Now that the Government has determined its key Ministerial appointments and gets underway with implementing its legislative agenda, it’s timely to briefly examine the three key areas of Government focus over the next year when it comes to superannuation.
Let us briefly examine the three areas where the Government has confirmed the review will focus on.
1. Review of Your Future, Your Super laws
The Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones has announced a review run by Treasury of the Your Future, Your Super laws. It will commence after the performance test for MySuper products has been run a second time at the end of August.
The review will examine all aspects of the Your Future, Your Super laws for any significant unintended adverse consequences. Given the importance of the review to industry participants and superannuation fund members, the review will form a significant component of the superannuation policy agenda over the next 6 months. It is expected that the review will allow for consultation of an initial issues paper as well as consultation on any draft laws that aim to alter the scope and operation of the Your Future, Your Super laws.
2. Legislating an objective of superannuation
We can also expect the Government to move quickly on its pre-election commitment of legislating an objective of superannuation. While the details for this project have not yet been announced, we can expect the legislative wording to reflect that the objective of superannuation is to provide an income in retirement and for this objective to be legislated in such a way to make sure that future changes to superannuation policy settings take this objective into account.
3. Supercharging Superannuation framework
The third key priority of the Government’s superannuation agenda is to establish an all-of-government framework for facilitating partnerships between super funds and projects of national importance, including large-scale infrastructure, affordable housing, innovative investment and agriculture and manufacturing. Co-investment with state and local governments will be encouraged. We can expect work to develop this framework to kick off later this year. By the very nature of the policy, the framework’s development will likely be an ongoing, iterative process involving a large degree of consultation with superannuation funds.
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