Superannuation should be voluntary. By Adam Creighton in The Australian.

More than $160bn in wages and salaries is siphoned into super accounts every year, generating roughly $34bn in annual system-wide fees. In short, it’s the biggest racket in the country. 

Those fees … may not be counted as taxes, but they might as well be. They sustain a vast bureaucracy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

 

From the ASFA, via the Daily Mail

 

Most of the $3 trillion in APRA-regulated funds is actively managed, when much of it should be sitting in ultra-cheap indexed options …

Workers are being forced to save too much during the years when they most need that money — to buy a home, raise a family and enjoy life while they are still young enough to do so….

In its 2020 Retirement Income Review, Treasury found that when retirees die, most leave behind the majority of the wealth they had at retirement. Members who died had left about 90 per cent of the balance they held at retirement. In other words, retirees tend to live off the income from their assets, not the assets themselves. …

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry — the last truly exceptional and independently minded economist to hold that office — … also made a devastating point about the public finances. The system, he said, is a “net cost to government even over the long term”, puncturing the common claim that forced saving somehow saves taxpayers money. As he put it, the loss of income tax revenue from the various concessions would not be fully offset by higher super tax collections or lower Age Pension costs.

Put plainly, all other taxes are higher than they need to be because of this system. …

There is also a serious governance problem. Big super funds now control almost 40 per cent of the Australian sharemarket, creating an unelected parallel government that votes on company direction according to environmental and social fashions the vast majority of members are unlikely to care much about.

Whose money?

The Prime Minister has been boasting that super could become a “national asset that can be used more appropriately”, while the Treasurer said in 2023 that he hoped to maximise its potential through “greater investment in our national priorities”.

And what exactly does that mean?

Fortunately there is a political party advocating that superannuation be made voluntary — the People First Party, led by the impressive Gerard Rennick:

Superannuation is not working. After 34 years of compulsory superannuation, over half of retirees are still on a full pension, which is the same as it was in 1992 when superannuation was made compulsory. …

So super’s just become yet another way to shovel money to wealthy bureaucrats and finance industry types?

The cost of the pension is approximately $55 billion, yet superannuation tax concessions cost almost $50 billion and most of these concessions go to the highest 20% of income earners….

Superannuation is estimated by the productivity commission to cost 1% of fees under management or around $40 billion a year to just shuffle paper assets.

Will all the non-far-left parties please unite? The ruling class and their radical left fringe is thoroughly unpopular with most Australians, but their opposition is split across most (but not all) of the Liberals, the Nationals, One Nation, People First, Family First, …. and a bunch of even smaller parties.

For the 80% of us normies, how can we effectively vote to avoid rule by woke bureaucrats who are too sympathetic to Islam?

Btw, in efforts to “unite the right,” perhaps it would be better to avoid words like “conservative” and “right” — because many people who’ve voted Labor all their lives also want to vote against the far left.