Media Release

Let’s have a superannuation debate based on facts: ASFA

27 March 2013

Let’s have a superannuation debate based on facts: ASFA

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) has called on industry and policy makers to take a step back and consider the facts around the key issues currently being debated in the media regarding the future of Australia’s superannuation system.

ASFA CEO Pauline Vamos says the shared goal of all stakeholders must be ensuring we have a sustainable superannuation system that delivers adequate retirement income to all Australians.

“With growing account balances and an ageing population there’s no doubt this may involve some changes to the system in the future, but it’s important these decisions are made based on facts and not fiction, particularly given they have the potential to impact many Australians.”

ASFA’S TOP 3 SUPER MYTHS

MYTH 1: Tax concessions cost the budget $32 billion last year alone
There has been a lot of discussion regarding the budget cost of the various superannuation tax concessions, which based on last year’s figures, was estimated at around $32 billion.

Once you take into account that the government is currently saving $7 billion annually in Age Pension expenditures as a result of super, this figure drops substantially. When you also deduct the leakage of savings into other tax-advantaged areas such as negative gearing which would occur with any decrease in tax concessions, a true estimate of the aggregate tax concession for superannuation on an ongoing basis would be around $16 billion. This is roughly half the figure in the Tax Expenditure Statement.

Many retirees rely on superannuation to supplement the Age Pension, giving them greater comfort in retirement. Importantly, without compulsory superannuation and its various tax concessions, around 50 per cent of couples and over 70 per cent of single people would have incomes in retirement no greater than a $1,000 a year in addition to the Age Pension.

“Tax concessions are a necessary feature of superannuation as they grow the pool for people to self-fund their retirement, taking pressure of the Age Pension in the future.” Ms Vamos says

MYTH 2: The majority of government support for retirement goes to high income earners.
The amount of assistance for retirement provided by the government is broadly comparable across the personal income tax brackets.

Not only has the amount of government assistance provided to individuals on very high income levels been substantially decreased by lower caps for concessional contributions, but when you take into account the Age Pension, tax concessions and rebates the present value of government assistance is around $300,000 over a person’s lifetime across the range of tax brackets.

“A lower income person will receive this mostly in the form of the Age Pension, concessionally-taxed contributions and the low-income superannuation contribution, while a person in the top income tax bracket will receive it as tax concessions for super,” Ms Vamos says.

MYTH 3: Government funds spent on superannuation tax concessions would be better directed at helping other areas of the economy
Superannuation does and will continue to play an important role in providing the foundations for economic activity and prosperity.

It currently lifts household savings by around 2 percentage points of GDP and with the upcoming increases in the compulsory Superannuation Guarantee, this is expected to rise to 2.5 percentage points of GDP.

“This helps Australian businesses and government to finance investment and infrastructure without having to rely unduly on foreign savings and investment,” Ms Vamos says.

Superannuation benefit payments, including lump sums, pension payments and insurance payouts, already boost domestic demand by over $50 billion a year and this figure could increase four fold by 2040.

While the increasing proportion of retirees in the future is projected to lead to a slowing of growth in GDP, without superannuation and superannuation benefits in retirement this reduction would be much greater.

“Superannuation provides business with the consumers of the future, delivering a boost to the economy which benefits all Australians,” Ms Vamos concluded.

For further information, please contact:

Pauline Vamos, CEO, 0433 169 342

Lisa Chikarovski, Media Manager, 0451 949 300

About ASFA

ASFA is the peak policy, research and advocacy body for Australia’s superannuation industry. It is a not-for-profit, sector-neutral, and non-party political national organisation whose aim is to advance effective retirement outcomes for members of funds through research, advocacy and the development of policy and industry best practice.

Derek Thompson

Bestselling author, podcast host & founder

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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.