Who benefits? - The high cost of super tax concessions - Super tax concessions exacerbate income and gender

For a single person to be eligible for the full pension, the threshold is $301,750 for a homeowner and $543,750 for a non-homeowner.5 So, the more super a person holds, the less likely they are to be eligible for Age Pension, and those with balances over $2 million are well past the point of qualifying. [...] If the objective of superannuation is to provide income in retirement to substitute or supplement the Age Pension, then the Commonwealth Government does not need to provide concessions to those with such high balances. [...] Figure 8 shows that the amount of foregone revenue that goes to super concessions is so large that it is nearly equivalent to the cost of the Age Pension. [...] 13 Treasury (2024) Tax expenditure and insights statement 2024, p 121-125, 14 Because assistance to the aged is mostly made of the Age Pension and because the Government does not release separate figures just for the Age Pension, when this paper refers to the cost of the Age Pension it is referring to support for seniors. [...] By 2045-46, tax concessions on super contributions and earnings, which make up almost entirely the super tax concessions, are projected to cost the Commonwealth budget more than the Age Pension.17 Concessions are not reducing spending on retirement as they were supposed to and, in the future, the “solution” will become worse than the problem super was supposed to fix.