Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Fair Super for Young Workers) Bill 2026
Senator BARBARA POCOCK (South Australia) (09:02): I rise to speak to my private senator's bill, the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Fair Super for Young Workers) Bill 2026. The Greens are proud to bring forward this bill because we believe that Australia's superannuation system should apply to every worker. It's time for young workers to be paid the super they deserve.
Right now, workers under the age of 18 are only guaranteed super if they work more than 30 hours a week for the same employer. As we know, the vast majority do not. Ninety-three per cent of young workers do not work this much, mostly because of their school and study commitments and the casual nature of their employment.
We want them at school. We want them to be studying, but we also want them, where they work, to get paid super in a fair way alongside everyone they work with. In practice, what's going on right now is that hundreds of thousands of young Australians who are under the age of 18 are missing out.
Every year, 530,000 young teenage workers are denied the astonishing sum of $411 million in super for no reason other than their age. Young workers look after us in our cafes and supermarkets and shops, in hospitality venues and on construction sites in communities across our country. They cover weekend shifts, late shifts and public holidays.
They pay tax. Yet many of them are denied compulsory superannuation contributions simply because of their age. Hundreds of thousands of young workers are being held back financially before they've even had a chance to get ahead.
This discriminatory rule does not impact a marginal cohort. It's the typical experience of teenage workers. The Greens believe that young workers should receive the same financial rights as everyone else.
If you earn a wage, you should earn super. It's that simple. Australia's world-leading superannuation system exists because generations of workers and unions fought for the simple proposition that people deserve dignity in retirement.
It was built on the foundation of universality, but it's not universal. For too long, Australia's superannuation system has failed young workers. The continued exclusion of workers under 18 who work fewer than 30 hours a week is a clear case of legislated age-based discrimination that no longer has any defensible policy rationale.
When compulsory superannuation was introduced in the early 1990s, this carve-out was justified on the basis that fees and insurance premiums would erode small balances. That's what people were told. That's what the discussion was about.
But that justification has been overtaken by decades of reform. Today, fee caps and protections for low-balance accounts, alongside opt-in insurance settings for young workers, mean that even small super balances are preserved and grow over time. What remains is not a targeted safeguard but a blunt, discriminatory exclusion that denies young workers the same entitlement to deferred wages as every other worker.
The rule draws an arbitrary line based on age and hours despite the fact that under-18s perform the same work for the same employers as their older counterparts. As a result, hundreds of thousands of young people are working, earning and contributing to the economy without receiving the superannuation that they should be legally entitled to. Maintaining carve-outs of this kind undermines the integrity and the fairness of our system.
Young workers are not immune from the rising costs of living. They are facing growing housing unaffordability challenges that are very severe across our country. They are especially insecure in their employment and they have massive and rising debt from the costs of education, which have changed so dramatically in the last few decades.
Young women in particular are disproportionately affected by this age based exclusion. Women retire with substantially less super than men, and casual workers, part-time workers and workers in feminised industries—all the care sectors—are also accumulating lower retirement savings. When we deny young workers super, we reinforce inequalities that follow people throughout their working lives.
The consequence of the current exclusion extends far beyond a teenager's first pay packet. Superannuation works best when contributions start early. It's essential that young workers receive super on every dollar earned from the moment they start work.
Modelling shows that young workers could be $11,000 better off by retirement through the power of compound returns. This bill removes this unfair, outdated and discriminatory exclusion. It removes the existing legislative exemption that allows regulations to exclude employees that are under 18 from super guarantee coverage, and it repeals the associated regulatory provisions that currently deny super to too many young workers.
It will ensure that all employees under the age of 18 are entitled to compulsory employer super regardless of the number of hours they work. There is strong public support for this change. Eighty-five per cent of Australians believe that anyone in paid work should receive super, which is a view shared across all parts of the community, and 73 per cent of Australians support changing the law so that workers get paid super at all ages.
Only seven per cent oppose that. This bill supports the principle that every Australian worker should receive super contributions from the first dollar earned, irrespective of age or hours of work, and it aligns with our vision of a truly universal superannuation system. Young workers know this is unfair.
Take Sarah, who is a young worker from Western Australia. She is 18 and has been working since she was 15. She works at a discount supermarket.
Sarah's super balance would've exceeded $3,000 by now if contributions had been paid while she was under 18. It's nearly three times what she's actually holding in her super balance now. When she was asked how she felt about this, she said: 'Not good.
That's a lot of money not paid, and I'm doing the same work. That's just not fair.' Right now, this exclusion entrenches a two-tier system of workplace rights, where age determines access to retirement savings and where some of the lowest paid workers are systematically left behind. This is not a rule supporting small business.
It's a system that allows some of the most profitable multibillion-dollar, big corporations in our country to deny young workers their basic entitlements. It's a direct transfusion of money out of the pockets of kids under 18 into the bottom line of some of our biggest and most wealthy corporations. The question is no longer whether this is fair but who is it working for, and the answer is big businesses.
