Fair Pay for Sustainable Living: The Superannuation Ripoff

The major drivers of marginalisation in Neo Conservative Capitalist Australia are legislated constraints of workers rights to assert for fair pay and the unregulated freedom given to a few greedy directors to rob the population blind. While businesses can and do charge extortionate prices for their increasingly shoddy services, workers are barred by legislation from using any effective methods of lobbying for fair pay,ensuring that they have access to their fair share of the nations wealth.These unequal policies and law combinations have the bipartisan support of the Liberal National Coalition and The Australian Labor Party (or at least its current dominant ultra right wing). 

The Superannuation Trade-off Debacle

 Since the Hawke years, Australian Liberal-National and Labor Governments have foisted the furphy of Superannuation on a gullible workforce as an alternate to Fair Wage increases.The following Keating,Howard Rudd and Gillard administrations have all succumbed to the ease of control Superannuation provides over workers (but not politicians) Superannuation.

Trade Union advocacy for and involvement in the administration of "Workers Super Funds" has shifted Union leadership interests from serving the needs of workers to working collusively with capital. This formula has had the effect of channelling workers compulsory savings into the control of a few neo conservative capitalists who enjoy unfettered access to an ever increasing revenue stream of workers funds - to use as they wish.The entirely predictable result is that workers capital is actually used against their own personal and familial interests, driven in part by the need of Super Fund managers to show returns consistently higher than other forms of investment. The problem is, those largely wholesale borrowers of those super based funds MUST drive even higher returns for their shareholders. With residential property a leading commodity, values inevitably will rise, driven not by the demand of residents alone, but by speculating investors, who want to maximise their return on investment while minimising their outgoings. And thats the point at which the superannuation dog comes back to bite the superannuant squarely on the posterior. The superannuants money, under the control of greedy financial manipulators, has become a mere figure on the excel sheet whose aim is solely to maximise profits-for the borrowing capitalist. The worker has as little effective control of their superannuation as they have over the so called democratically elected governments who govern not for,but over them.

What, you ask,does this have to do with homelessness?? I say it has everything to do with Homelessness- it is among the three core drivers of homelessness and social marginalisation. Superannuation is the government decreed tool which forces you to trade off your right to a Fair Wage now - for an insubstantial "nest-egg" when you're just about dead. Superannuation forces all workers,except politicians, to give over this "savings" to capitalist exploiters-effectively 5 international companies- to control.Several of our homeless and marginalised would NOT be in such dire circumstances if they could access this bounty which a few wealthy financiers get to use as play money in the casino they call the financial markets. And this money comes back to bite your arse with very sharp teeth every time you try to take another step up the financial ladder.Crippling bank practices and rampant fees.The Gillard Rudd Governments sop to the publics outrage at these practices was to regulate brokers but not the financial institutions themselves.


  Workers need this income in their pockets now.Just to keep pace with the cravings of capitalism which under the mastery of a few seeks to gobble and consume all in its path in the name of driving annually focussed profit.