Bureaucracy or efficiency?

A Super Review roundtable considers whether a special panel for superannuation in Fair Work Australia is necessary or is just another layer of bureaucracy.

Mike Taylor, managing editor, Super Review: Well seeing as you mentioned it, we do have a special panel in Fair Work Australia appointed and you know is it just another layer of bureaucracy?

I mean, did we really need a special panel on top of what, in the form of the industrial judiciary, is a special panel anyway? Andrew Bragg, I’m sure you’ve got a view?

Andrew Bragg, policy director, Financial Services Council: Well I think you know the starting point is that competition is good. I’m sure everyone agrees that competition delivers more efficient and innovative and hopefully better-priced products to members ultimately.

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If people are in a good position because of their incumbency in an award as a fund and they’re delivering good services, then they shouldn’t be afraid of competition fundamentally.

But the idea of overlaying further bureaucracy on top of MySuper in terms of the Fair Work Commission – look, to be honest with you it’s very hard to understand how that will work. 

As I understand it there’s a two-step process whereby all the funds go into a list, there’s a master list and then each of the awards is populated with funds and then there’s 10. It seems incredibly bureaucratic but I guess we have to keep some people in a job, so it is what it is.

Mike Taylor, Super Review: Paul Cahill?

Paul Cahill, chief executive, Club Plus: The expert panel – I don’t know what to say about that. You do need some assistance in trying to work super-related matters out. It is a very complex subject but to form a panel to work that out – that itself is an exercise, let’s be honest. 

Getting all these learned people around to work out who goes on which list is fascinating, you could write a story on that. I’ll be very interested to watch how that plays out.

There are some industries in this country one size just does not fit all. A bookstore is not down the bottom end of a mine or hanging off the back of a ship or putting your head over the top of a cow taking its head off.

You cannot have one size insurance to fit that because they are all different, they’re white collar, blue collar, dark blue collar.

To try and amalgamate them all up and say yes, they’re all good, let them go, does not do justice to what a lot of people set out to do in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s about looking after people’s retirement. It really does not do it justice. 

Mike Taylor, Super Review: Russell?

Russell Mason, partner, Deloitte: I think we’ve got our expert panel. It’s called APRA and it’s been assessing funds with MySuper.

Then if what we read in Super Review and the national press is correct – and I know from my own experience and that each of you around the table would see it – they’re putting funds through a lot of work, they’re knocking back applications and saying we’re not happy with this. They’ve raised the bar quite a bit.

Funds have gone through this with MySuper. I think if you get your MySuper licence you’ve jumped enough hurdles. After that we’ve got to also give members some credit to be able to actually pick a fund as well.

So I would hope that, if the funds represented around this table get their MySuper licence, that that’s saying something about their governance, their processes, their insurance offering, all of which has to be covered under MySuper.

Let that be the criteria to be on the long default list as it was referred to, and then perhaps we narrow that down for the individual awards or perhaps that’s enough. It’s up to employers and members to make that decision from there.

Gordon Noble, policy director, Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA): Industrial relations has been complex since the Harvester judgement back in the previous century.

Everything that we have in superannuation is really built on something else. So I can understand the comments that have been made, but it is what it is.

However I turn the conversation a little bit around, rather than saying let’s just focus on the difficulties around the workplace and the way we regulate the workplace, because that’s clearly been our focus for the last 20 years in terms of superannuation guarantee and the way that has evolved.

But the conversation to look forward to is also the post-retirement phase and how superannuation interacts with pensions, interacts with retirees in the future.

We’re an evolving area and our focus historically has been on the workplace relationship.

Now it’s becoming much more complex because it’s going to be the workplace, it’s self-employed, it’s post retirees etcetera.

So I just leave the comment there that workplace relations will be amended, as it always is politically, and then we need as a system to evolve and adapt to that. It’s a complex system for many reasons.