The CSRI Leadership Forum brings together leaders in public policy, industry and academia to debate how to secure a sustainable retirement incomes system for Australia and to explore alternative policy proposals.
The forum aims to develop a holistic reform position, incorporating interactions with health and aged care, and to build a broad coalition of support for this agenda.
While our retirement incomes system has many strengths it also faces significant challenges as millions of baby boomers start retiring:
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Many older people will live precariously, especially those without their own homes or who, for health or other reasons, are unable to keep working till pension age.
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A quarter of a century since the introduction of compulsory super, serious weaknesses remain in translating accumulated funds into secure income streams that last a lifetime.
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A significant gender imbalance in super means women end their working lives with about half the savings of men on average and facing long years on very low incomes.
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The system shifts significant risk to individuals ill-equipped to manage it. With financial literacy low, confusion about how much to save and how to manage it is rife.
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The sheer complexity of the system, together with the frequency of policy changes, contributes to high transaction costs and undermines confidence.
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Rising longevity and increasing years in retirement add to the cost and complexity of the system and highlight the need for affordable aged care.
As a non-aligned group, the CSRI has sought the input of a broad range of prominent industry, consumer and academic experts in developing policies to tackle the above challenges.
Our proposed policy framework will be debated at the Leadership Forum with a view to building support for sustainable retirement incomes policies that go beyond the current budget or electoral cycles.
Download Program
Achieving a comprehensive, coordinated and holistic rethink of retirement incomes policy will require a broad community consensus on the need for change. This in turn demands a mechanism for bringing together various stakeholder interests, including consumers themselves.
That was a key discussion point at the CSRI’s 2016 leadership forum in Canberra.
The CSRI Leadership Forum on 12-13 October in Canberra brought together leaders in public policy, industry and academia to debate how to secure a sustainable retirement incomes system for Australia and to explore alternative policy proposals.
The forum discussed ways for developing a holistic reform position, incorporating interactions with health and aged care, and how to build a broad coalition of support for this agenda.
See outcomes document here.
See photos from the Forum here.