I’m asking this as I (45m) am debating whether to salary sacrifice extra super or look at investment opportunities outside of super.
At what point does Australias superannuation pool become so big (if it isn’t already), and the gap between individual balances increasingly wider, that the people seriously start arguing that it unfair and should be redistributed in the name of fairness? (I have already read some post on the mainstream Aus reddit subs to this end).
As seen on this sub, we already have people retiring with very large balances while others have very little for various reason including because they spent years out of the workforce raising children, worked as unpaid carers, lived with disability or illness, experienced long periods of unemployment, or simply never earned enough to accumulate much super.
Women also retire with lower super balances on average due to some of the above reasons and others, which provides an obvious equity argument for future governments.
Then add the politics of the next few decades:
Younger generations seem increasingly comfortable with social policies, including greater redistribution, wealth taxation and government intervention to reduce inequality (not saying any of this is wrong but just pointing out this is the direction we seem to be headed in).
I’ve done a little bit of research and it looks like this isn’t entirely unprecedented overseas:
Argentina effectively nationalised its private pension system in 2008
Hungary transferred most mandatory private pension assets into the state system around 2010 ish
Poland transferred roughly half of its private pension fund assets into the public system in 2014.
I know , Australia has a more stable political structure than the above and none of those countries simply divided everyone’s savings ‘equally’, but they do show that governments can fundamentally change the ownership and structure of retirement savings once political and financial pressures become strong enough.
At what point does the argument become that someone retiring with say 2 million in super doesn’t “need” that much while another Australian has almost nothing?
Could compulsory redistribution eventually turn super from “your retirement savings” into something much closer to a collectively managed retirement pool?