Australia treats superannuation like a civic sacrament. You do not question it. You contribute. You thank the priests in the industry funds. You wait until 60-something to touch your wages. Anyone who says "I'd rather have the cash" is treated as a heretic who wants old people eating cat food. That is not policy. That is religion.

The compulsory system now sits on about $4.4 trillion, roughly 150% of GDP, the fourth-largest pension pool on earth, extracted from 28 million people. Macrobusiness (link below) is right to call it a compulsory savings experiment that has drifted a long way from its original pitch. The original pitch was dignity in retirement, less pressure on the age pension, and a deeper pool of Australian capital for Australian development. What we got is a gigantic, tax-privileged asset manager that reallocates control over money, subsidises people who already have assets, and still leaves the pension bill on the table.

I do not have faith in it. I would rather have my own money. Canberra already takes enough.

The creed says: left to yourself you will blow it, so the state will lock a slice of your pay in a fund until you are old. Employers "contribute," which is a polite way of saying part of your compensation is routed through Canberra's preferred pipes. Funds invest. Compounding does the rest. Everyone retires richer than their grandparents, supposedly.

Some of that happened, for a cohort. Past performance is not a promise. The same industry that prints that disclaimer on every PDS treats the system as beyond doubt.

Look at the original three aims against the record Macrobusiness (link below) sketches:

Prosperity in retirement: true for many now; increasingly shaky for the young who will pay 12% of wages into a market that buys existing houses, listed paper, and offshore assets while they cannot get a deposit together.

Get people off the pension and protect the budget: it did not. Concessions on super are now in the same fiscal neighbourhood as the age pension. Plenty of balances are managed so the pension still flows. The "budget stabiliser" was never nailed down. Only the compulsory extraction was.

National development capital: the pool is huge. A lot of it sits in physical assets, low-risk, pro-cyclical positions, or leaves the country. Australia deindustrialised anyway. Fund managers chase asset prices, not new productive capacity. So, the religion kept the collection plate and lost the theology.

It is not "your" money until they say so:

That is the core offence. Super is sold as your nest egg. In practice it is deferred wages under other people's mandate. You cannot use it for the deposit that would actually change your life in your thirties. You cannot use it to start the business that might beat a balanced option. You cannot use it when a marriage explodes, a parent needs care, or the job vanishes. The system is notoriously worse for people who do not have a neat, continuous PAYG story: non-working spouses, carers, entrepreneurs, people after divorce. The brochure is written for the person who stays in the same kind of job for forty years. Most lives are not that.

"I'd rather have my own money" is not greed. It is the recognition that liquidity in the years you are building a life is worth more than a locked box you may raid under rules written by people who already own homes.

Compulsory super does not create wealth from thin air. It reallocates control. Your labour becomes someone else's funds under management. A handful of mega-funds dominate. Their mandate is not "make Australia more productive." It is return within a risk box, fees, and scale. When a few institutions sit on a pile that large, they are not a humble savings club. They are a parallel Treasury.

Canberra already takes the first cut. Before super even enters the story, the Commonwealth takes income tax, Medicare, and a growing list of levies and compliance costs. Then it mandates another slice into a system whose tax treatment is a second political instrument.

The concessional settings are sold as a gift to workers. They are also a gift to high-balance accounts and to the industry that lives on percentage fees of a $4 trillion mountain. The taxpayer subsidises wealthy superannuants more than the person on modest wages who needed the cash in the year it was earned. That is not solidarity. That is an upside-down welfare state with better branding.

"Canberra gets too much already" is not a slogan against pensions for the broke. It is a statement about how much of a working life is pre-committed to institutions in the ACT and Collins Street before you have paid rent. Every increase in the super guarantee is applauded as "more for your future." It is also less for your present, in an economy where housing, energy, and services already eat the young.

If the age pension is the safety net, say so and fund it honestly. Do not run a compulsory wealth vehicle, keep the pension, layer tax breaks on the top end, and call the whole stack "fair."

The series' last charge is the one that should end the sermon: the system stifles opportunity for young Australians. Housing is the obvious collision. You are forced to save in a structure that bids up the same assets you are locked out of. Money that could have been a deposit, a relocation, equity in a trade, or a buffer against a bad decade is instead "working for you" in a default option.

Slowing the circulation of money is not a side effect. It is what compulsory long-duration savings do. Firms get a bid under existing assets. New activity that needs flexible capital fights for leftovers. Fund managers mark the assets up. Productivity is someone else's job.

A 25-year-old does not need a homily about 2065. They need optionality in 2026. The religion forbids that conversation because optionality means the collection plate shrinks.

I can respect voluntary saving, tax-advantaged accounts with real access rules, and a lean public pension for people who outlive their luck. What I will not do is treat a Keating 1980s union–government bargain, patched by both parties for forty years, as sacred.

Superannuation became a wealth and bequest machine subsidised by taxpayers, concentrated in mega-funds, weakly tied to national development, and still leaning on the pension it was supposed to replace. That is not a miracle. It is path dependence plus fees plus politics.

Give people their wages. Tax them once, in the open. Let them buy a house, a tool, a year off, or an index fund they can sell when life happens. If they blow it, the pension is there. If they don't, they did not need a priesthood to tell them compounding exists.

I do not have faith in the religion of super. I have a preference for money that still answers to the person who earned it; not to Canberra, not to a default MySuper option, and not to a $4.4 trillion experiment that has already collected the tithe.

https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2026/09/why-australians-need-to-question-their-superannuation-system-the-10-reasons-its-not-fit-for-purpose/