This became clear earlier this year through a Greens initiated inquiry into this exclusion. This important inquiry showed that most large employers of young Australians do not provide their under-18 workers with this basic workplace entitlement, despite raking in massive profits on the back of their very cheap labour. Through the inquiry process, the committee wrote to a large range of Australian employers, seeking information, for the first time, regarding the payment of super to employees under the age of 18.
The committee wrote to 41 companies that are the biggest employers of workers under 18 and asked them to give us their data. 'Tell us how you are treating your under-18 workforce and whether you are paying them super.' The committee received 37 responses, which are summarised in the chair's report. It makes interesting reading. Take the supermarket duopoly, for example.
Coles, who employ around 12,000 workers under 18, do not pay them super regardless of the hours they work. Coles's their profits last year? $1.08 billion.
Woolworths, who employ around 11,500 people under 18 in their enterprises, and another 1,150 in Big W, also do not pay super, regardless of the hours those young people work. And Woolworths' profits? $1.38 billion.
These responses reveal a simple truth at the heart of the superannuation loophole for under18 workers: most of Australia's biggest corporations are denying retirement savings to the young workers who help generate their massive profits. This is not about whether big business can afford to pay super to young workers—they can; they clearly can. The fact that some employers, such as Bunnings, Aldi, JB Hi-Fi and Priceline, choose to pay their under-18-year-old workers super, regardless of how many hours they work, shows that this is possible.
It is a matter of discretion to those big corporations. And they are pocketing those profits rather than doing the right thing like those companies, like Bunnings, that are paying their young people their super entitlements and what are fair super entitlements. Instead, the vast majority of large employers use a business model that relies on insecure, low-paid, low-hour teenage labour while denying these workers the same retirement rights as everyone else, as everyone over 18 who works alongside them working more than 30 hours a week.
The biggest employers of young workers are large corporations that are making millions, and sometimes billions, in profit every year. They have no trouble finding money for executive bonuses and shareholder payouts but they are denying their youngest, most insecure, lowest paid workers their basic entitlements. So our position in the Greens is straightforward: if you're old enough to work, if you're old enough to pay tax, you're old enough to earn super.
Billion-dollar corporations should not be building their massive profits on the backs of teenagers missing out on fair entitlement rights and their savings into their retirement, and the Labor government should not be letting them do it—as you well know. As multiple submissions to this inquiry made clear, there is no longer a credible policy basis for treating young workers differently.
The inquiry's majority report was very clear: support paying super on every dollar earned, including extending superannuation to workers under 18 as part of a long-term pathway to universal superannuation. However, the chair's report, the conclusion, denied those young workers the fairness of this in their earnings. It's a classic major party play: agree in principle, promise more consultation and leave vulnerable people waiting for fair treatment and for long overdue reforms.
Well, Australian workers don't want another roundtable; they don't want a consultation paper. They don't need that to decide what's fair in their workplaces. They've been waiting for decades.
We have the evidence. Enough delay; it's time to act. This bill is the third time the Greens have had a go at pushing, in this chamber, to make this thing happen.
We took this policy to the last election. Last year, we tried to amend the government's payday super bill to grant all young workers the right to super from their employers. Labor had a chance to back young workers then, but they decided to side with the very wealthy one per cent over ordinary young working people.
And then, in July, we pushed again to partially allow this exclusion in regulations. And, again, Labor had the chance to back young workers. Instead, they partnered with the antiworker coalition over here, and One Nation, to block it.
Now's their chance to make it right. It's time to stop boosting the profits of some of Australia's biggest and most profitable corporations by letting them continue ripping off young workers by taking money out of the pockets of those kids under 18 and putting it into the bottom line of some of our most wealthy corporations. From recent attacks on our superannuation system from the Liberals and One Nation, we can see it's clear we cannot take a backward step.
One Nation points to the need for cash-strapped Australians to have easier access to superannuation. We can't trust this mob, One Nation, with our super system. The solution to Australians being cash strapped isn't to let them raid their super—unless they're in dire circumstances in which they can.
It's time to make sure that their real wages actually increase and that we deal structurally with the problems of the cost-of-living crisis out there—something that One Nation has voted against in this parliament over and over again. In his Press Club speech last week, Senator Bragg called compulsory superannuation 'an illiberal experiment'. He also likened giving super to young workers to giving it to cats and dogs.
Did the Liberal Party actually want to try and explain to a young person why they don't deserve super? Have a go at that. They have no argument, and young people will not be hoodwinked by that kind of rubbish.
The Greens are the only party who've been trying in this chamber over quite some time to close this unfair loophole for young workers and give them the justice they deserve in their working lives. We want super extended to under-18s, no matter how many hours they work, and this bill will do exactly that. Super should be a universal right and it should be paid fairly.
Every worker deserves their super, whether they're 16 or 60. Because of Greens pressure, Labor amended their national party platform just recently to explicitly support paying super on every dollar earned, including for workers under 18. Well, now's your chance.
Don't hold back. Don't, for the third time, say 'no' to those young workers who know what's fair. I call on the Labor government to follow its own policy platform and support this bill, and I commend the bill to the Senate.