Mr BEAZLEY (Leader of the Opposition)(9.11 p.m.) —I want to speak on this superannuation legislation because it starts the process of dismantling what was one of the fairest and most decent initiatives to improve savings and the retirement possibilities of the ordinary Australian that a government in this country has ever introduced. After a series of fits and starts over the years, and incorporating at different points of time in the history of its processes such luminaries as Bob Menzies, the government finally had the guts and almost sufficient longevity to leave it in place.

This proposition starts the process of dismantling. Given what the Treasurer (Mr Costello) said over the weekend, it is completed in the next budget when the co-payment, which the previous government promised when in office and the incoming government promised to implement when running for election, is put in place. This effective package for superannuation arrangements and increasing national savings and providing a decent retirement then disappears.

This is a government without creativity but with prejudices. It has no creativity but it has a load of prejudices. It is as though they were Rip Van Winkles of the last 13 years. They understood nothing. They forgot nothing of the slights directed towards them. They learned the words but they never learned the music. They never internalised any of the intellectual arguments accepted by the community—generated from the community in some circumstances—that caused this country to be regarded as an interesting example of effective social experimentation by many other countries in the OECD, and by many people in the United States, on a whole variety of issues. They came out with the words they committed themselves to.

Nothing is more appalling than to watch the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) parade around the country now as though he has accepted his election undertakings. Part of that process that he knocked over was child care. They committed to the arrangements that we had put in place with child care; he annihilated them in the last budget. Part of the process was with the universal health care system. Not a single decision that they have taken since they have been in office enhances that, and they have bungled the $1.5 billion rebate which could have transformed public hospitals.

They committed to opportunity and access to higher education by putting in place a system of arrangements inviting the universities to charge Australians full-cost recovery in a variety of degrees, which in some cases will be well over $100,000. They put that out there as an example of what the cost actually is, creating a sense of unfairness in a proportion of the student body that is paying that amount, while at the same time increasing HECS to the point where students feel constrained from entering particular courses.

On Friday evening I was talking to a very bright kid who has just entered university. He got a 99.5 rating in the New South Wales system, which easily qualifies him for medicine. He said simply, `I can't afford the uncertainty. I can't afford the HECS. I am going to be a lawyer.' God help us. He is going to be a lawyer. In this instance, we have taken one of the brightest kids you could imagine, who was not unenthusiastic about doing a university degree, and we are going to educate him towards malevolence on a grand scale as far as the rest of the community is concerned. What a shame.

This Rip Van Winkle government, having wrecked a whole range of social initiatives that produced decent public investment—real investment in the development of our nation and the quality of our citizens—by reintroducing privilege as the basis of access to goods and services and educational opportunities in this country, have now joined issue on a matter about which one would have thought the Liberal Party would have been prepared to lift its bat and allow to pass through to the keeper and say, `Okay. You produced a cure on the savings front to the chronic problem which has afflicted this nation since the 1960s, that is, our inability to save. You have just put through a set of propositions which will produce that.' Their response to that has been, like a bunch of vandals, `Let's go in and wreck this as well.'

They are a very lucky government; they are an extraordinarily lucky government. They have out there a jaded public that is switched off politics and a press which is operating on a 24-hour memory as far as these things are concerned. If we sit down and look through a proposition like the work for the dole scheme that we will be debating later in this week, we see that it was introduced into the public arena, poll driven, chucked into the middle of it, and everybody operates, revolves and dances around it with a 24-hour memory. It is as though Working Nation was based on reciprocal obligation. The Prime Minister even gets away with describing his system as reciprocal obligation. Where did he get those words from? He got them from Simon Crean, that is where he got those words from.

The Prime Minister even has the temerity to talk about reciprocal obligation to that and everybody who calls themselves a social analyst, at least in the media, is prepared to allow him to get away with it. They are prepared to ignore what was one of the most effectively developed schemes of social support and one of the most effectively developed schemes of educational and training support for the long-term unemployed who had no hope without it and now have, in most instances, no hope at all. They allowed him to get away with that paltry, tawdry scheme thrown into the middle.

