Speaking on ABC breakfast, former Labor prime minister Paul Keating accused the government of being doomsayers, stating the country should use the increased productivity and higher business profits over the last five years to pay for rises in superannuation.
“There’s a reason the stock market is at 6,300. From 1959 until today, we’ve seen a huge increase in the profit share of the economy and a long-term decline in the labour share of the economy,” Mr Keating said.
“The last thing you want is some bitchy performance from the Liberal Party trying to knock off compulsory super.”
Mr Keating pointed out that the politicians that are currently debating whether or not superannuation should rise are getting a significantly higher rate of super than ordinary Australians.
He said politicians get 15.5 per cent super, while the “bitchy Liberals” want to knock off currently legislated 2.5 per cent rise, which will impact Australians for the rest of their lives.
“I’ve been here. All this was said to me in 1992. What did we see? We saw real wages rise for 20 years. Now the average accumulation for every Australian is $230,000, it will half a million in eight years from now. All of this was said before. It’s all wrong.”
The former PM also urged the Reserve Bank to do more to support the Australian economy through buying government bonds as a way of funding wage subsidies and the boosted JobSeeker payment.
Mr Keating said the economy would recover, while people needed the support today.
“We don’t dump them like they’re all happy hanging five on the big wave and all of a sudden they’re in the dumper,” he said.
“What we’ve got to do is see the wave into the beach.”
He said JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments, which the government is scaling down, should be maintained.
“If the Reserve Bank actually got off its tail instead of producing silly little minutes once a month and actually bought more of the bonds and put them on their balance sheet, we could do this without a lot of hurt.”
The RBA launched a bond buying program early to keep the rates low at the start of the crisis, but has scaled back its purchases since April.
“You get all this sort of wise talk, they say, ‘Oh, the Reserve Bank’. Look, they’re basically a bunch of bureaucrats,” Mr Keating concluded.
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