Labor commits to ‘tweaking’ YFYS
Labor would not make any “wholesale changes” to Your Future, Your Super reforms but has instead committed to tweaking aspects of it in response to emergent challenges that could be flagged by the industry.
Speaking at a Financial Services Council (FSC) industry event, Shadow Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said Labor would work in tandem with industry.
“If problems emerge or challenges emerge, and we can be convinced that there is a tweak that's necessary, then we will tweak it, but we don't sit down working out how we can kind of begin again.”
He said there were a few issues that had been raised by the industry which Labor had already targeted.
“A lot of the issues that we raised and dug in on frankly, the admin fees, the way that some of the investments were treated and measured, the investment penalties, some of those issues the Government dealt with [and] that’s a good thing,” Chalmers said.
A good example of the kind of tweaking that could occur, according to Chalmers, was Labor’s proposed changes to faith-based superannuation.
If elected, Labor would make the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) consider religious affiliations of super funds when applying the recently-introduced performance benchmark.
Responding to the FSC acting chief executive, Blake Briggs’, comment thanking Labor for supporting the Government’s Retirement Income Covenant, Chalmers said Labor’s strategy had been to offer bipartisan support where it was warranted and to only “kick out” against the Government when needed.
One of those examples, said Chalmers, was Labor’s push for the Government to follow the Superannuation Guarantee (SG) legislative timeframe which was slated to increase to 12% by 1 July, 2025.
“A lot of the disagreements that we've had with the government, we've been on the same side as you.”
Following signalling from the Government that it would restrict SG rises in the future, Senator Jane Hume, minister for superannuation, financial services and the digital economy, said late last year that the SG rise could not be changed without opposition support and “it won’t be because it is already legislated”
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