As the old saying goes, if the left didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any. Today’s case in point is, of course, the Albanese government. When the coalition floated a policy of allowing young Australians to access their superannuation, to put toward a home deposit (now well north, in many Australian cities, of what it would have cost to buy a home outright, just 20 years ago), Labor went ballistic. When One Nation recently announced a policy of allowing workers to redirect just three per cent of their compulsory superannuation contributions into their take home pay, Labor duly dialled up the ‘outrage’ again.
There’s just one problem with Labor’s confected hysteria: their own staff are allowed to do exactly what One Nation are proposing for ordinary workers. Like ‘Cultural’ leave, Flexitime, and ‘mental health days’, it’s one rule for highly-paid lanyard class members, a completely different one for Joe Punchclock.
“Dr Jim Chalmers seems to have taken the hypocritical oath,” [Pauline Hanson] said in a statement provided to News24.com.au. “He says giving Australians the choice to take three per cent of their super as pay will destroy superannuation, while staff working in his own office can already choose to do exactly the same thing. Apparently it’s fine when Canberra political staff do it, but reckless for Australians struggling to pay their rent or mortgage because of Dr Jim’s cost-of-living crisis.”
The treasurer’s fury is less about the sanctity of one’s golden years and more about the sanctity of the $3.5 trillion slush fund that sustains the machinery of the modern Left. To suggest that a struggling family might prefer a few extra dollars a week to stave off the bailiff – rather than having those funds locked away in a left-wing bureaucrat’s piggy-bank – is heresy. Why? Because that mountain of capital is the lifeblood of the activist class.
These funds, largely presided over by union apparatchiks and a revolving door of ideologues, function as the primary financier for every boutique hobbyhorse currently gnawing at the foundations of our nation. When your money is ‘managed’ by these institutions, it isn’t sitting idly in a vault. It is being weaponised. It is leveraged to advocate for the whole roster of woke causes: net-zero vanity projects, radical gender equity quotas, the antisemitic BDS movement, and a relentless push for mass immigration that ensures the only thing cheaper than imported labour in this country is the dignity of the average worker.
Worse yet, the funds are now serving as a convenient ATM for the Treasury. Having grown accustomed to profligate spending, our treasurer has turned his sights on these very accounts to fill the gaps in his own budget.
The $4.6bn more than expected in income tax revenue came from a higher than expected tax take on superannuation. But doesn’t Labor believe that superannuation is workers’ money?
One must marvel at the audacity. Treasurer Zippy preaches against ‘anti-super’ ideology while simultaneously raiding the piggy-bank for more of other peoples’ money. He assures us that the improvement in government receipts isn’t coming from wage earners, yet the Treasury’s own maths confirms that a massive chunk of this windfall is siphoned directly from the taxation of those very retirement savings. It is a shell game of grand proportions: the worker is told their money is safe, untouchable, and strictly for their benefit, while the state treats it as an infinite reserve of taxable plunder.
The reality is that superannuation has become the ultimate cash cow for a political establishment that despises the notion of individual agency. They insist that the ‘superannuation elites’ know how to handle your future better than you do, even as those elites pour your hard-earned dividends into movements that actively lobby against your own interests.
Barnaby Joyce was not entirely incorrect when he tagged the treasurer as the greatest threat to your savings. By manipulating tax rates on balances and demonising anyone who suggests that workers might want to manage their own household budgets, Labor has revealed their true colours. They don’t want you to have agency. They want you to be a perpetual contributor to a system that feeds the ideological machine, keeping the gravy train running while the average Australian is left to wonder why their own money, managed by their own ‘betters’, seems to be the only thing that never actually works for them.
It is the classic manoeuvre of the Canberra set: keep the doors of the treasury locked for the proletariat, while ensuring the lanyards in the minister’s office have a gold-plated key to the side entrance.
