Anthony Albanese is about to cross a line with his superannuation meddling | Daily Mail

Australia's superannuation system is fast approaching $5 trillion in value.That is one hell of a national achievement.But it's not a national asset for the government to use and abuse as the PM now seems to think that it is.Albo, simply put, needs to keep his grubby little hands off our superannuation.The government, well, it's increasingly eager to treat our private retirement savings as their money.The Prime Minister says he wants superannuation to be leveraged for domestic corporate lending, infrastructure spending and other national priorities.

Paul Keating, who was the architect of compulsory superannuation, which is no bad thing, he has weighed in on this debate.He wants to fuse parts of Centrelink's age pension with major superannuation funds.Meanwhile, super executives are wringing their hands that retirees are drawing down only on the statutory minimum that they're required to.Now, taken together, these moves suggest a hostile takeover of the super system's original intent may well be on Labor's agenda.Let's be clear about this.Super is no longer being treated as private retirement savings, but instead it's been eyed off as a convenient cash slush fund for an expanding collective of government problems.

Paul Keating is right that Australians shouldn't have to navigate endless pages of Centrelink paperwork just to obtain a pension that the government already knows they deserve.Better data sharing and things like pre -filed applications are long overdue.Reform in that space, but outsourcing the administration of public benefits to private superannuation funds, well, that's a leap thatwe need to think pretty long and hard about before actually taking it.Super funds manage private wealth and earn fees for doing so.We all know that.

They're not disinterested administrators of the welfare state in our democracy.Centrelink is broken.There is little doubt about that.But the answer is is to fix Centrelink, not to quietly privatise its functions to conflicted fund managers in the super space.The industry anxiety over retirees spending too little is also misplaced.Fund executives are frustrated with members' fear of running out of money before they die.

But being cautious with spending money is not an irrational instinct.It's perfectly logical as a response to unknown lifespans, what one's looming health and aged care challenges and costs might be, and of course a political class that consistently tinkers with retirement rules, thereby creating financial uncertainty for retirees.Now, successive governments have taught Australians that super policy is never settled, however much they claim that the latest bit of policy tinkering is the last time that they'll do it.Furthermore, there is no mandate for a super balance to hit zero on the day that its owner passes away.If retirees want to preserve a buffer, leave an inheritance for their children or others, or simply buy some extra peace of mind, well, that's their prerogative.It is their money after all, not the government's money.

The most alarming rhetoric that we're now hearing belongs to none other than the Prime Minister himself.Anthony Albanese's desire to leverage the super pool in this country as a meansasset crosses a critical ideological and philosophical line.

There is nothing wrong with funds investing in domestic infrastructure or domestic housing.

providing that those investments are done on strictly commercial grounds.Such super investments must attract capital by offering super members the best risk -adjusted returns, not simply because some minister has slapped a national priority sticker on some sort of policy or goal that they want to achieve.If Labor wants more domestic investment, well guess what?it should undertake the hard economic reforms that are required to make Australia an attractive place to deploy capital.In some respects, they're doing the opposite at the moment with some of their policy decision making.That is a problem.

Now, compulsory retirement savings aren't an off -budget financing mechanism that can simply be used to mask a lack of policy courage within the political class.Besides, would anyone describe the likes of Albo or our treasurer Jim Chalmers as the sort of financial gurus that you would entrust with your life savings?I certainly wouldn't.They can't even manage the federal budget without letting it blow out across spending, debt and rising deficits.

Compulsory super rests on what is really a fragile, implicit bargain that the government forces workers, it does force them.to lock away part of their wages and do so for decades.But in return, it promises that the money will be managed solely for the retirements of those forced to put aside a sizeable chunk of their pay packet each fortnight or month.

Once Canberra treats super as nothing more than a sovereign wealth fund that it has some sort of control over, well, there's no obvious end point as to how they might continue to intervene and overstep the mark in the future.Today, it's commercially credible infrastructure, perhaps.Tomorrow, is it subsidising housing?favouring green energy projects or diplomatic vanity projects, worse still.All conveniently wrapped, of course, in this rhetoric of the national interest.Spare us the propaganda and the spin designed to allow our Prime Minister and his cronies to get their hands on more of our hard -earned money.

The Aussie super system is a national achievement, but the achievement belongs to the system, Paul Keating gets a thanks for designing it, and the assets within it, they belong to us.Simplifying pension access, yes, that's a good idea.Better financial advice is obviously sensible too.But turning super funds into quasi -government agencies and conscripting private savings as instruments of public policy, well that's a profound betrayal of everything other than pure socialism.