It is not hard to work out why Australians don't save. Due to the Keynesian policy of euthanasing the rentier, the whole taxation system is biassed against the saver and in favour of the borrower. With the additional policy of perpetual inflation, this means that the real after tax return on a bank account is negative. People are not stupid, so they don't save. The main investment is in owner-occupied housing, which means we will end up the best housed beggars in the world. Most people hate money lenders, and others are obsessed by equality, so the policy is popular. However the result is that not only do we have a currency that has lost 99% of its value over the last eighty years (which I believe is the greatest sustained inflation in recorded history), but we have acquired a massive overseas debt. When this is called in, the results will not be pleasant. Still, as Keynes said, we onlt think of the short term, as in the long term we are dead. Hopefully, when the Chinese take over, they will bring back the Gold Standard.

This is an excellent idea and can be extended to other situations. For example why not extend it to all household budgetting and purchases. Let us have optin and adjustable household budgetting systems that take our expenditures and measure them against our budgets.

While many households do this the ones who most need this discipline often fail to budget. Such a scheme would be voluntary - but everyone by default - would be part of the scheme. Budgets would be set by default to the "standard" for your situation in life and you could see how you perform against the standard.

As almost all significant transactions are electronic and identifiable the cost of such a system would be relatively low to implement and run. The benefit to the community through better individual decisions would be significant.

Such a system could be paid for by giving ways for groups of individuals to band together to form bulk buying groups for commodity items like banking, fuel, and telco services.

This article reflects a very common capacity to over compartmentalise an issue into what could be called a "pie chart" mentality. In this case the superannuation is the savings and the housing is the consumption and never the twain shall meet.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The reason we don't save more in superannuation is because we are paying off the mortgage. A payment of principle on a loan covering an asset is A FORM OF SAVING. Even if one does not eventually trade down to a cheaper house the payment of principle still amounts to a pre-payment of rent that might otherwise have been paid.

At the upper end of the market there is an obvious element of consumption in part of the payment of principle but the people paying it will be the first to point out that it is worth every cent as it is recovered in higher asset values.

The fact is that most people retain the option of trading down if necessary. And that makes housing a store of wealth and a form of saving. Those savings can be cashed in by letting the kids stay home into their thirties while they accumulate their own deposit. Or it may be cashed in when a single parent returns home to recover from crisis.

So unless one is talking about all forms of saving, one runs the risk of being labelled as a spruiker for the superannuation industry as sole deliverer of savings facilities.

Super doesn't work for me, or other Australians who no longer work full time. For each casual job I get, I get signed up for another Super fund, some employers get around to offering me the opportunity to roll the (paltry) sums across to the fund of my choice provided the existing fund provides 10 pages of paperwork. How bad is this - since June I have had casual work through 8 seperate employers.
Why does Super have to be linked to your employer? I have seen large Australian companies fire 50+ year old employees to reduce their superannuation commitments.