Coming to grips with adequacy

4 min read
4 min read

An early Christmas present from the Grattan Institute was their latest report on superannuation and retirement incomes. However, for the superannuation sector, it was as welcome and as useful as someone with a beard receiving aftershave from an uncle or aunt on Christmas Day. Even worse, it is not something that can be regifted.

The report makes use of what they call the Grattan Retirement Income Projector (GRIP) model. However, it perhaps could be better called the Grattan Retirement Income Poor Expectations (GRIPE) model.

ASFA issued a strong response to the Grattan report when it was released. Paul Keating also provided a powerful defence of compulsory superannuation.

ASFA pointed out that in a world where there are broken work patterns, and where women’s balances are 40 per cent less than men, adoption of the Grattan recommendations would leave large parts of our society exposed to poverty in retirement.

Despite assertions by Grattan, ASFA has never said that every Australian should achieve the ASFA comfortable standard. However, for the bulk of the Australian population it sets a very relevant benchmark. This is confirmed by independent surveys of the population which indicate that most people aspire to achieve expenditure in retirement at ASFA comfortable or more. For those who do not aspire to it (or more), very often it is because they are limited by the financial resources available rather than the target being over the top in terms of consumption.

Spending around $43,000 a year for a single person and $60,600 a year for a couple, does not make you rich.

To be able to run and maintain a home, to eat adequate meals, to clothe yourself, to afford haircuts and grooming supplies, to run a motor vehicle, to purchase private health insurance and cover out-of-pocket medical expenses, to have a range of leisure and hobby activities, including domestic vacations and the very occasional overseas holiday, is not an unreasonable aspiration.

While the Grattan analysis contains a number of errors, one of the main factors in coming to their conclusions is the use of movements in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) as the deflator for their projections of retirement income rather than the movement in community living standards, with growth in average wages the proxy for that.

Discussions about the right deflator to use are normally confined to those comfortable at nerdfests, or who have an unhealthy interest in Star Trek episodes. However, a translation is that if you use CPI as a deflator you assume that acceptable living standards do not change, the same bundle of goods and services are purchased as at the start of the projection period, only prices for them change.

On that basis a retiree now should only expect to live the life of a typical person in the 1950s. This would mean no internet and like services, lucky to have a television (which really should be black and white screen) no car, no health insurance, not many whitegoods, holidays limited to a relatively nearby motel or camping ground, and a diet of lamb chops and potatoes.

Going forward we do not know what community living standards will involve in 30 years’ time let alone 60 years’ time in terms of the bundle of goods and services purchased, but one thing that is sure is that retirees will not be happy with the lifestyle of decades earlier.

Another outworking of the Grattan analysis is that it has a projection of the Age Pension at a level that is very high. For instance, the report asserts that a person retiring in 2052 will have access to the Age Pension which has a maximum rate of around $38,000 a year in today’s dollars. This drives their misleading assertions about the supposed no need to move to 12 per cent SG.

ASFA will continue to defend the compulsory super system as appropriate and rebut any misleading analysis that is published.

Picture of By Ross Clare

By Ross Clare

director of research

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Derek Thompson

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

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

Sessions

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

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

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.