Lib senator says superannuation a 'cancer'

Rookie senator Gerard Rennick launched a tirade against the major economic reforms of the Hawke and Keating era through the 1980s and 90s.

"I'll be honest: the coalition sold out its personal responsibility values when it didn't stop this cancer called superannuation," he told parliament on Wednesday.

Senator Rennick said superannuation destroyed incomes of people living in the bush.

"Millions of dollars gets sucked out of the pockets of the battlers in the bush and sent to the blowhards in Sydney and Melbourne to manage, all for a small cost of around $37 billion a year in management fees," he said.

He said union-linked industry super funds were "laughing all the way to the bank" while no money was reinvested in regional areas.

"The Hawke-Keating Labor government destroyed the bush with their reckless, neoliberal privatisation and centralised saving agenda."

Selling Qantas and privatising the Commonwealth Bank are seen on both sides of politics as necessary economic reforms undertaken during the 1990s.

But Senator Rennick said the moves were part of Labor selling regional Australia "down the toilet".

"Now regional Australia has to pay more for flying regionally than it costs to fly overseas," he said.

Mr Rennick said the Commonwealth Bank used to have a development bank to lend to farmers, but after privatisation it got rolled into business banking.

"The CBA, like every other bank in this country, became obsessed with housing rather than driving business and investment, especially in the regions," he said.

"Of course, selling the CBA also meant that branches would close down in regional centres - and they have."

Senator Rennick also attacked the Goss Queensland state government for introducing poker machines 30 years ago.

"As battlers in the bush became addicted to these dirty, stinking, one-armed, mechanical parasites, the royalties flowed to the corrupt Labor government," he told the upper house.

"We never heard a word from corruption-busting Tony Fitzgerald about the destruction that gambling does to regional communities, did we?"

Australian Associated Press