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

Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (18:03): I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Payday Superannuation) Bill 2025 and the associated bill. I support the practice of the main bill, its purpose and its intent. But I call on the government to show the same commitment to removing regulation and making life easier for business that it shows for reforms like this.

Let me start firstly with the main bill. This bill requires super contributions to hit a worker's bank account within seven business days. There is a really strong reason this is important: we're talking about people's wages here and we're talking about people missing out on super payments because they're not paid promptly and, ultimately, those super payments are not paid at all.

The ATO estimates that the superannuation gap in 2021-22 was $5.2 billion, a gap of 6.4 per cent. The Super Members Council estimates that this impacts around one in four workers. In Wentworth, the estimate is that 26 per cent of people in my community, around 19,750 individuals, have a lower super balance or have missed out on super payments because of this lack of prompt payment of super and mistakes or lack of payment over time.

That's, on average, $2,140 that these people are missing out on and a total cost to the electorate of $42 million, so this really matters. It matters to individuals, it matters to women and it matters, particularly, to workers who might be moving across different parts of the economy and who may have some complications or difficulties getting super paid. We do have companies who have abused the super system, who have used it as a piggy bank and who haven't paid the entitlements of super, and the lack of payday super has been something that has enabled that practice.

This is why I support the bill. However, on this and other bills, I want to make the point that the government has committed in principle to making sure that we right-size regulation to make it easier for businesses to grow and thrive in this economy, and that is really important. But what I want to see is more action on this.

It has been a number of months since the Treasurer committed to that, and this is a laudable aim, but this is going to be difficult. It is going to require sustained activity, and we need to see—and I am certainly looking for—more action on this. I think there are three key areas in this that the government needs to prioritise.

First is that legislative review, prioritised by the industries that need it most. I give credit to the government for addressing the EPBC Act as a priority, because this is a piece of legislation which we know is causing problems in terms of development—actually just causing harm to business—and failing to protect the environment, so this is the area to start in.

But the government is not adopting the same activity and strength in other areas of the economy, and I will identify industrial relations as one of those areas where the government should be looking at a right-sizing approach on regulation of IR and should be looking at the regulation of IR on the basis of the benefit that it provides the workers, the benefit it provides the business.

Can do things that simplify awards that could be better for both? The government does not have an agenda there at this point. The second piece that I think the government really needs to move harder on is the incentives.

The incentive in this place is to stand up and pass laws. We all feel better for that, but it doesn't necessarily make the country better, and it certainly adds to the burden of regulation that our businesses face. When I was running a small not-for-profit, one of my auditors said, 'You should have a list.

You should know all the legislation you are subject to.' I asked them, 'Well, can you write me a list?' They gave me a page and a half—it felt like about 30 acts—that I was responsible for as the CEO of a business. There is absolutely no way that I, as someone who is running a small not-for-profit with around 20 to 30 staff, could be across the depth of legislation that I am, in theory, responsible to.

The truth is that government is not accountable for the need to make it easy for businesses to comply with government regulation, nor is government accountable for that breadth of regulation. We need to get to the heart of this, which is the incentives. I think there are two different ways to do that.

The first is that the regulators need to have a responsibility to grow the economy as well as to protect and manage risk. We need to have growth and risk, and we need to get that balance right, because too often I speak to businesses who say that it's only about risk. The country has moved to managing risk; we are not managing growth, and that is hurting our economy, and it hurts the opportunities for people in our economy—and people in our businesses and our young people—in terms of growth.

The second thing for the government, in terms of those incentives, is that it's about having speed of government decision-making. The EPBC Act is a perfect example, where there are projects that are still waiting, seven years on, for approval on the basis of this act. I have spoken to people who are still waiting, 18 months down the track, on the ATO to give their guidance on whether or not their interpretation of legislation is right so that they can make a transaction.

This is government not being accountable for the timelines of business, and that is holding back our productivity. The final area where I think the government needs to go—and to the Treasurer's credit, he spoke with openness to some of this in the economic reform roundtable—is to have clear goals in terms of what right-sizing regulation looks like, otherwise it's a theory.

It has to come down to whether we're going to measure this in terms of a 20 per cent reduction in regulation or whether we're going to measure this in terms of 'one regulation in, one regulation out'. I know all these measures are crude; I accept that, but the truth is we do need hard measures of this, because the incentives are all here across this place to drive regulation, to drive legislation and to not be honest about the burden that this places on business, because this is a burden that the people in this room do not bear.

I speak in support of this legislation. I think it is important legislation. But I seek to continue to ask the government to say where it is reducing the burdens on business, because this will take time and effort, particularly for small and medium businesses, to implement.

It's time I know many of them will be proud to do, because this is a positive change, but there needs to be give and take. Certainly, in the last term, there was no give and take from the government in terms of supporting smaller businesses, and they need to step up to it this term.