Your superannuation supports more left-wing lunacy

Paul Bongiorno. Picture: Supplied

It has long been wryly amusing that embittered old leftie journos like Paul Bongiorno and Michael Pascoe win adoration from the woke kids on Twitter by joining or fuelling nasty, obtuse pile-ons against people like me or anyone not avowedly green left. They need something to keep them amused, I suppose, and anyway, it is this pointless toxicity that drives sensible people away from the platform.

But I do draw the line at funding Bongiorno and Pascoe. It is not right that my compulsory super contributions (and those of many readers, no doubt) are boosting this pair’s semi-retirements, rather than just our own nest eggs.

They both write for The New Daily, a left-of-centre, free news website funded by industry super funds, including mine. And probably yours.

These industry funds are half-owned by unions, so the leftist bent of their website is no surprise. Still, it seems a strange venture to establish given the preponderance of green left news online — with the ABC, SMH, The Age, The Guardian Australia, Crikey, Junkee et al, it is a crowded field.

Bongiorno’s unrelenting leftist leanings were on display last week when he wrote in TND that the Queensland border closure dispute had blown up not on Annastacia Palaszczuk but Scott Morrison. The former priest argued that in the wake of Palaszczuk’s refusal to grant an exemption for a Canberra woman to attend her father’s Brisbane funeral, Morrison tried to “leverage grief” and “score some tawdry political points” — one hell of a contortion given the callous ruling (Queensland opened its borders to ACT travellers less than a week later).

Anyway, that’s Bonge, a Canberra bubble insider who has become increasingly strident in his anti-Coalition views over the past 20 years. It should go without saying that he is entitled to share his views, however erroneous — it is just that we should not be forced to fund them through our super.

Pascoe is of a similar ilk. His commentary is sullen and cantankerous every day a right-of-centre government is in power.

Pascoe recently wrote in TND that the “vast majority” of economists supported increases in compulsory super payments (in the survey he referred to, almost a quarter of the economists sampled wanted the increases abandoned and almost half wanted them deferred). His article tended to support the case for the increases and said many of the government MPs opposing them “just don’t like compulsory super anyway and especially dislike industry super funds”.

Pascoe’s piece was a stroke of good fortune for the owners of TND, who just happen to be those same industry super funds. Given its backers, TND’s support for the super industry and, particularly, industry funds is unsurprising, but documents revealed through the Hayne banking royal commission reveal this positioning is TND’s raison d’etre.

A proposal sent to Australian Super CEO Ian Silk in 2012 sought capital for the media venture, outlining financial and governance models, as well as aspirations for the site. The venture was launched the following year.

According to the proposal, the website would “have a slight tilt towards using industry super spokespeople for quotes” and would provide a “fair and reasonable” representation of the industry. It would aim to provide super fund members with a comprehensive news service, for free, as an alternative to traditional, commercial news sources.

Critically, this news service would “provide funds with a vehicle where the reporting about financial services, as well as super generally and industry funds specifically, is fair and reasonable, separated from opinion and not subject to opaque editorial/proprietorial campaigns.” If we take them at their word, we must believe that the advocacy by Pascoe and others of industry super fund arguments in TND articles must be free from any “opaque editorial/proprietorial campaigns”.

With such a transparent agenda advocated through its site, serious questions have been raised about TND’s status as a member organisation of the Australian Press Council. One of the council’s core principles is to “ensure that conflicts of interest are avoided or adequately disclosed, and that they do not influence published material”.

At the bottom of Pascoe’s recent piece there was a note declaring TND was owned by Industry Super Holdings but that is hardly the point. On the evidence available the whole purpose of establishing TND was to influence the flow of information on issues relevant to industry funds.

The financials of the organisation are also a matter of clear public (and member) interest. The website was established with an injection of $12m in capital from super funds such as AustralianSuper, Cbus and others.

But the operation was later sold, at no cost, into Industry Super Holdings, a company owned and run for the industry funds. This structure means TND’s financials are hidden from the public and its own members.

Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg wants an investigation from the regulator. “Well there’s a legal arrangement known as the sole purpose test,” he says, “which means that super funds are supposed to only look after the money for the benefit of the workers — and not fund boondoggles and propaganda outfits like The New Daily — and what you are seeing are clear breaches of the sole purpose test.”

Apart from employing its own journalists, TND has a commercial arrangement with the ABC. It pays undisclosed amounts to the ABC to run the national broadcaster’s content on its site.

So let us get this straight. Workers are forced by law to contribute at almost 10 per cent of their income into super funds, and then some of that money is used to fund a left-of-centre news website that loses money rather than generates it, and some of the cash consumed has been paid to the ABC to source additional left-of-centre output.

Despite never being asked, workers are funding a jaundiced and costly website, and they are paying twice for the ABC — once through their taxes and then through their super funds. If only a robust media campaigner for the rights of workers (such as TND or the ABC) would investigate these arrangements.