All these things are recoverable. Elected to office in 1½ years time, we can cure—or start to cure—the reintroduction of the notion of privilege, eliminate it and go back to education as a public investment. We can go down that course again. We can put in place decent mechanisms to ensure that the long-term unemployed are kept job ready and have an opportunity to get in, and a decent reciprocal obligation put in place with them so that there is an array of opportunities made available but a reasonable expectation by the community that one of them will be accepted. We can do that. We can fix up the mess that has been made of research and development in industry. We can fix up a lot of the mess that has been made in a whole range of other industry assistance programs.

But, when we sit down and contemplate the consequences of what they have done here, I very much fear that it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to fix. They are driving people out of the upper end of superannuation and annihilating the benefits at the bottom. What is going to be the effect of that? The effect of that on the nation overall is that the net increase in private savings that would have come through as a result of these schemes—improving and lifting our private savings ratios by some two percentage points of GDP in net terms just after the turn of this century—is gone. That simply will not happen without that copayment going through. That proposition, which would have lifted us, if you want to put it in dollar terms, to the trillion dollar mark by around that time—compare that trillion dollar mark with the $200 billion that we owe foreigners, if you want to put things that way, and you would see that we deal very comfortably with that problem we have to generate sufficient internal savings to be basically responsible for our own development—is gone, all gone, as a result of the decisions that this government is about to make and is in the process of making.

We got the cutest possible explanation of all that by the Treasurer at question time today. He had the hide to get up and repeat again that canard of his that somehow or other he was not obliged to keep our promises. Treasurer, we do not oblige you to keep one of our promises—not one. The government is not responsible for keeping the Labor Party's promises—not one of them. The government is, however, responsible for keeping its own. What makes the private savings of the nation a non-core promise? What makes it so insignificant? The problem of dealing with our current account deficit, the problem of dealing with ownership of Australian industry, the problem of dealing with a decent retirement package for everybody now in their 30s and 40s—why is this so trivial that it is a non-core promise? We say black means white when we see a proposition like this put forward by the Treasurer in February 1996: `A coalition government will provide in full the funds earmarked in the 1995-96 budget to match compulsory contributions according to the proposed schedule.'

The other cute part of his explanation today was to say, `Aha, a revelation! What you did not tell the Australian people was that there would be a one per cent compulsory contribution from the wage earners—and then two and then three as the years go by.' You didn't tell them! The previous Prime Minister used to dance across the airwaves day after day telling them precisely that. The union leadership which took an interest in these matters used to dance across the airwaves day after day telling them precisely that. And that stately dance was joined by none other than the now Treasurer back then in February 1996 when he made amply clear that a coalition government would `match compulsory contributions according to the proposed schedule'. That was not our promise, not some promise put out there in the ether that descended unfortunately on the head of this new government as it came in. It was their promise, their undertaking to the Australian people.

This was a promise as core as anything else that they delivered or said that they would deliver after the election. What have they produced? They have produced a rebate of $1.5 billion—completely wasted. How are they going to pay for that shenanigan? To kill the savings of the nation, to kill the retirement of 30- and 40-year-olds now who looked at the prospect of a retirement with an income more or less around the average weekly earnings that they now enjoy—whacking off the average 30-year old now some $100,000 on the point of retirement and hoping to skate through this one by saying, `Well, it is not terribly relevant to them because it doesn't happen for another 30 years.' They are going to need a very quiet press on this one because as this becomes more generally known this government will stand monumentally condemned for this piece of electoral chicanery.

Today we saw the Treasurer in probably his worst question time that I have seen for some considerable time. But the other little piece of chicanery on the Treasurer's part was to try to claim that, with this particular exercise—I have already gone through the fact that he claimed it was an exercise—their savings vehicle would match it. Let us go through an analysis of what we know of their savings vehicle—their savings vehicle that will partly pay for it. He was saying that they could only afford to do that because they had to deal with the black hole that was left by us.

