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Chalmers highlights importance of sustainability of superannuation

Treasurer Jim Chalmers isn’t ruling in or out whether there will be any changes on superannuation tax concessions in the May budget.

I’ll tell you what I think. I gave a longish speech about this on Monday, where I said the priority [of] super is and should be nailing down the objective. For too long, the lack of an agreed objective has meant that our predecessors could mess with superannuation when it came to all kinds of ideological pursuits. We want to take that out of the system.

Ideally, we’d want to get some kind of broad agreement amongst the industry in the community … about what super is for, so that we can build from that. And as part of that speech, I pointed out the fact … that the cost of superannuation tax concessions will overtake the cost of the pension. That’s a fact.

Not necessarily.

I just think as part of a broader assessment of where our superannuation system is at and how we locked down the objective of super so that we can provide more certainty and security around its purpose, as part of that I acknowledged earlier in the week, that these concessions in the superannuation system, they’re not cheap. I don’t think it’s especially controversial to acknowledge that.

Well, as I keep saying, we haven’t changed their view. We haven’t taken any decisions.

We haven’t determined that.