Some innocents believe that kindly governments provided tax benefits and forced employers to contribute to superannuation just so retirees will have a more comfortable lifestyle. Bunkum. It was really all about cutting back the future cost to government of the age pension as the proportion of over-65s jumps from one in seven to one in four over the next 40 years. Any side benefit to retirees is a political bonus that fits the 1992 rhetoric when Paul Keating introduced compulsory superannuation that it was ‘designed to… act as a supplement to improve post-retirement living standards above what can be afforded by the Age Pension’. The trouble for future government budgets is that its cost-saving is not working well enough. Even though superannuation and other assets are reducing the proportion of retirees on the full age pension, with about 40 per cent currently getting only part pensions, the forecasts are for rising pension payments to continue to take a greater share of our national income. And the cost burden on a diminishing proportion of taxpayers to pay age pensions for an increasing proportion of retirees (three Australians of working age for each person over 65) is likely to get worse unless there are some big changes in the way superannuation works. This is according to the just-released research paper on Superannuation Policy by the hard-nosed Productivity Commission

The report shows that superannuation (at the future higher employer contribution rate of 12 per cent instead of today’s 9.5 per cent) will only fractionally reduce (from 70 per cent to 67 per cent) the proportion of Australians getting an age pension by 2055. And forget about superannuation replacing pensions for ordinary Australians; as the Commission says ‘A fully self-funded retirement is likely to remain the province of those who were relatively well-off.’ While there is no doubt that superannuation is easing the age pension burden on future governments, there are limits; for the 90 per cent of additional aged pensioners a year transitioning (mostly at a full rate) from another government benefit, there is little scope for any savings at all.

The Productivity Commission has posed some problems the Abbott government must act on. ‘It is unclear whether the current concessional tax rates for superannuation… provide an incentive to make additional savings for retirement or merely distort the way that people store their wealth’ while some concessions ‘appear to be used almost exclusively as a means to reduce tax liabilities among wealthy Australians’. Action to end such tax lurks is protecting the revenue, not an attack on superannuation.

My sympathy for former Senate adversary Graham Richardson’s medical problems does not extend to ignoring his latest published attack on me. In an article in the Australian on Bill Shorten’s admitted lies, Richardson looked through the distorted prism of his acknowledged personal involvement in Labor’s internal dirty tricks to see some sort of moral equivalence in the Liberal Party. His unsubstantiated claim that I had been John Howard’s surrogate in undermining John Hewson’s leadership is simply false. Both Howard and I voted for Hewson to succeed Andrew Peacock in 1990 and both were shadow ministers up to the ‘unlosable’ 1993 election where our political advice was rejected, as I outlined in the Party’s election post-mortem.

As a result (and as I pre-warned Hewson) I was one of the minority of 30 voting for Howard in the subsequent leadership ballot against the 47 voting for Hewson, who, prompted by Peacock, had reneged on his undertaking not to seek the leadership if he lost the election. Rewarded with a demotion, as a backbencher I was not involved in any way in the collapse of Hewson’s unsuccessful second spell as leader; Howard was not even a candidate when Downer replaced Hewson in 1994.

Richardson is among the last people to be considered an authority on the Liberal Party – or on me ever since he took umbrage at my description in a Bulletin magazine review of his revealing autobiographyWhatever It Takes as a ‘Primer on how to lie, cheat and bully your way to political success.’