Why you should be concerned that Jim Chalmers is coming for your superannuation

Oh dear. I suppose it was inevitable. Our trainee treasurer – who wants to remake and reform our entire world in between his fiscal fiending - is now channelling his inner Willie Sutton.

But whereas famed Depression-era Sutton thought small – asked why he robbed banks, he famously responded: “because that’s where the money is” – our 21st century downunder version is thinking much bigger.

Jim Chalmers is going after the biggest pool of money in Australia, bigger even than what’s in our banking system – your, and I emphasise that word, your superannuation. Oh sure, it’s dressed up to pretend to be all about you. You could not ask for a more anodyne – indeed, what in our formerly sane world was called a ‘motherhood’ – statement. The ‘consultation’ process has started on legislating the “objective of superannuation”.

But that should immediately set the first amber light flashing. Hang-on, why should we have to legislate an objective for superannuation? Isn’t it self-evident? To build up at least a sufficient pool of saving for retirement? And why not, individually, the biggest possible pool that you want to put aside for your future?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The answer of course is that the real bigger and wider ‘objective’ for that pool of money is one that you poor schmucks can’t understand, far less appreciate. We, know better than you how your money should be invested. And if as a consequence, you get hosed, well, by then, we won’t be around to cop any blame; you can warm yourself on those future cold winter nights in old age with the comfort that you helped build a better world. Or something. This amber warning light should turn red with the qualifying additional words from Chalmers: that super should provide retirement incomes in an “equitable and sustainable way”.

Again, ostensibly pure motherhood - or should that be ‘entity-carrierhood’? But not just opening the door to government and regulatory direction and manipulation and indeed confiscation – but ripping the door entirely off its hinges. Indeed, Chalmers all-but said exactly as much in a speech Monday.

The reforms would enable investment by funds in projects that “boost housing supply, manage climate change and spur digital transformation”.

Again, can’t they do that now? If it makes sense as an investment? To grow the superannuant’s balance – your money? In the dim distant past, I think it was an earlier politician named Kelly, who famously said “I feel a dam coming on”, any time a political leader started making flowery promises about “doing things’’ for the collective you (with of course, your money).

Now I suggest, it’s more the case of: Venezuela, here we come. As the ‘objective’ for your retirement money gets ‘broadened’ to include the solar panels and windmills of what passes for Jim’s mind, houses, fibre, and who knows what else a future energetic trainee treasurer might think we need. I really don’t think the SMSF – or its deputy director Peter Burgess – did themselves, or more importantly their members, any favours, by rushing out a statement endorsing the government’s actions.

Do they really think it was Jim Chalmers saying: “I’m the treasurer and I’m just doing this to help you”?

Critical to understand is the even more insidious – idiotic and indeed quite simply totalitarian - mindset that underlies all the discussion of super by Labor (and Green) politicians and Treasury and other bureaucrats. Simply, that it’s not really your money. Because of the tax incentives. No, every single dollar that goes into super, apart from some trivial co-contributions, is your money.

Yes, you are left with more to put in because of the tax concessions. Yes, and so what? You pay a lower rate on that income? That mindset actually believes that any tax rate less than 100 per cent is a ‘concession’.