The federal opposition has criticised the government’s proposed Your Future, Your Super legislation announced in the 2020 budget over inconsistencies and worrying inclusions it says are contained in the bill as it stands.
“The proposition that we’ve said that performance [of a super fund] is a problem and we might redline a fund and say your performance is so bad that we will not let another member join that fund, because it would be reckless and dangerous, and yet we will staple a person to that fund as their default fund seems to us a bit ludicrous,” opposition financial services and superannuation spokesman Stephen Jones said at the Council on the Ageing Australia National Policy Forum 2021: Retirement Incomes in Canberra last week.
“So getting the sequencing of these measures correct is absolutely essential.
“Yes we agree with driving bad performance out of the industry, but ensuring that somebody isn’t stapled to an underperforming fund will be a critical objective of Labor as we address this issue.”
According to Jones, this is not the only problem area contained in the bill, pointing out another concerning element with regard to the treasurer’s powers over superannuation fund trustees.
“There’s a provision in there that [former Venezuelan president] Hugo Chavez would be proud of that gives the treasurer the power, we’re calling it the [control] alt delete power, to override any investment decision of a trustee and supplant it with his own,” he said.
“It’s frankly a bit ridiculous [that] the minister who entered the front bench as the minister for deregulation is granting to himself one of the strongest regulatory powers reaching into some of the biggest boardrooms in the country. [It] seems to us to be completely disproportionate to the issue at hand.
“It will not rub.”
Despite these shortcomings identified by Jones in the proposed Your Future, Your Super bill, he reaffirmed Labor’s commitment to improving the performance of the retirement savings sector.
“On the issue of performance, we want to work with the government to get the right outcome. We think it’s critical,” he revealed.
