ADJOURNMENT

Mr FRENCH (Moore) (19:54): The leader of One Nation, the member for New England and the coalition are once again coming after compulsory superannuation. They want Australians to think taking money out of workers' retirement savings is about freedom. I don't buy it.

Their problem with superannuation isn't that it belongs to workers. Their problem is the power it gives to workers. To understand that, we should remember why compulsory superannuation exists.

Forty years ago, through the accord, Australian workers agreed that part of their remuneration would be put away for retirement. It was deferred wages. It belonged to the worker then; it belongs to the worker now.

And something extraordinary happened. Cleaners became investors, electricians became investors, nurses became investors and construction workers became investors. People who might never inherit a share portfolio own an investment property or have a family trust that started with capital accumulated through their own labour.

Think about that. Workers own shares. They own businesses.

They own infrastructure. They own property. They own investments here in Australia and around the world.

For most of history, the basic economic divide was pretty simple: working people worked; people with wealth owned the capital. Superannuation helped change that. It gave working people capital of their own.

Collectively, that gives working Australians enormous economic power, and that is the part the leader of One Nation, the member for New England and the coalition would rather not talk about. They tell you it's your money. It is—exactly.

But Labor and the union movement spent decades making sure it became your money. Wealthy people have always understood what accumulating capital means. It means independence.

It means security. It means choices. Nobody tells a millionaire with a large share portfolio that the answer to rising grocery prices is to sell their shares.

Nobody tells someone with several investment properties to stop accumulating assets because their electricity bill went up. But when the asset belongs to a cleaner, a sparky, a nurse or an aged-care worker, suddenly we hear building wealth is somehow stopping them from exercising their freedom. I think that tells us quite a lot.

They are perfectly comfortable with people at the top accumulating the capital. They become a lot more interested in breaking open the piggy bank when that capital belongs to working people. And compulsory superannuation does something else.

It makes our retirement system sustainable. If we abolish or weaken compulsory super, the cost of retirement does not disappear. Someone still pays.

Without enough private retirement savings, governments eventually face a choice: higher taxes to fund more pensions, a lower pension, people working longer or more Australians retiring into poverty. Australia chose a better model. The pension provides a safety net.

Superannuation allows workers to build an asset throughout their working lives. And there is a third part that we should be talking about more often: homeownership. The Australian retirement system works best when somebody reaches retirement with two major assets: the home they own and the superannuation they have built over decades.

The home keeps their housing costs down, and the super provides the income. The pension sits underneath them as a safety net. That is the Australian retirement compact.

Australians are struggling with mortgages and rents, but the leader of One Nation's solution is to weaken the other part of their economic security. Apparently the answer to the housing problem is to create a retirement problem as well. Under One Nation's proposal, workers could redirect three percentage points of their compulsory super contributions to their take-home pay—but the employer is not paying a cent.

There is no additional wage increase. The worker takes money that was going into their retirement and puts it into their everyday account. And the leader of One Nation calls that a pay boost.

That is not a pay rise. A pay rise is when your employer pays you more. This is a worker funding their own pay rise.

It is moving money from one pocket into another and pretending the worker has become richer. And then we come to the member for New England. He was asked what taking money out of super would cost workers when they retire.

He hadn't done the modelling, and, when pressed on the figures, the member for New England explained he was not Jesus Christ. Nobody asked the member for New England to perform a miracle; we asked him to do the maths. If you want Australian workers to sacrifice part of their retirement savings, surely you should know what that sacrifice is worth.

How much less will they retire with? How much investment growth will they lose? How much greater will their reliance on the age pension become?

And what will that cost the next generation of taxpayers? Those issues are not side issues. House adjourned at 20:00