Media Release

Further superannuation changes will be a disaster: ASFA

20 April 2012

Further superannuation changes will be a disaster: ASFA

The Government should immediately drop plans to make any further changes to the superannuation system, the peak body for the industry warned today.

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) said that the constant tinkering and speculation on the settings around superannuation were undermining confidence in the system.

“This treatment of the industry as a ‘honey pot’ which can be dipped into whenever the Government is looking for money, must stop,” said ASFA CEO Pauline Vamos.

“We have a compulsory superannuation system that is relatively young – 20 years old this year – and yet the goal posts are always shifting.

“Our research shows one of the biggest frustrations with super and one of the reasons people are reluctant to commit to saving more for their retirement, is the constant change.

“To proceed with the kinds of tax changes that have been leaked today as under consideration, would be bad for women, those close to retirement and self-employed workers who we are trying to encourage to save for their retirement.

“In effect, it would be the Government mortgaging this country’s future and undermining the good work they have done to reform the system.

“It will mean more Australians will have less in retirement and a greater burden will be placed on the public purse through the Age Pension.

“We are already facing an ageing population with insufficient savings for retirement – and we are living longer.

“Removing incentives to save more through superannuation will have a snowball effect which will mean: reduced voluntary contributions, less money invested in the Australian economy through the diverse holdings of the super pool and a much bigger burden on the taxpayer down the track.

“The retirement incomes system in Australia is based on three pillars: compulsory contributions, voluntary savings and the Age Pension. By removing the existing tax concessions, those voluntary savings will result in less revenue for the Government as discretionary funds move into less productive investments such as negative gearing of both residential property and shares, or even into discretionary family trusts.

“Over the past year the Government has already reduced concessions available within superannuation by halving the co-contribution, pausing the indexation of concessional caps and placing restrictions on the contributions those over 50 can make.

“The perception that the tax concessions unfairly favour the wealthy is demonstrably wrong.

“The tighter contribution caps (on the amount of super contributions attracting the concessional tax rate) and other factors have seen the level of tax concessions flowing to the top income earners drop considerably since 2005.

“In 2009-10 around 90 per cent of employer contributions related to individuals on less than the top marginal tax rate, with over 50 per cent of contributions relating to individuals on a marginal income tax rate of 30 per cent or less.

“The bulk of tax concessions on super flowed to the majority of Australian employees who are on marginal tax rates of 30 and 38 per cent.

“The superannuation system already pays more than $10 billion in taxes every year and helps drive the Australian economy through diverse investment including in Australian companies and infrastructure.”

For media inquiries, please contact:

Pauline Vamos, CEO, 0433 169 342

Rebecca Glenn, GM Marketing and Communications, 0416 170 439

Megan McDougall, Media and Communications Coordinator, (02) 8079 0849

About ASFA – the voice of super

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia is the peak industry body representing the superannuation and retirement industry. ASFA is the only organisation that represents all types of superannuation funds (retail, industry, corporate and public sector) and associated service providers. ASFA members manage or advise on the bulk of the $1.3 trillion in superannuation assets as at September 2011. Its members represent over 90 per cent of the approximately 12 million Australians with superannuation.

Derek Thompson

Via live link

Best Selling Author, Podcast Host of 'Plain English'

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Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Few speakers can match Derek Thompson‘s ability to synthesize mega-trends in society, labor, economics, technology, and politics. Put another way: Derek trawls the data sets and does the forecasting and deep reporting necessary to help us better understand how we live, how we vote, how we spend, and how we work.

In his paradigm-shifting #1 New York Times bestseller, Abundance (co-written with Ezra Klein), this award-winning journalist reveals how our policies and culture have pushed us into a world of scarcity (not enough housing, workers, or progress)—and offers a radical new path towards a world where housing is affordable, energy is plentiful, and innovation flourishes across industries.

He shares a compelling vision of a future where we have more than enough for everybody, and a practical, actionable roadmap for how to get there. It starts with taking more risks, building more expansively, and recognizing that we all have the power to create a world of abundance. “Everything’s utopian until it’s reality,” he says.

Carmen Beverley-Smith

Executive Director - Superannuation, Life & Private Health Insurance, APRA

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Carmen joined APRA in March 2023 and holds the role of Executive Director, Life and Private Health Insurance and Superannuation.  

She has had an esteemed career in financial services, spanning over 25 years. She has held diverse leadership roles at Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including across risk, transformation and change, product and portfolio development, and sales and service. 

Prior to joining APRA, she held the role of General Manager, Risk Transformation Delivery Integration at Westpac. This involved leading the group-wide implementation of a suite of solutions to uplift risk management capability and develop data, analytics and reporting. 

Carmen leads with a values-driven approach and a particular interest in developing and mentoring talent. 

She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Accounting, is a certified Chartered Accountant and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. 

Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

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Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.  She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organisational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. 

Edmondson’s latest book, Right Kind of Wrong (Atria), builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well. First published in the US and the UK in September, 2023, the book is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organisational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

 

Daniel Mulino MP

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services

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Born in Brindisi, Italy, Daniel was a young child when he moved with his family to Australia. He grew up in Canberra and completed his first degrees – arts and law – at the ANU. He then completed a Master of Economics (University of Sydney) and a PhD in economics from Yale.

He lectured at Monash University, was an economic adviser in the Gillard government and was a Victorian MP from 2014 to 2018. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer of Victoria, Daniel helped deliver major infrastructure projects and developed innovative financing structures for community projects.

In 2018 he was preselected for the new federal seat of Fraser and became its first MP at the 2019 election, re-elected in 2022 and 2025. From 2022 to 2025, Daniel was chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Economics Committee in which he chaired inquiries; economic dynamism, competition and business formation and insurers’ responses to 2022 major floods claims.

In 2025, he became the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services.

In August 2022, Daniel published ‘Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia’, which aims to explore the ways in which an insurance approach can improve the effectiveness of government service delivery.