—and because of this government. The consequences for Jamestrong of shutting down Tomago are significant and include undermining its global competitiveness and giving its foreign competitors a huge leg-up in the Australian and overseas markets. How is this good for the regions and for Australia, particularly for jobs?

These price hikes, coupled with the threat of Tomago's closure, put at risk this investment in Jamestrong and Taree. It has never been clearer that Labor is the party for higher electricity prices and for killing manufacturing in this country. In conclusion, may I say that these changes to superannuation are a good thing, but the bigger, far more important priority is to make sure we actually have employment in the first place and an energy policy that enables industry to remain viable, open, operating and on our shores.

It is crystal clear that net zero must go. We must have Australian energy and emissions policies, not a European dictate—a policy that is about jobs so that people can invest in themselves through superannuation.