Two bitter opponents in the superannuation debate shared the stage for more than an hour at the National Press Club last week.
Both men – John Brogden, the head of the Financial Services Council, and David Whiteley, the chief of Industry Super Australia – had last year put their swords down before the election because they wanted the then-Labor government and Abbott opposition to agree to make no policy changes to the super industry for at least three years.
Everyone in the industry was tired of constant change, they said. Everyone needed a break.
And they got what they wanted. Both parties promised not to touch super policy until the next election.
But the truce between Mr Brogden and Mr Whiteley disintegrated shortly afterwards – particularly over the Abbott government's decision to water down Future of Financial Advice laws – and they went back to warring.
But at the Press Club last week, when they were asked to talk about the things they had in common, they were happy to do so.
They agreed it would be bad economics to allow people to access their super to buy a house or apartment.
Why would that be? It sounded like they were both protecting their patch. After all, it is not in either of their interests to allow the pool of super savings to shrink.
But plenty of economists actually agree with them.
In a property market like Australia's, which is heavily supply-constrained and which is likely to be supply-constrained for years to come, anything that allows people to spend more on housing than they otherwise would will result in house prices rising further and/or faster than they otherwise would.
So in this sense, economists argue, there's no real difference between allowing people to dip into their super to buy a home and providing them with first-home owner grants, stamp duty concessions, or allowing mortgage interest as a tax deduction.
Any of those things will increase the demand for homes, but since the housing supply is so heavily constrained all they will do is push up the price of homes.
So it wouldn't help first-home buyers. It would do the opposite.
Both men also said they did not want the government of the day deciding that there should be a mandatory allocation of superannuation investment into a certain class of assets.
As Mr Brogden asked, how would such a policy develop?
"Let's go 10, 20 years ahead," he said.
"You still have infrastructure challenges in Australia, the number of taxpayers has diminished, government capacity to build infrastructure has diminished, [and the] superannuation [pool] is sitting at $3 trillion, $5 trillion, $7 trillion."
"What's 5 per cent of that? Only 5 per cent must be invested in infrastructure ... [But] the problem with that is you open up, you know, what's next? Five per cent into health? Five per cent into whatever it might be? You end up becoming a de facto public purse."
So as you can see, the battle over what to do with our growing pool of super savings is alive and well.
But at least we know Mr Brodgen and Mr Whiteley agree on those two things. Where do you stand on them?