Let us reflect upon their last budget. Whatever claims they might make about the financial system they inherited, they announced to the Australian people proudly at the last budget that they had left sufficient way in the budget for the implementation of this promise in full. So the first cute explanation was, `We didn't make it, the dog ate our homework, we lost the promise. The second cute little explanation for the breaking of that particular promise was that it was somebody else's promise and they were not obliged to commit l-a-w law. The third cute little explanation for this exercise was that somehow or other they had a budgetary situation of our doing, not the budgetary situation that they have themselves confronted since the budget which they brought down last time.

It was a point of pride for the Treasurer. He does want us to operate on a 24-hour memory, but I can recollect him getting up there offering his blandishments to the opposition spokesman on Treasury matters. He used to do it far more forcibly in those days than he does now. He would lean across the dispatch box and say, `Not only have we fixed up the budget deficit, but we are going to put in place your l-a-w law tax arrangements. That's what we're going to do.' This was not even before the last election; this was after the last budget. Up he got and said precisely that. So the third cute little explanation that he had here today for what it was that he was up to is out the window as well.

Now we turn to the matters that are contained within this bill. These matters, of course, are not so serious in their impact on the nation's savings, nor on the opportunity for retirement for the average Australian, as are the propositions that they have foreshadowed for the next budget, but they are just as serious in their impact on the credibility of superannuation as a mechanism for saving. It is the first step in the subversive process, the first step in undermining the proposition. This step drives high income earners out of the superannuation arrangements. They are the ones who can make alternative arrangements available for them. Therefore the savings are not going to be there in the public saving sense, but what will be there, for those who remain, is a whole set of arrangements—enormously costly to put in place—that will be recovered from the other members of the superannuation funds and diminish their benefit. All the battlers—all 15 million, or whatever it is—who are signed up now to these superannuation funds, one after another over the last few years, will be impacted upon.

Secondly, of course, they are massively impacted upon by the practical activity associated with these measures which means that, when they do not put in their tax file numbers or if they are just an ordinary battler and they tot up a final payment that comes to over $70,000, on both those fronts, the so-called wealthy, who are in fact the Australian battlers, will be the ones who are soaked. In other words, exactly the same people who are going to be skinned alive when it comes to this next budget are also the people who are going to bear the brunt of this.

The superannuation funds, and others associated with the industry, have pointed out that there is virtually no response from individual fund members, from copious correspondence with them, because superannuation is not a system that they readily understand, they consider themselves to be in receipt of rote letters to which you never respond, and their lives are too busy anyway. They are going to be royally punished for that lack of attention when this particular bill goes through. What will happen to them at a minimum is going to be the loss of earnings that would have been there on that proportion of their income, which will be illegitimately taxed as a result. That may actually last for a very long time indeed in the case of a number of members and, even when they discover it, what they will not get back is the loss of earnings from the fund when that occurs. Various estimates have been placed on this but reasonable ones are that some one million Australian battlers are going to be the people who are worse off as a result of that.

Finally, there is a point that ought to be made about this which goes to the competence of this particular Treasurer. I do not want to describe this fellow as a bloke completely without ability. He has some, but he is not a Treasurer. Maybe in another 10 or 15 years he would be a Treasurer. He is not one now. He is going to find over the next few days, as he has already found at the hands of Rose QC, at the hands of the premiers, at the hands of those who actually know something about this, that this is monumentally botched legislation, completely botched legislation. Not only is he destroying part of the nation's savings; he is destroying it incompetently. There is absolutely no clothing left on this particular emperor. This particular emperor has no clothes at all when he tries to claim a degree of expertise in this field.

He will get through this legislation. The nation will be the poorer for it and it will be even poorer still when the rest of his shenanigans as far as superannuation is concerned come to fruition. This particular part of it is going to bring him down 18 months from now as people come to understand what he has done to them and the superannuation funds descend in chaos. (Time expired)