Liberal Party’s latest super plan an attack on Aussie workers   
New Daily
Jan 10, 2024.


Superannuation should be something all Australians can benefit from, writes the ACTU Assistant Secretary.

Superannuation is one of the great democratising vehicles that Australia has created, and an important driver of equality.

Thanks to the efforts of union members a generation ago, working people like teachers and truckies are now able to not only retire with dignity, but also invest and own an enormous share of our national wealth and production through their super funds.

It is a sign of how backwards the Liberal Party is that it would see the broad ownership of Australian companies by the Australian people as a threat.

Recently, the one-note, anti-super Senator Andrew Bragg called for workers to be barred from owning more than 10 per cent of listed Australian companies through their super funds.

This proposal would absolutely smash the returns working people would get on their superannuation.

On day one of the Senator’s fever dream, Australian superannuation funds would need to jettison stocks to be gobbled up by those he thinks would be better owners – foreign-owned multinational investors like Brookfield, Vanguard and BlackRock.

Before working people started banding together and investing collectively through their super funds, the ASX was more foreign owned and more concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest.
Long-term investment for all workers

It is only now, through working people and their super, that nearly all Australian workers have a broad long-term investment in the stockmarket.

A policy to prevent Australians from owning Australian companies would result in more foreign ownership and increased ownership by the very richest in Australia.

Working people would lose out on investing in their country, in their companies and in their future, and more money would be sent offshore to make up the lost returns they would otherwise get at home.

The thought bubble would also treat working Australians as second-class citizens.


Why should UBS or HSBC be able to take more than 10 per cent of a company for their foreign clients and Australians be denied that same opportunity through their super fund?

2024 is a critical year for the Australian people to assert what their goals for superannuation should be, crystallised in the debate about its legislated objective.

It has been a generation since the first workers, as union members, went on strike to win employer-paid superannuation.

In doing so, they asserted that every worker deserved to retire with dignity and that superannuation as a vehicle should not be reserved for only exclusive management, men or the very rich.
Universal values

Super must be available to every worker and their savings should be invested responsibly for the long term and preserved for retirement.

It is part of the great Australian spirit that the campaign to win superannuation was started workplace by workplace, with the ultimate goal that every worker should be afforded that right.

Universality, equity, adequacy and preservation are the pillars of the system, which make it one of the best retirement income systems in the world.

This attack on how superannuation is invested is the latest in a series of hare-brained schemes by Bragg and the Liberal Party to undermine the pillars of the system the Liberal Party has always opposed and is actively seeking to unpick.

In the previous government, the Liberals froze workers’ legislated super increases for five years, permanently cutting the retirement incomes of millions of Australians.

They forced workers to drain their super just to get by in the pandemic, abdicating their responsibility to the Australian people by cutting something they don’t care about.

They attack preservation by suggesting working people should add super to the bonfire of house prices, making people rightfully desperate to buy a house and drain their super to do so.

And now the Liberals are looking to smash workers’ investment potential by robbing them of the magic of compounding returns.

This idea, along with all their others that cut workers’ retirement incomes, should be rejected.

The super scam of high priced charges and fees hits most at the part-time casual - the tent city dweller etc - who in many cases scarcely has the income to put super on the table.

The whole deal needs a total overhaul.... starting with the massively preferential one for politicians and their chosen ones secure forever by the stolen 230Bn that pays no tax.

It is beyond my understanding that the people of Australia allowed that to happen under Don Juanito Howard's watch, and allow it to persist.... these dorks can do whatever they want to this country - bring it and its people to their knees - and still have their retirement money secured for life.

$230 Bn+ would help our economy greatly if put in the right place and politicians and other leaners forced to live in the same world as the people they trash by the day and take the consequences of their often abysmally stupid decisions and policies.

Something badly wrong with you people - you allow your national boss and his mates to literally rob the national treasury and salt billions away for themselves - and you say nothing and most don't even notice.

Why do we have a Liberal party ?

Waste of time and a risk to us all.

Removing the massive preference is hardly an imposition .. besides - it could be phased into the norm over time....

Something has to change - how about everyone get the same deal then?  Return the stolen $230Bn and that's a good start on the National Equal Super Scheme ... a bank of the people's money from which governments may borrow at good rates to build infrastructure etc and pay it back thus obviating the need for 'public/private ventures'..... if you haven't worked out the Barilaroing that goes in those by now, you never will....

"the DFRBS or MSBS (both now closed schemes)" ... closed - so why should those change?   They go until they run out of recipients as will occur now anyway.

How about those working diligently for fifty years and ending up with no super?  How about those young people increasingly forced into part-time casual? What say you?

I say super is another disaster waiting to happen... unless we act NOW to control the excesses and bring it all under one roof for equal treatment.