Work longer, wait longer, now borrow your own retirement back

One Nation’s super-for-housing plan offers immediate relief, but risks repeating a message its new midlife voters know well: solve the problem with your own money.

At the weekend One Nation released its answer to housing stress. It is a superannuation policy.

The mechanics are these. Any Australian paying rent or a mortgage would be able to opt in. Their employer would keep paying the full 12 per cent superannuation guarantee. But the super fund, rather than banking the lot, would pay 3 per cent of it straight back to the worker as cash. A quarter of every contribution, redirected to the pay packet, for up to three years. The money would be taxed at the concessional super rate of 15 per cent rather than the worker’s marginal rate. Existing balances would not be touched.

One Nation’s own numbers: a full-time worker on about $90,500 would see roughly $2,300 a year, or $44 a week. A couple on a combined $168,000 would see about $4,300 a year after tax, or $82 a week. A full-time worker on the minimum wage, about $26 a week. Barnaby Joyce puts the eligible pool at around seven million people and argues only those in real strain will take it up. Asked whether the party should tell people what it does to their retirement balance, he said people are competent enough to work that out for themselves.

Labor called it a raid. The Super Members Council modelled a 30-year-old who takes the full three years and found them about $25,000 worse off at retirement. Jane Hume called it a headline.

All of which is the debate the political class wants to have. Is super sacrosanct or is it your money. Should it stay locked up or be released. That debate has been running for a fortnight now, since Andrew Bragg called compulsory super an illiberal experiment, Pauline Hanson called the system broken, and Jim Chalmers declared the next election a referendum on the whole thing.

I want to suggest the debate is not the point. The point is how this policy will be read by the people One Nation has spent the last year recruiting, courting and ‘renting’. There is a decent chance it reads to them as something very familiar.

The voters who moved to One Nation over the last 12 months are not the party’s founding base. That base, the roughly 6 per cent that stayed through everything, is older, and long detached from the major parties. The new cohort is different. In our polling they cluster hard in a single life stage: late 40s to early 60s. Gen X, with a slice of the youngest boomers. They live in the outer suburban mortgage belt and in the regions. They work, have kids at home, or kids who have only recently left, or kids who have come back. They carry a mortgage they took out in the 2000s or early 2010s, and most of them no longer expect to pay it off before they stop working.

They are the reason One Nation sits where it does. In May our RedBridge/Accent Research MRP had the party on track for 53 seats and the role of official opposition. Strip this cohort out and One Nation is back on the margins.

What unites them is not ideology but a running tally. A running tally, most of it unconscious, of every occasion on which a problem in the national accounts was solved by putting a hand into their pocket. That tally is long, and it is the lens through which the weekend’s announcement will be read.

Consider this sequence.

They were told the pension age would rise to 67. Anyone born from 1957 now waits until 67, and every member of this cohort is on the wrong side of that line. The Abbott government’s first budget tried to push it to 70. That plan died in the Senate and was formally buried in 2018, but the idea has never left the policy conversation, and every few years someone with a think tank resurfaces it. The message: work longer, so we can tax you more.

They were told the age at which they could touch their own super would rise from 55 to 60. The phase-in was set by birth year, and it lands squarely on them. Anyone born after mid-1964 is locked out until 60. Their parents’ generation could access super at 55 but they cannot.

They were told, from 1992 onwards, that a share of their pay would be diverted into super, and some politicians even argued back then that this was wage growth forgone in exchange for security later. Pauline Hanson’s own argument is that this is money they sacrificed in lieu of pay. She is right about that. It is precisely why being asked to now borrow it back for the rent lands so oddly.

They were told during the pandemic that they could pull $20,000 out of super to get through. Millions did, and close to $38 billion came out, much of it from the outer suburbs and the regions where this cohort lives. Some politicians correctly cite that episode as the cautionary tale. It was a policy of the same design: no cost to the budget, the individual pays.

They were told, through 2022 and 2023, that inflation would be tamed by 13 consecutive interest rate rises, and they were the ones holding the variable-rate loans. In the year to June 2023 the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) measured mortgage interest charges for employee households rising 91.6 per cent. The Reserve Bank has raised rates three more times this year. Mortgage interest charges rose 8.2 per cent in the June quarter alone, and employee households recorded the fastest rise in living costs of any household type. Inflation is not a problem this group created but a problem they have been made to pay for and carry.

They have watched the entire national housing conversation turn on first home buyers. Deposit guarantees, shared equity, super for deposits, mortgage interest deductions for the first purchase. Every scheme is aimed at the person trying to get in. Nothing is aimed at the person who got in 15 years ago and now cannot see the end to the pain.

They have watched bracket creep quietly take back every tax cut. They have watched insurance premiums, power bills and council rates climb. They have become the unpaid navigators of an aged care system that has just been redesigned, on behalf of parents who cannot navigate it themselves. The complexity and cost they, again, have to carry.

