About 200 years ago, American political philosopher Thomas Paine wrote: “Gov-ernment, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil”.
About 200 years ago, American political philosopher Thomas Paine wrote: “Gov-ernment, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil”.
Witnesses to the debacle that is the choice of fund debate would no doubt hear the resonance of these words today. Through a combination of ideological bickering and good old fashioned bloody-mindedness, Australia’s politicians have managed to make a mess of what is fundamentally a good idea.
The Government says it wants to introduce a Bill which offers employees the right to choose which organisation and which investment style they will trust to look after their retirement nest egg.
The ALP opposition says publicly that the Australian public is not sufficiently edu-cated in superannuation to make fund choice. However, the public is educated enough to have investment choice which the ALP advocates.
The Democrats say they are going into bat for the consumers, demanding a raft of consumer protection safeguards before they will rubber stamp the legislation. They support the principal of choice, but want regulations to protect the punters.
But there are also other issues which the opposition has with the Government’s choice proposal. One is the widespread belief in Labor’s key trade union affiliates that the choice of fund legislation is a conspiracy by the Government to hurt union run industry funds. The ALP is calling for a number of amendments which will Whether this is true or not is not clear but what is clear is that the ALP does not trust the Government’s motives for fund choice.
The result has been a stalemate. As most people are aware, no-one wins in a stale-mate.
What we have seen over the past four years is a lot of hot air but no agreed legisla-tion. And while the various political parties have been posturing to their target vot-ers, choice of fund has been quietly entering workplaces. So what is now happen-ing is that we have choice of fund spreading its tentacles into some of the nation’s biggest employers but there is no legislation to protect consumers.
It is all very well for politicians to vote for or against choice of fund, but the fact is that they are not going to stop it happening in the real world. All the bickering is doing is leaving workers unprotected.
And politicians wonder why the public, like Thomas Paine before them, has be-come so disillusioned.
