Australia’s “broken” superannuation and pension systems are condemning a growing number of retirees to financial misery in their sunset years.
More than one in five Australians live in poverty when they retire. And that number is growing.
With housing affordability at an all-time low, many Australians now face the brutal double whammy of going through their entire working life unable to afford a home and ending up in poverty when they retire.
But there’s a simple change the government could make to slash the nation’s embarrassingly high rate of retirement poverty. It could reduce or remove the massive concessions to those retiring with millions of dollars and use that money to increase to the Age Pension.
It could also allow older Australians to earn income to supplement the Age Pension.
New research by the Australia Institute has found that Australia spends almost as much giving tax breaks to wealthy retirees as it does providing a safety net, the Age Pension, to those with little or no retirement savings.
The research compares Australia’s superannuation scheme and Age Pension program to the equivalent systems in Sweden and Norway, nations with comparable GDP’s to Australia.