Each of these on its own is defensible. Together they form a pattern that this cohort can recite. ‘The problem is always somewhere and we always have to pay the bill’.

Now One Nation, the party that harvested that resentment, has produced a policy with exactly the same signature. It costs the Commonwealth nothing. It asks the person under stress to fund their own relief. It is framed as choice when in reality it’s not at all their choice. It’s, yet again, the political class asking them to pay for the bill.

There is a second thing this cohort has in common, and it is the thing that makes this particular policy sting.

Their parents are on the pension.

Not all of them, but most. These are not the children of the self-funded retiree class. Their parents worked in factories, on farms, in shops, on building sites, in the public service before it paid well. Compulsory super arrived too late in their working lives to build anything substantial. So they retired onto the age pension, and they have lived on it now for 10 or 20 years.

Their children see that life up close. They see it every weekend. They see what a pensioner’s fortnight looks like: the discount days, the fuel calculated, the specialists deferred, the car that cannot be replaced. The pension is, by every measure, hard to live on. The ABS puts living cost growth for age pensioner households at 4.7 per cent over the year to June, higher than for any other household type.

But their parents own the house.

That is the thing. The pension was designed on the assumption of outright home ownership, and for their parents’ generation that assumption held. They bought in the 1970s or 1980s at three or four times a single income, they paid it off in their early 50s, and the roof over their head has cost them nothing since. That is what makes the pension liveable. Barely, but liveable. Their children, now well into midlife, know this and it scares them senseless.

They are watching their parents’ lives and doing the maths on their own, and the maths does not work. In 1981 the median Australian had paid off the mortgage by 52. By the middle of the last decade it was 62. At the turn of the century close to two-thirds of Australians aged 55 to 64 owned their home outright. By 2020 it was just over a third. More than half of that age group still carry mortgage debt. Some surveys report that 27 per cent of Gen X are expecting to retire with a mortgage, possibly a lot more when you factor in the current economic situation, against 8 per cent of people already retired.

So the picture this cohort holds in its head is precise. It is the pension, without the house. It is their mother’s fortnight pension, plus a mortgage repayment. It is the hardest lifestyle they have ever observed at close range, made harder by the removal of the one thing that made it survivable, owning the home outright.

That is the fear, and into that fear the political class has now offered the following: take a little of your retirement super and spend it on things you struggle to afford today.

The geography of this is not incidental. Lay the RedBridge/Accent Research May MRP against the 20 electorates with the heaviest concentrations of age pensioners and the story tells itself.

One Nation was the projected winner in 12 of the 20. Lyne on the New South Wales Mid North Coast, at a 44 per cent primary. Mallee, at 41. Wide Bay, 41. Hinkler, 40. Gippsland, 40. Page, 38. Dobell on the Central Coast, 37. Cowper, 36. Barker in South Australia, 36. Paterson, 35. Grey, 34. Braddon in Tasmania, 32. In the remaining eight, held by Labor, an independent or the Liberals, One Nation was still polling between 25 and 32 per cent.

These are not, in the main, seats full of retirees living alone. They are seats where the pensioner parent and the midlife child live within a short drive of one another. Hervey Bay and Bundaberg. Taree and Port Macquarie. The Latrobe Valley. The Riverland and the Mallee. The Central Coast. The north-west of Tasmania. Places where the parents came for the cheap housing or never left, and the children stayed to be near them, or came back. In these seats the two generations share the same GP, the same shopping centre, the same roads.

One Nation’s vote in these seats is not just a pensioner vote. It is the vote of the people caring for the pensioners. Its strength is the midlife cohort living in proximity to the very lifestyle this policy asks them to move a little closer to.

What I am describing is not an argument against the policy on its merits. Financial planners and the super industry will conduct that argument, and there is something to be said on both sides. A family in genuine strain may well prefer $44 a week now to a larger balance at 67, and that preference is not stupid.

The argument is about reception. Political messages are read through the accumulated experience of the people receiving them, and this cohort has a very particular accumulated experience. It has been asked to work longer. It has been asked to wait longer for its own money. It has been asked to carry the interest rate cycle. It has been asked to fund the next generation’s deposit and the last generation’s care. It has spent a year telling pollsters that it moved to One Nation because the parties that did all that had stopped listening.

It will now be asked, by the party it moved to, to fund its own rent or mortgage relief out of its own retirement, while the problem it did not create, inflation, goes on being someone else’s to solve.

If the policy were ever to be implemented, I am sure some will take the money. But many more will file the policy where they have filed all the others.

The risk for One Nation is the one it should understand better than anyone. The people who lifted it from 6 per cent to the brink of government did not do so because they had a considered view on the preservation age. They did it because they were exhausted by a political class that keeps discovering solutions that only ever ask the victim to pay for the lack of economic reform.