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Media Release

April 10 2008

Women miss out on retirement super

Professor Rhonda SharpMany women baby boomers approaching retirement in Australia could find themselves in financially vulnerable positions, with a National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) study in 2004 showing that 30 per cent of women in this age group have no superannuation at all.

The NATSEM study, which is based on the ABS Survey of Income and Housing 2003-4, shows average superannuation balances for half of women aged 45-59 years are less than $8,000 each.

For most women, relying on a spouse’s retirement income savings is unlikely to ensure a comfortable retirement, according to Professor of Economics at UniSA’s Hawke Research Institute, Rhonda Sharp.

“While men’s superannuation on average is double that of women’s across all age groups, half of the men in the baby boomer population approaching retirement (45-59 years) have a low average superannuation balance of less than $31,000. Only a small proportion of baby boomers, mostly men, have significant superannuation assets,” Prof Rhonda Sharp said.

While one of the stated goals of Australian society is equality between men and women, Prof Sharp says the government’s massive reform in the area of superannuation taxation has included very little scrutiny regarding the impact on women and girls and men and boys, and the gender relations between them.

“The superannuation reforms, which feature large tax concessions to encourage individual savings, were sold under the umbrella of ‘better superannuation for all Australians’. But if we analyse the impact of those reforms, women are the big losers when it comes to having adequate aged income support,” Prof Sharp said.

“Distribution of superannuation is uneven and unfair. A majority of men have high incomes, more financial assets and significant super, but the chances of having good super if you’re a baby boomer woman, retired or approaching retirement, are quite small, and much smaller relative to men.

“Women’s chances of accumulating good superannuation reserves are often low because they experience more broken work patterns, spend fewer years in full time paid work, earn lower wages and have greater responsibility for unpaid work than their male counterparts,” Prof Sharp said.

Research by Jefferson and Preston has estimated that female baby boomers will spend 35 per cent less time in paid employment during their lifetimes than male baby boomers.

“The recent superannuation taxation concessions provide an ‘upside down subsidy’ where the largest benefits accrue to people on higher incomes. Similarly, the new rules allowing people to sell off assets to gain tax free superannuation over the age of 60 favour those with greater wealth, particularly in the form of flexible assets. These policies have built-in gender impacts, with the majority of men earning higher incomes on average than women, and women’s wealth holding being less and tied up in the family home,” Prof Sharp said.

Prof Sharp says tax concessions will have an impact on budget expenditure and their affordability in the future may be questioned because of their significant drain on budgets. In the long-term tax concessions are expected to supersede expenditure on the age pension.

“The 60 and over age group is a growing demographic, with budget expenditure increasing as more people reach tax free status and the higher the incomes and wealth, the bigger the tax concessions,” she said.

Prof Sharp believes tax concessions will be difficult to remove because the superannuation industry is being built on it. Added to that is the government mandated superannuation guarantee charge (SGC), which has created a superannuation industry in Australia worth $1.2 trillion today - one of the largest in the Asia Pacific region.

The primary source of funding for retired people in Australia is the aged pension, with some 78 per cent receiving a full or part aged pension at a cost of $20 billion a year. Other retirees are partly funded by the SGC and very few are fully funded by private superannuation.

“The federal treasury estimates that 70 per cent of older Australians will still be receiving an aged pension in 2040 and only 25 per cent of the pension age population will be self-funded retirees by 2050,” Prof Sharp said.

While the aim of the tax concession is to get all Australians to be self sufficient in retirement, Prof Sharp said that it won’t happen, except for those who are well placed to take advantage of the tax benefits.

“It is not possible to completely privatise superannuation. We need to have insurance against longevity, just like health insurance, to remove the risks of living to an old age, but we’re increasing the risk for some women living to an old age because they won’t have adequate aged income support,” Prof Sharp said.

Older women greatly outnumber older men in most countries worldwide and Australia’s population is no exception. In 2004 more than 55 per cent of the country’s population aged 65 years or older were women, and in the over 85 year age group, women outnumbered men by two to one.

“A good retirement system is not just about looking at the end of the life period. It’s about having gender equality throughout people’s lives.”

Prof Sharp has been conducting a gender analysis of superannuation taxation concessions with Associate Professor Siobhan Austen from Curtin University of Technology.

An invited participant in the United Nations Expert Round Table on financing gender equality in Norway recently, Prof Sharp is internationally recognised for her expertise in gender and public finance, and her work in setting up conceptional frameworks and monitoring the practice of integrating a gender perspective into government budgets, revenues and taxation.

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