ACTU and Ai Group agree super bill is poor

Employers and unions jointly demand the Senate reject the proposed superannuation bill outright and a key crossbencher calling for substantial amendments.

Senator Rex Patrick has released his proposed amendments to the proposed superannuation bill. Picture: AAP

The Coalition is under increasing pressure to make significant changes to its proposed superannuation bill, with employers and unions jointly demanding the Senate reject it outright and a key crossbencher calling for substantial amendments.

South Australian independent Senator Rex Patrick released his proposed amendments after the ACTU and the Australian Industry Group wrote to crossbenchers declaring the Your Future Your Super bill should be rejected due to “very serious flaws” that would result in poor outcomes for existing and future fund members.

Superannuation Minister Jane Hume hit back at the criticism, labelling the employers and unions “vested interests”.

With Labor also pushing for changes, a second crossbencher Stirling Griff was on Sunday strongly critical of the bill, while One Nation said it had yet to determine its position.

In a joint letter, ACTU president Michele O’Neil and Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said the bill would lock more fund members into poor performing products “potentially for life”.

They said the changes would leave many workers in high-risk industries with unsuitable and inadequate insurance coverage, exclude a large proportion of poor-performing super products from performance benchmarking; and create a power for the minister to cancel investments that were in members’ best financial interests.

“Our organisations believe this bill should be rejected and alternative legislation should be developed to address under­per­formance and multiple accounts,” Ms O’Neil and Mr Willox wrote.

Senator Patrick said on Sunday that he would seek the removal of the provisions allowing the minister to prohibit funds from making certain payments or investments.

“I think the recent criminalisation of Australian citizens returning home is proof that if you give this government an inch, they’ll take a mile,” he said.

Senator Patrick said he would move amendments to exempt employees working in a dangerous occupation from stapling.

“I also intend to move an amendment to clarify that a person cannot be stapled to a fund that has failed to satisfy the performance assessment within the last year. This is intended to protect people from being stapled to a fund that is not meeting the prescribed performance benchmarks.”

Senator Griff said the intent of the bill was “fine, but the approach is deeply flawed and, as such I will not be supporting it as it now stands”.

He backed employer criticism of the government for not undertaking a regulatory impact statement, and said there was no genuine consultation on the draft bill, with stakeholders given a few weeks before Christmas to provide feedback, which was then ignored.

“One flaw example is that the stapling arrangements will begin before the tax office has an automated system in place for employers to find an employee’s stapled fund,” he said.

“Small business owners will have to call the tax office and manually request information about a new employee’s super fund every time they hire someone. That will waste the time of every small business owner in the country — for no good reason.

“It will be even worse for businesses with bulk recruitment rounds. They may have to hire scores of temporary workers to process these requests, at considerable and unnecessary expense. This will obviously trigger a massive increase in the ATO’s workload — but it does not seem they will have any additional resources. The inevitable result of this flaw will be queues, backlogs, and many hours wasted by business people and bureaucrats.”

One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts said he and Pauline Hanson were continuing to receive representations from a variety of stakeholders. “Super is becoming increasingly complex yet fundamentally we believe in freedom of choice for fund members and accountability for superannuation funds,” Senator Roberts said.

Senator Hume’s spokesman said it “was not surprising that vested interests are desperately lobbying the crossbench looking for any excuse to block these reforms”.