Australia’s compulsory superannuation scheme, says Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, is ‘a massive failure, probably the biggest failure of public policy in the last 50 years’. It is hard to disagree. The scheme takes vasts sums of money from everyday Aussies, the majority of whom allow that cash to be invested for the future by ‘managers they will never meet’. Oh, and it’s probably worth pointing out that increasingly – and kept very much under wraps at the time the superannuation scam was dreamed up – those ‘managers’ are the detritus and leftovers of various Labor governments. Or to put it more bluntly, ex-union hacks.

A quick flick through the names of those who sit on the boards of or head up the numerous highly profitable industry super funds and the names of former Laborite luminaries tells the story.

When the superannuation scheme was concocted back in the 1980s, Treasury officials proposed a simple swap: put away a small slab of money out of your wages – it was 9 per cent back then – and in exchange you get to have that money in its entirety, tax-free, when you retire, thereby absolving the government of the need to provide you with a pension. A common-sense, uncomplicated ‘rainy day’ proposition. But of course, bureaucrats and boffins, not to mention the political elites and the grasping socialists, couldn’t leave well enough alone and before you knew it all sorts of caveats and taxes, along with regulations and limitations, were being imposed, creating a vast industry eager to get its paws on this ever-increasing pile of cash.

At the heart of the superannuation conundrum, as shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson has accurately pointed out, is the inconvenient truth that those on the right of politics view that money as still belonging to the individual, whereas those on the left – by dint of their socialist ideology – view the cash as first and foremost belonging to the government.

The Turnbull-Morrison governments, along with their net zero insanity and Covid recklessness, betrayed the conservative spirit of the original superannuation plan by deciding to put ‘caps’ on how much money an individual could place into ‘super’. In doing so, the Coalition government removed the entire philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the scheme, and shifted the emphasis away from the individual onto the collective: the government will decide how much of your own money you may have and the circumstances in which you may have it.

Senators Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bragg are both correct in their desire to see control of superannuation money returned, at least to some degree, into the hands of the people who earned it in the first place.

It is an absolute absurdity in this day and age in a so-called modern democracy that individuals cannot use their own money to secure their own future through measures such as buying property. The fact that this money is instead lining the pockets, however indirectly, of ex-ministers and union hacks is a disgrace.

If Mr Bragg, a self-declared ‘radical liberal’ on the far left of the Coalition, and Ms Hanson, a so-called ‘far-right’ MP, can broadly agree on something as fundamental as this, there is hope yet for the right side of Australian politics to unite around a handful of core policies and defeat this socialist, collectivist government of grifters, spivs and superannuation thieves.

Fiji! RSVP (Anybody?)

Of all the obscenities perpetrated by this arrogant Albanese government, the one that most reeks of socialist entitlement is the disgusting episode of Chris Bowen’s fraudulent and failed Fiji fandango.

The spending of some twenty million dollars by a minister on any kind of self-aggrandising event should always be treated with scepticism, but this one takes the proverbial climate cake.

To recap: despite spending a fortune of Australian taxpayers’ money at last year’s Cop30 conference in Brazil with the stated aim of securing this year’s Cop31 conference for Adelaide, Climate Change and Energy Minister Bowen came away empty-handed. Well, almost. He did manage to pocket the tawdriest of prizes: a meaningless personal title of ‘President of the Negotiations’ for this year’s gabfest in Turkey.

Now ‘His Excellency’ is spending up big on the taxpayer dime on a ‘pre-summit’ junket in Fiji, of all places. The idea being, presumably, that along with Mr Bowen, world leaders could all wade out into the shallows post-Pina Coladas and lament the rising (sic) sea levels.

Wisely, world leaders have en masse declined Mr Bowen’s ridiculous invitation, leaving, instead, the usual union hacks and climate spivs to fill the lounge chairs around the pool. What a disgrace.