This question time showed quite clearly that the government has not been upfront with the Australian people over the past week. Obviously, the talking points went out this morning that they wanted to use the word ‘modest’ an immodest number of times during question time. It was ‘modest this’, ‘modest that’, ‘modest everything’, until the finance minister was a little too immodest and revealed that, in fact, the amount of people that are going to be hit by Labor’s doubling of the super tax is 20 times what they’ve been telling Australians over the past week.
Over the past week, this government has been trying to tell fibs to the Australian people: that only half a per cent of you are going to be impacted by their tax grab that is directly against what they promised only a year ago at the election. Only half a per cent. Don’t worry about it. Less than a per cent of people. You don’t have to worry about that.
Actually, it was revealed today that, because of inflation, 10 per cent of Australians will pay this tax over their lifetime. This tax is a lifetime tax. It’s about taxing you for saving for your own retirement. It’s not really about how many people have more than $3 million today. That doesn’t raise a lot of money, because there are not a lot of them. This is actually about taxing you in the future, taxing your future self, the self that you’re trying to work hard for and save for so you can have a dignified retirement.
The government’s refusal to index that $3 million shows that there is a hidden secret agenda here. The hidden agenda is to tax you more so that they can spend more, waste more, on the various things that the Labor Party, with their friends in the Greens, love to waste your money on. Ten per cent of people is a lot of Australians. It might be you. You don’t know how your life is going to turn out. You might work hard and do well for yourself. Look around. One in 10 of you are going to be hit by this tax. This is the decimation of the Roman legion. One in 10 will be hit by this tax, thanks to the revelation of this secret modelling.
Not only has the government been keeping this secret from the Australian people; they have actual modelling, we know now, that they told no-one about. In fact, I’ve been messaging some journalists just now. The journalists have been asking the government for these figures over the last few days. They’ve been asking for them, but—surprise, surprise—no-one has given them to them.
Well, now we know that there is a bunch of secret modelling there. I would have thought that in this place, in this chamber, we should be holding the government to account and getting the full details of that secret modelling from the government. We need all those details, not just the figure of 10 per cent; we know that 10 per cent are going to be hit. But then, after being a little immodest, the finance minister went back to being modest again—okay: there is modelling—and she wouldn’t tell us how much extra tax, over their lifetime, those10 per cent of Australians will have to pay. That’s surely in their modelling. It’s not that hard to work out. So, where is that figure? We should, as a Senate, demand that figure before signing off on these changes.
All this modelling should be revealed. It isn’t too hard to do some sums. If you do some rough sums, you’ll see that a 30-year-old who today has $200,000 in super and is earning only $100,000 a year—which is just over the average full-time wage now—and makes their normal mandated contributions and their salary goes up with inflation and they make average returns on super will be over the $3 million threshold by the time of their retirement. That’s someone on an average wage. They will be over the $3 million threshold if they start off with a bit of money. That’s the power of compound interest. And if they do end up in this category, they will end up, over their lifetime, if they live to just over 80 years of age—which is the average age, once you retire—then they will pay an extra $700,000 in tax in their lifetime thanks to this change, because this tax hits you every year. Clearly it hurts the growth of your fund. It’s a tax on saving, a tax on capital accumulation. It’s the worst kind of tax, because it hurts our overall economic strength.
If the government is going to be fair dinkum with Australians it should now do two things. They already broke a promise to the Australian people. But, to be fair dinkum, they should release this modelling so that people know how much extra tax they’re due to pay thanks to this broken promise from this government. And the government should commit to indexing this threshold, because it they really want to hit only half a per cent of Australians, then just index the threshold, and that argument will be taken away from me. The fact that they’re not doing that shows that they are not being fair dinkum about this change.
