Superannuation is supposed to be untouchable — your money, put aside for your own retirement. On this week’s Court of Public Opinion, Jeremy Cordeaux raised a proposal he believes puts that principle at risk: a plan linked to Paul Keating to merge the enormous superannuation system with social security.
Trillions On The Table
The figures are almost hard to grasp. Australia’s super funds hold around $4.5 trillion — among the largest retirement pools anywhere on earth. Any move to alter how that money is handled, Jeremy stressed, touches millions of lives and warrants the most careful scrutiny.
The proposal, as he outlined it, would bring the superannuation system and the age pension together — a wholesale rethink of how Australians fund life after work.
The Ownership Question
Jeremy’s central unease was about ownership. Super, as most people understand it, is their own money — compulsorily saved, but theirs nonetheless. Merging it with social security, he feared, risks smudging that line, treating private savings as part of a collective pot the government administers.
For a broadcaster who prizes reward for effort and personal responsibility, that smudging strikes at something fundamental. People have saved across a working life believing the money is theirs. Any reform that unsettles that belief, he argued, must be examined with great care.
A Generation At The Door
The timing raises the stakes. Jeremy noted that roughly a million Australians will retire in the coming decade — a wave of people about to lean on exactly these savings. Many, he said, already dread outliving their money.
Into that anxiety lands a proposal to restructure the very system they’re counting on. Whatever its intentions, he argued, it arrives at a moment of genuine vulnerability for a vast group of Australians — which alone demands full transparency.
Eyes Open
Jeremy’s message matched his warnings on other super stories: engage now, before any change is locked in. Once the framework of a $4.5 trillion system is altered, it won’t be easily reversed.
He wasn’t branding the idea doomed or sinister — but he was adamant that a change of this scale, shaping the retirement of millions, should not pass without the public grasping precisely what’s proposed, and why.
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Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
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