With everything happening in the world, it is probably easy to miss what is apparently becoming one of the Greatest Issues Of Our Time.

It’s not addressing the housing affordability crisis, which has shown that rental stress is at record highs, social housing doesn’t come close to meeting demand, and safe and affordable housing is becoming a luxury.

It’s not raising the rate or ending mutual obligations or ensuring that we actually do lift people out of poverty, a test we carried out during the pandemic and proved we can achieve quite simply, if there is the will.

And it’s not only climate, which is about to get another kick in the guts domestically with Labor to approve the 50-year expansion of Woodside’s North West Shelf project – which will add the equivalent of a dozen coal-fired power stations of emissions to the atmosphere, increase domestic costs for Western Australians and further erode priceless rock art that survived an ice age.

It’s not even Australia’s continued absenteeism in responding to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

No, it’s none of those. It’s even bigger.

Are you ready?

It’s … very rich people being asked to pay a tiny bit of tax on a small percentage of the earnings on their wealth.

Yup. Labor’s very modest super changes. Which it announced in the last term of parliament but said it wouldn’t move on until this term, to give the 80,000 or so people this will impact time to get used to paying a tiny bit of extra tax. (Or receiving a lower tax break, depending on how you look at things.)

It’s a whopping 0.5 per cent of the population we are talking about here.

According to the tax office, the average income of someone with $3 million in their super is $381,000. If you have more than $5 million in superannuation, your average income is about $495,000. And if you are one of the handful with more than $20 million in your super, your average income is just short of $1.3 million.

We’re not exactly talking Jan and Joe Average here.

Oh, but maybe one day you COULD have $3 million in your super and then you too will be subjected to having to pay a tiny bit of tax on earnings above that $3 million balance. Not the balance itself – just the earnings on the capital above $3 million.

Let’s say that COULD be you, or your children. And yes, sure, one day in 20 or 30 years, it COULD impact more people.

Think you might one day have $3m in your super & be affected by the super tax changes?

Ok, you are 18yo, you just got a job – it pays… $150k!
Give yourself a 3.7% annual pay rise.
Never take time off for study, kids or illness.

You will retire with $3,017,016

moneysmart.gov.au/how-super-wo…

[image or embed]

— Greg Jericho (@grogsgamut.bsky.social) 23 May 2025 at 13:18

Putting aside the fact that no one seems to care how any other policy is going to impact future generations in two or three decades, let’s meet Prudence. Unlike most 18 year olds, Prudence is very worried about her superannuation balance and has spent a lot of time reading Tim Wilson’s socials, so Prudence is heading into the labour market ready to do battle.

For Prudence to retire with $3 million, she has to earn at least $150,000 a year right off the bat. Then she needs to secure at least a 3.7 per cent annual pay rise. And no time off, Prudence! No unpaid leave time for you!

If she does all of that, she will retire with just over $3 million in her super account. Thoughts and prayers for Prudence then (assuming that the same legislation has remained in place and untouched for her entire working life), for she will receive a slightly lower tax break (or a slightly higher tax applied, again depending on how you look at it) on the earnings above her $3 million balance.

That’s a huge amount to take in. Better not do anything then, because poor Prudence!

Hilariously, the AFR is showing just how absurd is the scare campaign against the super tax changes.

They give an eg where someone’s super goes from $2m to $3.18m in a year!

Yep a $1.18m increase.

How much extra tax?

$1,528!

OMG!! THAT’S OUTRAG… err… oh actually that’s bugger all

[image or embed]

— Greg Jericho (@grogsgamut.bsky.social) 23 May 2025 at 10:04

Some of the criticisms have been truly ridiculous. It’s not going to impact investment, or the start-up sector, or even farmers (someone would have put their farm into their superannuation only to pay less tax. It is not the responsibility of the Australian people to keep subsidising wealthy people’s assets).

What it is going to do, is tax the rich. Just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit more.
It’s a slightly lower tax concession for people who have more money than you could ever need to retire, who want to maintain their tax breaks.

We know that self-managed super funds are popular as tax avoidance mechanisms and estate planning vehicles. These very small changes are just addressing some of the vast imbalances in wealth in this country, where rich people can move assets and wealth into whatever provides them with the best tax break, abusing systems built to ensure a fair retirement, not non-stop wealth accumulation.

And the rich people are very annoyed at being asked to pay a tiny bit more tax than they planned to. Finance professor Mark Humphery-Jenner told the Australian Financial Review that it was “moral repugnance [to target] someone merely because they are wealthy”.

But the fact is, it is morally repugnant to NOT tax the rich. Especially now.

A recent ANU study found that the pre-tax income of Australians aged over 60 was equal to the average mid-career income of 65 per cent of the working population (and much higher than most workers aged between 18 and 30).

That’s been fuelled by government policy in the past couple of decades, which has led to older generations earning significantly more private income “primarily as a result of higher capital income from real estate and superannuation”.

Put simply, previous generations have enjoyed tax breaks and policies that have helped them amass wealth younger generations can only dream of. And now people are complaining they might receive a slightly lower tax concession on part of that wealth.

Apparently we all need to be very worried about budget deficits and the need for structural reform – but only if modestly addressing it doesn’t make rich people upset.

It’s very telling that the critics of this modest policy have used farmers as the poster group for who might be harmed. That’s because they know if they showed you someone in Double Bay or Cottesloe (where the median incomes are $428,489 and $365,588) no one would care. And rightly so.

The legislation will be Labor’s first big test in the new parliament. Not because it’s bad policy, but because it upsets people who are not used to being the target of government cuts.

Perhaps they could go chat to someone on JobSeeker or the minimum wage for tips to adjust their budgets.