Media Release

Be a Super-hero! Boost your super today and pay yourself forward

4 July 2017

Be a Super-hero! Boost your super today and pay yourself forward

Money magazine and the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) are excited to bring back the Super Booster Day campaign – an initiative to encourage all Australians to boost their super by Super Booster Day – 15 September 2017.


The campaign will run from Tuesday 4 July – Friday 15 September 2017.

Fewer than five per cent of Australians aged under 45 are currently contributing extra to their super. That coupled with a shortfall of $25,000 a year for couples and $20,000 a year for singles between the full Age Pension and what it costs to have a ‘comfortable’ lifestyle in retirement, means Australians need to act now and start boosting their super.

According to ASFA’s Retirement Standard, to have a comfortable lifestyle, single people need $545,000 in retirement savings and couples need $640,000. At this time fewer than 20 per cent of single people and 30 per cent of couples aged over 65 are able to achieve this at retirement. Currently, the average super balance at retirement is $292,500 for men and $138,150 for women – a big gap from the current ASFA ‘comfortable’ level.

This is why Money magazine and ASFA have once again joined forces to bring back the Super Booster Day campaign, to highlight the long-term benefits of making additional contributions to super.

Money magazine editor Effie Zahos said, “I’ve always been a strong supporter of topping up your super and I encourage all Australians to take advantage of the tax benefits it has to offer.”

“You can enjoy tax savings if you top up your super using your pre-tax income. These contributions are generally taxed in the super fund at a maximum rate of 15 per cent. In most cases, this tax rate is less than the marginal tax rate. If you can’t make regular payments, a one-off after-tax contribution can help you supercharge your wealth,” she said.

From 1 July, you will generally be able to claim a tax deduction for a personal contribution to super without needing to set up a salary sacrifice arrangement with your employer.

ASFA CEO Dr Martin Fahy said Australians should invest in their super to reap the rewards of the magic of compound interest.

“It’s particularly important for young people and women to engage early with super,” he said.

“It’s an ideal way to build wealth and even small amounts can make a big difference in the long term.”

If you’re 40, have $50,000 in super, earn $70,000 a year and only rely on the Superannuation Guarantee, by the time you’re 67 you’ll have $388,000 in super.* That’s around $150,000 less than you need to lead a comfortable lifestyle.

So to pay yourself forward and for a range of information, tips, checklists and links to SuperGuru calculators, visit www.superboosterday.com.au before 15 September 2017 and follow the three-step guide to make a pledge.

There are also 5 x $1000 prizes up for grabs. By pledging, you can go in the running to win $1000 for your super – simply tell us in 25 words or less what your dream retirement looks like.

Super Booster Day is supported by:
CBUS, ING Direct, QSuper, Sunsuper and UniSuper

Join other Australians and make your pledge to ‘Pay yourself forward’ by Friday 15 September 2017, so that you can have the lifestyle you want in the future. www.superboosterday.com.au

Super Booster Day Ambassadors available for interview are:

Effie Zahos, Editor Money Magazine
Dr Martin Fahy, CEO ASFA
Sam Henderson, Financial Advisor and host of Sky News Business Your Money, Your Call
Paul Clitheroe, Chairman of the Australian Government’s Financial Literary Board

For further information or to interview Money magazine editor Effie Zahos, please contact Jackie Evans on 0407 776 222, jep.pub@bigpond.net.au


To interview Dr Martin Fahy, please contact Teresa Mullan on 0451 949 300 or tmullan@superannuation.asn.au


*Calculation made using superguru.com.au calculator and based on a 30-year-old person putting an additional $35 each month into their super account, assuming 5%pa growth over 35 years.

About Bauer Media
Bauer Media publishes 60-plus magazines in Australia, selling more than 60 million copies each year. They include some of the longest-running and most successful mastheads, such as the country’s biggest-selling monthly magazine, The Australian Women’s Weekly, Australia’s number-one weekly magazine, Woman’s Day, Dolly, NW, TV Week, Cosmopolitan, Australian Gourmet Traveller, Australian House & Garden and Wheels. Integral to the company’s success are vibrant, information-packed websites, mobile apps and social media platforms managed by Bauer Xcel Media, Bauer’s global digital division. BauerWorks leads the way in creating branded cross platform editorial content for major clients including Telstra, Myer and Weight Watchers. For more information visit http://bauer-media.com.au

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.

About SuperGuru
Super Guru is an independent website that helps you understand and maximise your superannuation. It is a site for Australians of all ages and stages of their life, whether you’re studying, working, have kids or retiring. Super Guru is an initiative of ASFA. For more information visit www.superguru.com.au

Derek Thompson

Via live link

Best Selling Author, Podcast Host of 'Plain English'

Sessions

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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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.