QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE: TAKE NOTE OF ANSWERS
Senator KOVACIC (New South Wales) (16:29): I move: That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked by Opposition senators today. In my family, we have something called word of the day. I run the word of the day for our family chat.
The word of the day today in the Senate chamber is 'egregious'. I think it's really important that we understand what that means. It means remarkably bad.
That's what Senator Hume was talking about when she referenced the tax changes that face Australians now. I think what's really important for us to focus on are the questions that were asked around the widow's tax. Senator Duniam asked those of Minister Wong.
This is important because the Albanese Labor government and the Australian Greens—from whom we've just seen quite a performance—chose to pass legislation that they knew was flawed. They chose to pass legislation that they knew had problems with it. They chose to pass legislation that had unintended consequences.
When Senator Duniam asked the minister why the government had failed to introduce legislation to abolish it, the answer was: 'We have plenty of time. We've got until 1 July 2027, so there's no hurry.' Then the question is: if you have so much time, why didn't you just wait and get it right before you rammed it through? It goes to two things that must be of great concern to Australians.
Number 1 is this government and their associates, the Greens, do not care whether the legislation they pass in this chamber is fit for purpose. They care about the theatre of it which was just very clearly demonstrated by Senator Shoebridge. Number 2 is they do not care that it sits there uncorrected.
We have to ask: why is that, and will they actually even correct it? Are they being genuine that they will fix it, or will it be the case that if an Australian has this kind of tax treatment, and their spouse or partner passes away, they will in fact be charged the widow's tax, a quasi-death tax, designed by the Albanese Labor government and the Australian Greens.
I couldn't bear the hypocrisy of them talking about young Australians and superannuation, when, in fact, the Greens traded that away. That could have been part of their package that they traded, but they didn't. But they want to sit here and pretend like they care about it.
If they cared about it, they would have fought for it. But they did care about a widow's tax, so they fought for that. They did care about taking away the rights of SMSFs to invest how they see fit, so they took that away as well.
What Senator Bragg said before was correct. They do want to ensure the primacy of big super funds in our country. They want to stop Australians from being able to make decisions about their own lives, particularly as it comes to SMSF, because guess what.
A big industry fund can invest in property, but, a mum and dad, the average Australian who has an SMSF, can't. Talk to me about the intergenerational equity of that because it doesn't exist. That is in fact egregious.
I agree with Senator Hume in relation to that. It is absolutely egregious. Just, very quickly, in relation to the housing completions, Senator Wong couldn't answer that question effectively.
She said how many completions, or purchases, there had been in New South Wales under the first homebuyers' scheme, but there was no answer about the fact that the Albanese Labor government have built fewer homes than the previous coalition government.