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

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Service, Minister for Women, Minister for Government Services and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (12:11): This deals with the broader question of your amendment, which I'm happy to speak to now. I was going to put these comments on the record. We are the party that established superannuation, and we are the party that continues to strengthen it.

As you've seen since we came to government, we have done a number of things, including paying super on PPL and making sure the SG, the superannuation guarantee, increases to 12 per cent, as that makes a big difference to people's retirement earnings, including young people if they are paid superannuation. Indeed, in the last month or so, there was the announcement about our commitment to the low-income superannuation tax offset, also known as the LISTO.

We work through these things in a methodical way. That's the way we approach these arrangements. It wasn't part of our commitment to payday super to make a change like the one that your amendment seeks.

But we continue to engage with the superannuation industry, with the superannuation council, as you identified, and with others, as we did on LISTO, to put in place appropriate strengthening of the superannuation system, and we'll continue to do that. We don't change the superannuation system based on an amendment from the Greens in the Senate.