The Federal Government should grandfather some superannuation arrangements for those aged over 50 who have made investment decisions based on current policy arrangements.
That is the assessment of a roundtable of a senior superannuation executives conducted by Money Management‘s sister publication, Super Review, with Towers Watson managing director, Andrew Boal suggesting that limited grandfathering provided a sensible way for the Government to significantly alter the current settings.
Boal suggested the grandfathering in the context of those likely to be currently seeking to make large contributions who he believed were most likely to be those aged over 50.
“So if that’s the case, anyone who is under age 50 hasn’t been yet affected by what has been proposed, so changing the rules for them probably isn’t as big a deal,” he said. “If someone has been doing it for six or seven years and relying on a system, well let’s let them get through unchanged.”
Boal suggested that such an approach could also support the concept of retirement incomes adequacy in circumstances where the superannuation guarantee had only moved to nine per cent 13 years ago.
“…so there’s still a generation of people who haven’t had a full working life of the SG contributions. So let’s give them a chance to catch up and get to a certain point before we change the rules,” he said.
Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) chief policy officer, Glen McCrea, said he believed the implementation of policy change would be a balancing act but that, in the end, the ultimate goal needed to be maintaining confidence in the system.
He said that meant looking for long-term solutions rather than short-term political fixes.
