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

Mr JOYCE (New England) (13:17): The member for Barton spoke about people who've missed out on super and people who don't know that their super has been paid. In line with that, I'd like to talk about people who have been paid their super and have had it stolen. That is one of the big issues before us today.

I want to read from a letter from a Paul Chiodo back on 24 March 2022, where he referred to a superannuation fund called Falcon/FGC, or an associated fund: Clearly this was their ongoing strategy to target non-sophisticated investors and classify them as sophisticated investors in order to illegally raise funds for ventures that suited the capital raisers including with Falcon/FGC having a financial interest in these ventures as well.

This shows that Falcon/FGC is in partnership and structuring payment arrangements of secret commissions dressed up in profit sharing to sales group to hide this away from the investors and not disclosed in their PDF— which is a disclosure form— These activities show a strong intent of this illegal activity, and this activity is now systematic with the makeup of Falcon/FGC.

This is the same fund and players that I made the original complaint to report these activities including stating that Falcon/FGC is the key enabler and beneficiary of these illegal strategies. What is interesting about that is that, later, Falcon/FGC, or what was associated with it—First Shield and Guardian—basically stole $1.2 billion out of people's super funds.

Well, they didn't steal it; they just lost it. We have people, and I've been meeting them, whose lives have been turned upside down by the loss of money. They have basically been a teacher all their lives.

They've worked all their lives. They've gone to get their super, and it's not that some of it's gone; it's all gone. I think there's obviously a role for Minister Mulino.

During these last weeks, I've never had an explanation about what's going on with these people. We've got Macquarie Bank, who, to their credit, have covered the Shield amounts that were lost—stolen, misappropriated or whatever—but only from the Macquarie Bank platform. We have other issues.

We have people in self-managed super funds. We've got to find out if the minister, under section 23 of the SI(S) Act, can deal with these self-managed super fund losses of about $17 million in Shield and $100 million in First Guardian. The minister clearly still has to catch up and pay attention to people such as Melinda Kee.

I've been speaking to people such as Peter Spencer-Franks. He lost over $1 million. It was gone—just taken.

What that means is that, as we go into Christmas, we're having the issue that some of these fundholders are, unfortunately, on the edge of suicide. They're going into Christmas with the realisation that all their savings are gone and they're going to be working for as long as they can stand upright. There is no alternative for them.

They have no money. They have to sell their house. It is incumbent upon the minister, Minister Mulino, to come to the dispatch box and give a statement to this House about exactly what is going on.

I know he has been in communication lately with Melinda. He's supposed to get back to her. Just so that the minister knows, I speak to her regularly.

What we want is a resolution on this. This money just wandered overseas. ASIC should have been over this.

ASIC should have been across this. They're approved. There's got to be some foresight.

People on the way through were making commissions on this. The investigation into this showed that the people who were basically the hawkers for the money—organisations such as Empire Wealth Group Australia; Aus Super Compare Pty Ltd, under director Osama Saad; Atlas Marketing; Indigo Group; Nohap; Lion & Horn—would go out and ring people up. They'd basically cold call them and say, 'You should invest,' and they'd get their money.

Then they'd get the money off to First Guardian or off to Shield Master Fund. Obviously they didn't do it for nothing. They would have collected a commission.

But we are investigating the hawkers and not the actual funds. The funds must have known who these people were. They were recommending this business.

We should be investigating the funds. We should be clearly spelling out the responsibilities that the government has because it's government legislation that makes you invest in super. And it's ASIC, run by the government, that has potential oversight of how these super funds work.

We're discussing this Treasury laws amendment. At the same time as the minister is presiding over this, he should be telling us exactly when these people are going to get their money back. It was amazing.

There have been warnings about this that go back to 2022. We had to wait until 2024, when they became basically insolvent, to find out that what they were warned about two years earlier is no longer there and still not there now. February 2024 is when Shield went into liquidation, but 2022 is when they were warned about it.

Here's another good trick. These super funds were frozen, so the investor, the person who owned the money, couldn't get it. But, while it was frozen, the money was taken.

It was taken out of a frozen fund. That's a good trick. And it disappeared.

It was stolen, taken fraudulently, misappropriated—call it what you like. How did they get it out of a frozen fund? If ASIC freezes the fund, how do they get the money out?

It wasn't the owner of the money; it was people sitting behind it who got the money. So there are so many questions. There are a few things I said this week that I'm going to follow up on.

Obviously, I'm always against intermittent power, but this is another big one. It's just like these people have been put under a mat and forgotten about. The minister is a competent person and has given some very loquacious speeches.

He went to Harvard, and that's great. But these people are waiting for someone to give some answers before Christmas about where they'll get their money back from. I put it to the minister, under section 23 of the SI(S) Act, why don't you just pay them out?

And the government, as the act prescribes, should go out and find the money. Whatever you catch, you keep, Government. But I think the government is in a much better place to go hunting for these people's money than Melinda Kee or Peter Spencer-Franks or Danielle Adams or Christian Eriksen, who are talking all the time about how they deal with this.

These are questions to the minister: Can you please tell us what your remedy is for this situation? Can you please give us a timeline as to when you're actually going to do this? Can you please make sure that your communications with the group go beyond empathy to outcomes about exactly what's going to happen?

Can you make sure that you clearly understand that some of these people are, unfortunately, in some instances, close to suicide? Can you give a reason for why you can't use section 23 of the SI(S) Act? And, if not, what do you intend to do?

The alternative for these people is that they sell their house, go into a rental house and try to live on the pension. That's rather remarkable when they've put away hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in some instances, more than a million dollars. There is a resolution that can help these people out.

As I said, they'll find out that their money was invested in financial tech stocks overseas and applications for AI and real estate in the United States and—I think David Anderson moved money out after the liquidation of the First Guardian Master Fund. How did that happen? These questions remain completely unanswered, and every day we get dorothy dixers on a whole range of issues.

You can even do this a neat way with a dorothy dixer from the government to the minister. They can ask what the process forward is from here. I want to note that the minister, I think, received 4,000 emails before he decided to reply to one, which is a bit of a record.

I reckon, if I had 4,000 emails in my inbox, I'd probably think something was up. This is going to be an important thing: I will close on some of the losses some of these people had. Melinda Kee lost $370,000.

She knew something was wrong. She said: 'I can't seem to get access to what's going on with my money. I can't get it out.' And then she found out it was gone.

Mel Wallace lost $380,000. Peter Spencer-Franks lost $1.2 million—just gone! Where would these people have got the knowledge and attributes to find out that people were basically thieving, misappropriating and wasting their money?

How could they do that? They looked on their balance, and the money was there. It's just that, when they went to get it, it wasn't there.

Do you know how perverse this is? When they go to get a pension now, the government says, 'You can't have it because the money is there.' They say, 'The money is gone, and you know it is gone.' So they can't get a pension because the balance still shows an amount that has been stolen and is gone. Can someone please explain to me how that happens.

That is the cruellest hoax that can be played on some of the most vulnerable people. I commend this request to the House. I ask the minister to stand and deliver a solution to this chamber, because there are a lot of people whose lives depend on it.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Chesters ): The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.