When politicians start talking about using super to fix policy problems they themselves have created, the rest of us should be wary.
It’s forgotten now but was rather big at the time: in the last week of the election campaign, a desperate Scott Morrison proposed to allow people to raid their super to buy their first home, to the delight of anti-superannuation warriors like Tim Wilson and Jason Falinski and a few political journalists who spent the entire campaign poised to declare Morrison had turned things around and was primed for another miracle win.
The rest is history — history that makes unpleasant reading for Wilson and Falinski, and for other enemies of superannuation, like Jane Hume and Andrew Bragg, who were able to survive the election catastrophe from the safety of their Senate seats.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers — in that near-unique Australian Financial Review event that actually generated interesting discussion — is now declaring that the super wars are over and that (hat tip to Chalmers for the Attlee reference) it is time to win the peace.
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