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

Ms JORDAN-BAIRD (Gorton) (17:11): I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Bill 2025 brought forward by Minister Mulino, and I commend him for doing so.. When I was 15, I worked in hospo. During this time, my boss signed me up as a trainee so he could pay me less, and he got away with it.

I know what it feels like to be taken advantage of by your employer, and so do millions of Australians. The ATO estimates that $5.2 billion in super went unpaid in 2021-22—$5.2 billion! That's $100 million every week that workers earned but never received.

Payday super is a once-in-a-generation reform to fix unpaid super, because workers deserve to get paid their full entitlements and Australians deserve to retire with confidence and with financial security. Super is an entitlement for workers, like salary or wages, and unpaid super is a form of wage theft. This bill will put a stop to that.

This bill is important. I know the effects of what we vote for in this chamber will be felt right across the country, and I know it will be felt in my electorate in Melbourne's western suburbs. Gorton is one of the fastest-growing electorates in the country.

There are 70 babies born a week in the city of Melton alone. We are young, with an average age of 35—many with young families—and we are diverse. In so many ways, my electorate is a microcosm of multicultural Australia, with its vitality, its rich cultural and linguistic make-up and its aspirations for the future.

A good, hardworking community like mine doesn't deserve to be taken advantage of by their employers. They deserve to be paid fairly, as do all Australians. In a typical unpaid super case for a 35-year-old, the recovery of their super leaves their retirement balance more than $30,000 better off in today's dollars.

For the average 25-year-old worker's retirement balance, this is the equivalent of receiving an extra $6,000 in today's dollars. When employers go bust, the impact is even more severe. For an average 35-year-old, missing out on super from a liquidated business could leave their retirement balance over $90,000 worse in today's dollars.

This reform will help ensure that workers actually receive the super they're owed when they're owed it. It means a more secure retirement for Aussies right around the country. From 1 July 2026, employers will be required to pay super at the same time as paying wages instead of paying it quarterly.

It means that employees will receive their super in their funds within seven business days of payday. It ensures that workers receive what they're legally owed, and it strengthens our super system. This will make it easier for employees to track their super and for the ATO to detect missed payments earlier, before debts become too difficult to recover.

Then there is the superannuation guarantee charge, which is a penalty employers face when they fail to pay super on time. The new framework will make sure that the super guarantee charge will apply for each payday your boss fails to pay super in full and on time. It includes notional earnings which compensate employees for the investment returns they miss out on due to a late payment; it includes an administrative uplift, which is an additional charge to reflect the cost of enforcing the framework and to incentivise employers to voluntarily rectify these missed payments; and it includes choice loading, an additional penalty if the employer fails to pay super into your chosen super fund.

Employers who continue not to pay their employees super, even after the ATO has raised a super guarantee charge, will face higher penalties, of up to 50 per cent of the unpaid amount. Employers who voluntarily disclose and have good compliance history will see their fees reduced. These changes are designed to encourage employers to fix mistakes quickly so that workers are fairly compensated when their boss falls short.

It isn't the fault of any employee when they don't get paid super; it's the fault of their boss, and those employees should be compensated for that lost pay. These are new changes, and it's fair for Australians to ask how, practically speaking, they will be implemented. To enforce these changes, the ATO will use Single Touch Payroll data, which employers already report, and match it with data from super funds to detect missed payments in near-real time.

This data-matching capability allows the ATO to intervene earlier, reducing the risk of large debts building up and increasing the chance of recovery for workers who aren't getting paid their fair share of super. To support employers to meet their obligations in the first year of this legislation being implemented, employers who make a genuine attempt to comply, even if they face technical issues, will not be targeted by ATO compliance.

This reform really is good for everyone. It helps reduce administrative pressures and the risk of large liabilities for employers. This is because the reform aligns super with payroll, meaning there's pressure taken off that end-of-quarter paperwork.

But, when we're talking in practicalities, this legislation needs to pass through Parliament House now. We need this bill to pass as soon as possible to give employers, payroll providers, super funds and the ATO time to build the systems needed for implementation by 1 July 2026. The longer we wait, the more workers miss out and the harder it becomes to recover all of that unpaid super.

That's why we're introducing this legislation now and passing it through parliament, because we know the importance of building a fairer, better system and we know the impact that a better system will have on the lives of everyday Australians. Don't get me wrong; this bill is important for all Australians. But for Aussie women this bill is a game changer.

Unpaid super disproportionately affects more vulnerable Australians: younger workers, casual workers and those in insecure work. Ironically, these are the people who can least afford to miss out on their retirement savings. A lot of the time, when we're talking about those on lower-paid, casual and insecure work, we're talking about women.

