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:

  • 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.

  •  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.

  •  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.

  •  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.

  •  The sheer complexity of the system, together with the frequency of policy changes, contributes to high transaction costs and undermines confidence.

  •  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

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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.