Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Fair Super for Young Workers) Bill 2026

Senator DOWLING (Tasmania) (10:02): I rise to speak on the Superannuation Legislation Amendment (Fair Super for Young Workers) Bill 2026. I want to begin by acknowledging something important about this bill. There is a good idea at the heart of it.

There is a legitimate question about whether a young Australian who works, earns a wage and contributes to their workplace should also be building superannuation from the very first stages of their working life. It's an important question, and it's one that Labor takes seriously. In fact, only last month, at Labor's national conference, we carried a motion calling for superannuation payments for workers under 18 regardless of the number of hours that they work, so this should not be portrayed as a debate between people who care about retirement savings of young workers and people who do not.

The question before us today is whether this particular bill is a sound way of achieving that objective. Unfortunately, this bill does not achieve that objective without some unintended consequences. When you're dealing with something as important and as interconnected as Australia's superannuation system, it's really important to get the detail right, and Labor does understand that better than most.

We built compulsory superannuation in partnership with the union movement because we believed working Australians deserve the dignity and security of knowing that a lifetime of work would be rewarded with a more secure retirement, and we spent decades strengthening it. The superannuation guarantee has now reached 12 per cent. We've legislated the objective of superannuation.

We are paying superannuation on government funded paid parental leave, we've legislated for payday super, and we've increased support through the low-income superannuation tax offset and better targeted concessions at very large balances. Around 1.3 million Australians benefit from the changes to the low-income superannuation tax offset, including around 750,000 women and around 550,000 Australians under 30.

We've legislated the survivors law, so that convicted child sexual abusers cannot simply use parts of the superannuation system to shield assets from compensation owed to victims-survivors, and we are working to strengthen the retirement phase so that Australians are supported not simply to accumulate superannuation but to use it effectively and confidently in retirement.

That is a substantial reform agenda, but there is a theme running through those reforms. They have been considered. They have involved consultation.

They have required engagement with workers, with unions, with employers, with super funds themselves, with regulators and with the people who actually have to make these systems work—because the superannuation system is too important to approach in any other way. That brings me to young workers. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of co-chairing a financial capability roundtable here in Parliament House, and we brought together people from across the financial capability sector, people involved in education, regulation, consumer advocacy, financial services and the community sector.

There were different views around the table, as you'd expect, but one thing came through very clearly: the earlier we can get young Australians thinking about their financial future, the better. Financial capability is not simply about teaching someone how to make a household budget when they turn 30. It's about building the knowledge, the confidence and the habits that allow people to make good financial decisions throughout their lives.

And those habits are best started early. If we think about a 16-year-old getting their first job—it might be a weekend shift at a cafe in Hobart, stacking shelves after school in Launceston or working in a tourism business on Tasmania's east coast during summer—that first payslip is one of those very important occasions where a young person begins to understand the connection between work, income, tax and saving.

It's an opportunity to start learning what superannuation is, to understand that money going into their super account belongs to them, to see that it is invested, to learn about compound returns and to understand why fees matter, why investment choices matter and why keeping track of your super matters. That is financial capability in practice, and there is an intergenerational element to this as well.

Younger Australians are rightly asking questions about housing, the cost of living, their future tax burden and whether they will have the same opportunities as generations before them. And superannuation is part of that equation. The earlier a person begins accumulating retirement savings, the longer those savings have to grow.

So I do have considerable sympathy for the objective that this bill is pursuing. Where the government parts company with the Greens is on the legislation before us, because the bill does considerably more than simply remove the rule that currently applies to workers under 18 who work 30 hours or less a week. If it were all it did, this would be a much more straightforward debate, but it's not.

As drafted, the amendments interact with the wider superannuation guarantee framework, and they risk creating uncertainty about the operation of exemptions and carve-outs which have existed for reasons entirely unrelated to the treatment of young workers. There are longstanding technical arrangements within the superannuation system, including arrangements connected with international social security agreements and other specific exemptions.

The concern with this bill is that its drafting may affect the way some of those arrangements apply, where the employee happens to be under 18. That is clearly not the stated purpose of the bill, and I don't believe that is what the bill is seeking to achieve, but legislation has to be judged not just by intentions but by what its consequences are. It has to be judged by the words on the page and what they actually do.

If we end up with exemptions operating one way for a 19-year-old worker but potentially operating differently for a 17-year-old worker in otherwise identical circumstances, we have actually not simplified the superannuation system. We've made it complex, we've made it more complicated, we've created uncertainty for employers, we've created uncertainty for the funds and for the regulators, and, most importantly, we've created uncertainty for the very workers this bill would be intended to help.

There's another element to this. The bill restricts the capacity for future regulations to provide exclusions applying to workers under 18. Again, that extends considerably beyond the straightforward policy proposition that young people should generally receive superannuation on their wages.

There may ultimately be a strong case for reforming the treatment of under-18 workers, and Labor's own national conference recognised that case, but that makes it more important that we get the reform right. We should understand how the change interacts with the entire superannuation guarantee framework. We should understand what that means for international arrangements, for payroll systems and for small employers and the consequential amendments that may be required.

We should make sure that the young worker who is meant to benefit actually receives a simpler and more reliable entitlement at the end of it. That is what responsible reform looks like. There is also a practical question of timing.

Payday super commenced on 1 July this year, and it represents a major change to the way employers meet their superannuation obligations. It moves the system from quarterly payments to contributions being made alongside wages. Employers, payroll providers, superannuation funds and regulators are undertaking substantial implementation work around this.

That does not mean we stop reforming superannuation—far from it. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Neill ): In accordance with standing orders, the debate is interrupted. Pursuant to order, we shall now move to government legislation.