“I think if we actually knocked them out of the system, that would give us another $10 billion to put into funding much better retirement things for the people at the bottom end that haven’t got it. “This is one of the points that has bugged me from the feminist viewpoint for a very long time: there is no outcome difference between a tax expenditure and a welfare payment. The outcome is exactly the same for the Budget.

Yet, I have sat around for years with men in suits at tables who’ve told me they’re entitled to tax expenditures, but nobody’s entitled to welfare. “I would like us working together to set up a fund which has a fair tax system where everybody contributes, and gets concessions at a reasonable rate.

And I would like to see it actually covering things like time out of the workforce for having kids; I’d like to see it covering housing; I’d like to see it covering various other life crises so that you actually can live your life before you get to the final stage like that. And I think we also need an acknowledgement that, even if it goes up to 12 per cent and 15 per cent – there’ll be a large proportion of the population that still will not be independent.

“How many members of the population will end up with $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 maybe max in their superannuation even if it goes up [to 12 per cent]? It will make a small difference to their retirement. It will not save money in the pension system because they will be getting full pensions in most of those cases. And it will actually be a grossly inequitable system, and I just think we do need to be serious and think about that.”

Jeremy Cooper, chairman of retirement incomes at Challenger, says compulsion is a critical part of why the Australian superannuation system has succeeded and why it will continue to succeed. “We tend to put things off. We tend to delude ourselves about how expensive retirement is. And when it’s actually going to happen, it’s a great thing that we’ve got compulsion,” he says.

“There are always school shoes, and other budgetary pressures on people and, certainly at low income levels, there is a view that traditional welfare takes over from compulsory savings or private savings, as you will. But we’ve got to remember how important compulsion is.

At the moment in the UK they’re going through all sorts of tangles to try to come up with a quasi-compulsory system, a so-called ‘auto-enrolment’, and I think that will be a pale imitation of our system because, of course, people are allowed to opt out of it, and those very day-to-day budgetary pressures are often what force people to do that.”

Cooper says it’s important to continue to seek efficiencies so that the benefits of raising the SG are not lost to unnecessary charges and other drags. “I mentioned in the beginning that I supported the 9 to 12 [per cent] on conditions – the conditions, fortunately, are ones that the Government is going for, and SuperStream will be one. “It became very clear to us that the back office of super was not efficient.