Page 1552 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 14 May 2019
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I suppose I am particularly conscious of this because I am a female. This is what happens to most women. They take off time to have kids. This is all very good, but they find at the end of life that they simply do not have the superannuation income that males with an uninterrupted work life have.
Basically this is saying that superannuation is a long-term part of a person’s income. Certainly for lowest income people, this is a reasonable expectation. I acknowledge that there are potential implementation issues with this, which is why I understand that the government did not put it in immediately.
I appreciate that the government and the insurance companies will not be employing the injured person, so they are not in a position to make an employer contribution directly themselves. However, the injured person is not going to be in a position to make a personal contribution themselves.
I commend this to the Assembly as something which I think is necessary to fulfil the original equity ideas behind compulsory superannuation. It is particularly so for the low income earners, who will always be the people who are going to find retirement more financially challenging than high income earners. We need to make sure that low income earners who are unfortunately injured in a car accident do not live to find that this is a problem for them in their old age as well as at the time.
MR BARR (Kurrajong—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Social Inclusion and Equality, Minister for Tourism and Special Events and Minister for Trade, Industry and Investment) (11.41): We do support the principle of this amendment but there are clearly going to be challenges in implementing the intent. Ms Le Couteur has touched on some of those. There are a number of technical issues related to commonwealth superannuation law, the ability of individuals to make superannuation contributions, and of course our capacity to compel people who receive these payments to actually put them into their superannuation.
These issues make it challenging to achieve the policy intent of the amendments; however, we will work through these with the aim of finding a way to implement the intent. In doing so, we need to be cognisant of any changes that may be required to commonwealth legislation.
This, in simple terms, also flows on to the amendments that are coming up in this clause from Mr Coe as well. An insurer cannot step into the shoes of an employer and pay compulsory superannuation under current commonwealth legislation. To do so would require a change to commonwealth legislation. We also need to be cognisant of the inclusion of superannuation in gross income and its relative fairness to those who, for example, are self-employed, who can pay voluntary superannuation only from their net business income.
Regardless of the outcome here, it would appear that this proposed amendment, both Ms Le Couteur’s and Mr Coe’s, could really apply only to employees. That is an added complexity. There are interactions with commonwealth law. There are challenges here, but we do support the principle of the amendment. We will work
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