Media Release

Misleading super myths exposed

29 November 2017

Misleading super myths exposed

Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) CEO Dr Martin Fahy today released a new Mythbusters paper, putting paid to some common and erroneous misconceptions associated with superannuation.

Myth 1 – Super is not getting people off the age pension

Dr Fahy said the take-up rate for the age pension had been coming down as more people accrued significant superannuation balances and more also worked past the age of 65.

“In 1997, the take up rate for the age pension and the age-related veterans’ pension was 79 per cent,” he said. “This fell to 75 per cent by 2007 and is now around 70 per cent.”

Myth 2 – Super is not improving retirement outcomes

Superannuation isn’t going to come up short as a public policy. Superannuation is delivering retirement incomes far higher than the age pension.

Around 22 per cent of people aged more than 65 have super as their main source of income. Already 30 per cent of those aged more than 65 are completely self-funded.

Myth 3 – Superannuation is not helping contain age pension expenditures

“By 2050 we will have reduced the reliance on the full or part aged pension to less than 50 per cent,” Dr Fahy said. “The age pension is only two to three per cent of GDP and will remain contained at that level, thanks to super.

Myth 4 – Australians have most of their savings outside super and therefore super is not important for most people

“Australians don’t have more assets outside super than in super and eating your furniture in retirement is not an option, even if the Grattan Institute thinks it is,” Dr Fahy said.

“For the great bulk of households (90 per cent or more) superannuation and owner occupied housing are the dominant forms of saving to support living standards in retirement.

Downplaying the role of superannuation using flawed statistics and dodgy averages is a debating trick rather than sound public policy analysis.”

Myth 5 – Australians would be much better off in terms of investment performance and final retirement savings if their super was invested by the Future Fund or the like, rather than by super fund trustees

“The stakeholders in the Future Fund can be proud of what they have achieved,” Dr Fahy said.

The reality is that on a five year return basis and adjusting for taxation, $1 invested into the Future Fund in June 2012 would have returned $1.67 at June 2017. Comparatively, the average super fund would have returned $1.64. Scores of super funds have also performed more strongly than the average.

Dr Fahy said the industry had invested $900 million to implement SuperStream over the past five years. “This has ultimately been funded by superannuants and nationalisation would represent a waste of their retirement savings,” he said.

Myth 6 – Saving outside super will deliver better retirement outcomes

Saving for retirement outside superannuation is not more efficient or effective. “Super is still the best game in town for funding your retirement,” Dr Fahy said. “Concessional tax treatment of superannuation leads to more dollars of savings being invested and higher after-tax investment returns from all forms of investment compared to being directly held by individuals.”

For further information, please contact:

Teresa Mullan, 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. ASFA’s mission is to continuously improve the superannuation system so people can live in retirement with increasing prosperity. We focus on the issues that affect the entire superannuation system and represent more than 90 per cent of the 14.8 million Australians with superannuation.

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.