Treasury Laws Amendment (Supporting Choice in Superannuation and Other Measures) Bill 2025
Mr ZAPPIA (Makin) (11:49): It was Labor that introduced super in 1992, and it did so to ensure that all Australian workers could retire with dignity and financial security. It has been Labor ever since then that has ensured that the superannuation guarantee that was introduced continues to serve Australian workers in the way it was intended to. Labor continue to upgrade and refine the superannuation laws so nobody misses out.
A good example of that is when it was applied to people on paid parental leave. Contrary to that, we have seen, ever since the superannuation guarantee was introduced, the coalition trying to somehow obstruct the intent of it. Indeed, we not only saw that in the last period of coalition government, where the contribution rate was 9.5 per cent and remained that way between 2014 and 2021.
We have since seen several attempts by coalition policies to try and allow people to have access to that super before they are entitled to, which, in my view, totally undermines the whole purpose of the scheme. The reality is that, because of Labor's policies, today there is some $4.3 trillion in superannuation assets held in this country. My understanding is—and this is based on the latest figures I was able to get—that over $2.7 trillion is in APRA regulated entities and over $1 trillion is in self-managed funds.
These are big numbers. I understand that Australia has the fourth-largest super assets holdings globally of any country and, the way we are going, it may well be that we'll be No. 1 in the years ahead. But the importance of super is simply this: not only does it provide for security and financial stability in retirement years but it actually reduces the burden on governments in paying pensions for those who don't have superannuation.
In fact, right now, Australia is possibly the only country bucking the global trend and spending a smaller proportion of GDP on the pension whilst other countries are spending more of their GDP on pension payments. So we're going against that trend all because of the superannuation policies that we have in this country. Labor's commitment to a sustainable superannuation system is demonstrated with this very legislation.
The legislation has six schedules to it. I don't have time to talk about each of the schedules, but I want to talk about two of them. The first is to try and ensure that we ban advertising during onboarding.
In a simplistic way, that's all about trying to ensure that people don't invest their money with funds which are not credible and secure. We saw that with the collapse of the Shield Master Fund and the First Guardian managed investment schemes, which impacted some 12,000 investors and perhaps up to $1.2 billion of funds. Whilst it appears some of those investors will be compensated, the future is very uncertain for many others who have lost some or all of their retirement savings and don't know if they will receive compensation.
Investors were lured into those funds through being cold-called and encouraged to switch from safer, more regulated funds to higher-risk, less-regulated funds. This highlights just how important it is to ensure that adequate protections are put in place against the types of unscrupulous practices that too often take place. Schedule 2 of the bill places a ban on advertising superannuation funds during an employee's onboarding when starting a new job, with some exceptions.
Whilst this doesn't directly address the circumstances that arose in the Shield and First Guardian collapses, it does nevertheless deal with a similar type of flaw whereby people may be exploited to make an uninformed choice at short notice amongst all the paperwork and preparation when they start a new job. The second issue that I want to briefly speak about is how this legislation affects the wine tax and, in particular, the wine equalisation tax, which will go from $350,000 to $500,000.
These facts can be sourced very easily from wine industry websites. To put this into perspective, I'll just go through some of the facts. The wine industry contributes some $51 billion to the Australian economy, supports about 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and contributes to regional tourism, with 7.5 million winery visits annually.
And Australia is a top six global wine producer. Sixty per cent of Australian wine is exported. That is 630 million tonnes, on the last figures that I was able to get, and over a third of that goes to goes to China.
Total production is about 1.57 million tonnes a year. Across Australia, we have 2,156 wineries and some 6,000 grape growers. My home state of South Australia accounts for over 52 per cent of all of that.
Right now, the industry is struggling. In fact, it's in crisis. An oversupply of wine and declining domestic and global consumption is causing that, and that's leading to an oversupply, where we currently have about 52 million litres in storage.
A few years ago, growers were getting something like $600 per tonne for their grapes. Today, they are offered $150 a tonne if they can get a buyer. That amount, $150 a tonne, doesn't even cover production costs—water, fertilisers, insecticides, labour et cetera—and when you add climate change to all that, you understand how difficult it is for some of those growers, which has led to a number of the growers now ripping out good plantations, healthy vines.
