She says the ACTU is sanguine about the impact on business of raising the SG. “Is 12 per cent enough? Well, the trade union movement has always argued for 15 per cent from the very beginning – and I admit that there probably wasn’t a great deal of science around that – at the very beginning, when Keating was discussing that 15 per cent was the perfect figure,” she says.

“Through the enterprise bargaining process of course, we’d have a lot of people who are already at 15 per cent – one in four businesses already pay 10 per cent. So, there are a lot of people that have already achieved that without the sky falling in for the business, and without it being an economic disaster, so, while I don’t think we’ll have Utopia, I think we have a pretty good sustainable system.”

Gruen says that the flat taxation of superannuation creates inequities. “The great achievement of the previous Labor Government was to establish the system – the great flaw was the idea that it should be done under a flat tax,” he says.

“I think we should grow the size of the contribution – make it more equitable, make it more comprehensive, and then you’ve got something that I think people would really react well to.” Cox says a major issue with raising the SG is that it will force a cohort of the community to save who cannot in fact afford to save.

“You’re asking low-income people to save for their retirement,” she says. “Can we stop acting as though somehow or other the rest of life is preparation for retirement? We actually live for a lot longer doing a variety of things than we do when we retire, but there’s this sort of magical fantasy that at retirement you will have enough money to do all of those things you’ve deprived yourself of earlier in life.

“People need money for housing, and quite frankly, you know we’ve got 69 per cent home ownership or potential home ownership out there. That leaves a lot of people out of it – and that will increase, because younger people are having more and more difficulty getting into highly difficult housing markets.”

Cox says the tax concessions that go to high-income earners could be productively directed elsewhere. “You know, we’re talking about $30 billion in tax concessions and we’re talking about 34 per cent of that going into the top 5 per cent of income earners,” she says.