Media Release

ASFA welcomes Age Pension announcement

5 September 2018

ASFA welcomes Age Pension announcement

The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) welcomes the Prime Minister’s announcement today that the age of eligibility for the Age Pension will not be increased beyond 67 years.

ASFA CEO Dr Martin Fahy said the decision to no longer pursue an increase in eligibility age to 70 recognises many Australians find it difficult to work into their late 60s due to the nature of their occupation and/or their health.

“Maintaining the existing access age is a fairer public policy than pushing people onto Newstart in their late 60s because they are unable to find or retain employment,” he said.

“Disability rates increase quite sharply for people in their late 60s, with even relatively high levels of take-up of disability support benefits for those aged in their early 60s.”

Dr Fahy said Australia’s Age Pension was affordable at under three per cent of GDP and will continue to be so in the future due to the operation of the means test and more Australians having substantial retirement savings through superannuation.

“An increase in eligibility age beyond 67 is not needed on affordability grounds in terms of public finance,” he said.

“Superannuation is doing more of the heavy lifting and providing higher retirement incomes.

“With the scheduled increase in SG to 12 per cent, ASFA projects the rate of people relying solely or almost exclusively on the Age Pension will halve between now and 2050, from around 40 per cent to 20 per cent.

“It is good to incentivise people working later in life, however the benefit of a safety net for those who are not able to or do not wish to work should be maintained.

“For those able to work, measures announced in the Federal Budget, such as an increase to the Pension Work Bonus, provide incentives to remain in paid work.”

There has been an increase of $50 per fortnight to $300, before income starts to count for age pension means testing.

For further information, please contact:
Katrina Horrobin, 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.

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

Sessions

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.