Quite frankly, it's a shame to see that happening. Part of the problem that we face right now is that, back in 2021, because of the Morrison government's stance, China closed its door to Australian wine for three years and imposed tariffs of between 116 to 218 per cent. Labor lifted those tariffs in March 2024, almost exactly three years later, and sales have started to pick up.
But, for three years, we had almost no sales whatsoever. Those three years of no sales literally account for all of the wine that is now in storage and which can't be sold. Regrettably, even though the markets have reopened, the problem is that China found new places to buy their wine from, so getting back to the full amount of wine that was being sold to China before the tariffs were imposed is becoming increasingly difficult.
Add to that USA, UK, Hong Kong and Canadian wine sales, which have all declined, and you begin to understand that the wine industry is indeed in crisis. So I simply say this: raising the wine equalisation tax from $350,000 to $400,000 will make some difference. It's not the silver bullet.
It won't cure all the problems, but it will make a difference, and right now the wine industry across Australia is in desperate need of whatever help it can get. I understand that the chamber will now be adjourning in just a moment, so I won't go on, but I simply stress that point, because it's a clear example of the damage done to the wine industry by a bad decision of a government a few years ago and one that now impacts so many families across Australia.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Swanson ): A quorum not being present, the Federation Chamber is suspended and will resume when the chair is resumed. Sitting suspended from 11:58 to 12:41 (Quorum formed) Mr ZAPPIA: Just before the suspension, I was referring to the increase of the wine equalisation tax producer rebate cap from $350,000 to $400,000 and how that will provide some relief to the wine industry across Australia, which is on its knees at the moment.
I was making the point that the wine industry is struggling right now because of decisions and policies taken by the coalition government under Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the time. In turn, that ended up with China closing its doors to Australian wine for three years in which there was almost no wine being sold to our previously largest importer of Australian wines.
Whilst the producer rebate cap being lifted to $400,000 is important and will provide some assistance, of course it won't go far enough to help those wine producers and the grape growers who are indeed struggling and right now having to pull out their vines. Just to do that, I understand, costs them around $7,000 a hectare, and then to replant with something else might add another $30,000 a hectare.
So you can appreciate the financial burden it places on them. Of course they would be welcoming some additional government support in respect to that, particularly because they find themselves in the position they do because of a previous government's approach. And so I have a great deal of sympathy for those wine growers.
The last matter that I will touch on is schedule 4 of this legislation, which talks about the convention that was agreed to between Australia and Portugal—a tax convention that was signed in November 2023, just over two years ago. There are two aspects to this that I think are critical. For one, in the global environment we live in, I think it's important to have tax laws that can be as simple as possible to use between two different countries, because that in turn makes the flow of free trade so much easier and allows businesses, whether they're in Portugal or here in Australia, to do business without having to have complicated tax arrangements in place.
But the more significant issue of that convention is that it also helps with trying to control the tax evasion that takes place across the world every day by multinationals who use different countries in order to set up their management arrangements for this very specific purpose of evading tax. We know that that's been the case for years and we know that, under both coalition and Labor governments, there have been attempts to try and reduce or prevent that in different ways.
But it's not very easy when you are dealing with entities that operate from different countries and when those countries are not prepared to comply with an arrangement whereby people are required to pay their fair share of tax. It's not good for either country, so to have the tax convention signed between Portugal and Australia is something I dearly welcome. Because whilst it won't stop these entities from operating the same kinds of schemes in other countries, at least it's another country that has added its name to the list of global countries that are out there trying to minimise tax evasion by multinationals, which runs into the trillions of dollars every year.
I know that it would make a huge difference to the budget here in Australia if those companies and those entities paid their full range of tax that they should be paying but which they are able to evade because they list their management centres in countries that are of low tax jurisdictions. So with those comments, I commend this legislation. It's another example of how Labor is committed to the superannuation scheme that was introduced back in 1982 and how we continuously ensure that it meets the requirements of today's people.