We have a serious problem in this country when it comes to women's pay. Women historically earn less. Today the national gender pay gap is sitting at 11.5 per cent.

Women are more likely to take significant breaks in their careers, putting them on the back foot when they re-enter the workforce. Women are less likely to be promoted into higher-paying management roles. Women have less savings in their super when they retire.

The gender super gap is about $50,000 for Australians nearing retirement—$50,000 less for women to live out their retirement on—because nurses, teachers, aged-care workers and hairdressers are amongst those in casual and insecure work. Part of the issue is that women in those fields aren't getting their fair share of super. This issue is massive, and it's long overdue for fixing.

This once-in-a-lifetime generational reform to fix unpaid super is by no means the only thing we're doing for women, our pay and our super; it's just one of Labor's reforms when it comes to superannuation. Just recently, the Albanese Labor government legislated paying super for parents on paid parental leave. Data from the Super Members Council shows that Gorton is amongst the highest Victorian electorates for unpaid super.

Paying super on Commonwealth parental leave pay will boost the retirement savings of a mother of two by about $14,800, and it will narrow the gender super gap by about a quarter. From the start of July this year, we also increased paid parental leave to 24 weeks and will up it again, to 26 weeks, in July next year. This change will make a significant difference to so many families in my electorate.

I'm proud to be the aunt of James, the son of my wonderful sister, Emily. She's currently on paid parental leave and navigating life with a new baby. An additional two weeks of paid parental leave makes such a tangible difference to the household budget of someone like my sister, Emily.

We know that reforms to women's pay lead to massive improvements in the wellbeing of Australian women. Research shows that since former prime minister Julia Gillard introduced the paid parental leave scheme in 2011, the likelihood of mothers experiencing postpartum depression decreased. The research also found that this improvement was particularly significant for first-time mothers and for mothers who did not have access to paid parental leave through their employer.

This is what happens when we elect women: women's issues become the forefront of the government's agenda. I couldn't be prouder to be part of a Labor government made up of 56 per cent women. When we elect women, we legislate on women's issues.

That's why we've opened 22 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics and are opening another 11. It's why we're investing over $500 million to deliver more choice, lower cost and better health care for women, including better IUDs, birth control pills and birth control implants. Just this week, we announced that from 1 November this year a new contraceptive option will be listed on the PBS, the NuvaRing.

We're giving women access to more choice and lower cost, and we're doing the same for all Australians. Labor is the party of superannuation, and we will always be the party of superannuation. We're the ones who establish compulsory superannuation.

In 1983, under the Hawke Labor government, we made an agreement with the ACTU to create a universal super systems so that all Australian workers would benefit, and then, in 1992, under the Keating Labor government, we introduced the superannuation guarantee, meaning workers were, for the first time, entitled to minimum superannuation rates of three per cent.

We're the party that continues to back compulsory super and we do it for a number of reasons—most particularly so that Australian citizens have access to funds that allow them to live a dignified retirement. That is the purpose of superannuation. That is the one we support and we continue to support.

When we strengthen superannuation, we do. At the core of the economic plan we laid out in our budget earlier this year, we had a simple objective: more Australians earning more and keeping more of what they earn. That's what this legislation is all about.

When you look at everything we're doing and what we've done for the superannuation sector, you can see that we do it because Australian citizens should have access to funds that allow them to live a dignified retirement. When we strengthen superannuation, we do—like raising the superannuation guarantee so that it has finally reached 12 per cent, like putting back on the low-income super tax offset so that lower-income workers have the same or similar tax benefits from superannuation as they're provided by the income scale and like paying super on paid parental leave so that women do not miss out on superannuation payments when they spend those critical years out of the workforce often caring for children.

We've legislated the objective of super—to provide income for a secure retirement. We've expanded the coverage of the superannuation performance test, from around 80 products more than 800 in 2023, and we're better targeting superannuation tax concessions and reforming the retirement phase of superannuation. Our plan is making a meaningful difference, and wages are moving in the right direction.

In the five-quarters leading up to the 2022 election, real wages fell in annual terms. They have now grown for the last seven. We've recorded the strongest annual real wages growth in five years.

We're now on the longest run of real wages growth, above 0.7 per cent, in a decade, and real incomes per capita are growing now as well. Reforming super is by no means the whole story when it comes to Labor and protecting Australian workers; it's just the tip of the iceberg. This bill is about fairness, it's about respect for workers, and it's about making sure every Australian is paid what they are earn in full on time every time.

For hardworking families in Melbourne's western suburbs and right across the country, this bill means just that. Labor is the party of workers. We are the party of super, and, with this bill, we are strengthening super and we're protecting workers for generations to come.

I commend this bill to the House.