Mike Carlton joins the superannuation debate:
"A flood of speculation from Canberra suggests the government will slap a higher tax on the earnings of money invested in super, up from 15 per cent to perhaps 30 per cent.
Here I acknowledge naked self interest, although millions of Australians are on the same playing field. Like most baby boomers, I was careful to save for my retirement. Not all of us could do it; many will be living on the seniors' pension now, with more and more joining them as the years roll on. But those of us able to put aside that nest egg made our decisions and investments by the rules of the game at the time. Shifting the goalposts now would be a spectacular act of bastardry. Rather, the government should be closing the loopholes available to such supranational companies as Google or Starbucks, who apparently pay next to no tax in this country.
Mind you, Tony Abbott is also planning to clobber millions of retired Australians on the lower end of the scale by bringing back the 15 per cent tax on superannuation for people earning $37,000 or less. That would cost your average punter about $500 a year.
None of this touches the politicians themselves, of course. Their superannuation ''entitlements'', lavishly underwritten by the taxpayer, are very comfortably removed from the real world inhabited by the rest of us."
Mike Carlton, The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 2013 (reproduced with permission).