Should Australians use their superannuation to buy a house?

by Helen Said, Melbourne Australia.

Pauline Hanson's far right One Nation policies will destroy Australia's compulsory superannuation system. This is a threat to the retirement incomes and economic security of Australian workers. Hanson's latest attack on super savings is to say that workers should sell out their retirement security by using their employer funded retirement nest eggs to buy a house.

If Senator Hanson was that worried about housing, why did she vote against the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill in 2023? In fact, Pauline Hanson has consistently voted against federal legislative packages and funding initiatives aimed at increasing housing affordability and public housing, including the federal social and affordable housing funds and the Help to Buy legislation. She prefers to blame migration for the housing shortage, rather than to use her position as a Queensland Senator to vote for real improvements. She has also opposed other cost of living measures which could help young people save up for a house deposit. The size of her own retirement nest egg depends on maintaining a small but noisy traditional voter base who enjoy her racist, anti-worker rants; this might help explain her public statements and voting patterns.

It is unsurprising that One Nation questions our superannuation system, as ON is funded by the richest person in Australia, Gina Rinehart. Australian employers are obliged to pay 12% of a worker's wage into their superannuation scheme, so that workers will have a decent retirement income, an expense many employers resent.

Pauline Hanson uses Australia's housing shortage as a pretext to attack migrants and attack superannuation savings. Undermining permanent migration will also benefit the rich. In 2012, Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting company secured Australia’s first Enterprise Migration Agreement (EMA) for the Roy Hill iron ore project to bring in over 1700 temporary foreign workers during construction. Such agreements do not give these workers the same rights as regular immigrants. Neither do these agreements encourage the training or recruitment of our local construction workers. If more local workers had been trained in construction, or if Australia had allowed some of those 1700 construction workers to stay on as immigrants, they could have been employed to build the houses that we need right now.

Pauline Hanson's answer to complex social and economic questions is her usual populist knee-jerk quick fix - cut migration and empty your superannuation fund. Cutting migration will leave us without builders, aged care workers, hospital employees, medical specialists, IT experts and other skilled workers that we need. Experts warn this could tank our economy.

As an aged pensioner, let me tell you that you are going to need your superannuation! When you buy a house, you are not set for life - your house ages as you do. Just when your teeth need capping, filling, pulling and replacing, age related expenses worth many thousands of dollars, your back fence will give up, your stove will conk out, your fridge will start making funny noises, your hot water tank will leak, you'll have to get some giant tree removed from your yard, your car will need replacing and your roof will start caving in. You'll also need to shell out to stay social and active and feel the now-or-never urgency to travel, and that's before you're tempted to spend on grandchildren. The aged pension can only cover basic day to day expenses even if you own your own home, and even then you will have to watch your grocery purchases and heating usage if you have no superannuation to cover unexpected expenses.

Pauline Hanson's suggestion that employer paid superannuation is your money, so you should be able to spend it right now and do whatever you want with it, is just fishing for foolish voters but not building our country or protecting workers. Australia's superannuation funds play a massive role in supporting and strengthening the national economy. Holding over $4.1 trillion in assets, the super system acts as a major domestic pool of capital that finances local growth, infrastructure, and financial stability. But the ex-fish and chip shop owner hasn't got her head around this. Catching votes in November's Victorian state election, rather than maintaining Australia's financial stability, is more attractive to her.

What would happen if a large number of workers instantly emptied their superannuation accounts and went looking for a house? Apart from draining this domestic pool of capital, the sudden housing demand would again push house prices through the roof, making it ever more difficult for every prospective home owner to get a foot in the door. If raiding the retirement next egg was seen as a quick fix for our everyday economic pressures, it would let stingy employers off the hook - they wouldn't be pressured pay us properly and it would let governments and banks off the hook, they wouldn't be pressured to make housing more available or affordable.

As Paul Hogan aka Crocodile Dundee said, Pauline Hanson is a "pelican". Paul Hogan praised multiculturalism and pointed out that his old work gang on the Sydney Harbour Bridge included people from Assyrian, Thursday Islander, Aboriginal, Welsh, and Irish backgrounds. They're the sort of people that we need, building our houses, contributing to our superannuation domestic pool of capital, building multicultural Australia.