It’s more than a quarter of a century since the Keating government introduced a retirement-incomes package in 1992 and Vince Fitzgerald reported on national savings in 1993. Ever since, Australia’s retirement incomes policy has been dominated by their assumptions.

A generation of policy thinkers assumed that people won’t have enough money in retirement and that the federal budget will not be able to maintain the age pension, which in any case would leave many impoverished. That thinking has guided the push for higher compulsory superannuation contributions, and support for generous superannuation tax breaks to top-up workers’ retirement savings.