It seems that the Nine media company is quite taken with Liberal Senator Andrew “virus guy” Bragg.
Last week The Sydney Morning Herald gave, in effect, a free ad for his new book attacking Australia’s compulsory superannuation model, ran an excerpt from it, and ran a follow-up story the next day recycling one of its core myths — that industry super funds are major political donors.
Bragg was also given a slot on far-right shock-jock Ben Fordham’s radio program on Nine-owned 2GB to spruik the book. Bragg also received glowing coverage from the SMH earlier this year when commenting on super.
At no stage in any of the SMH coverage was Bragg’s history at the Financial Services Council — the front group for bank-controlled retail super funds — or his central role in a discredited anti-industry fund campaign run out of the Business Council of Australia, mentioned.
It took Industry Super Australia’s Bernie Dean to point some of that out, when he was belatedly given the opportunity to respond to Bragg’s attacks a week later.
But it’s not just Dean’s response that appears today. The SMH also gave Bragg an ad in the most valuable newspaper real estate of all, its editorial.
Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, who has just published a book entitled Bad Egg: How to Fix Super, has called for major changes to the current system. He says the experience of the past couple of months will make people more willing to ask deep questions about the purpose of super. ‘People know it’s their money now more than they did before the crisis,’ he said. It is certainly a debate worth having.
Again, no mention of Bragg’s past. The editorial also recycled the lie about industry super funds (“union-backed”, according to the editorial, no mention of the employer groups who share control of them): “industry super funds should make full disclosure of their links to trade unions and their investment policies”.
The issue of disclosure is interesting, nonetheless. If disclosure of funding links is important, it’s strange that the SMH editorial writer, while convinced of the need for industry funds to reveal their funding connections with unions and Labor, failed to mention Nine’s financial links with the Liberal Party.
Last year, as the AFR’s Joe Aston revealed, Nine CEO Hugh Marks hosted a $10,000-a-head Liberal fundraiser at Nine’s Willoughby studios, with Scott Morrison as guest of honour — and a number of other Liberal ministers, including Assistant Minister for Superannuation Jane Hume.
Jane Hume, readers will recall, is notorious for repeatedly calling industry funds “unholy”.
If Nine’s hypocrisy isn’t enough, remember that the company is chaired by Liberal elder Peter Costello, who is also chair of the Future Fund. Costello, who as Treasurer pushed hard for a “superannuation choice” campaign designed to undermine industry finds in the last term of the Howard government, has for years called for the Future Fund to supplant industry super funds as the default super vehicle.
And while the SMH was flogging Bragg’s book, it curiously overlooked a report by financial services research firm Rainmaker published last Friday that showed industry super funds had declined 5% in the March quarter — when the initial pandemic-induced stockmarket crash occurred — but retail funds had declined 12% and self-managed funds 9%.
The Financial Review ignored the report as well, although such is that paper’s obsession with destroying industry super, that’s par for the course. Indeed, no one outside the financial industry press covered the report except ABC News.
While Bragg continues his war on industry super, and Tim Wilson uses a parliamentary committee to bombard it with vexatious questions, the government itself is in a more difficult position. Industry super, which holds nearly $800 billion in funds, will be crucial to the economic recovery.
Business investment had collapsed during the Great Morrison Stagnation before the pandemic, smashed by persistent weak household spending. Industry super, which compared to retail funds is far more prepared to look beyond equities markets and invest in infrastructure and start-ups, will be a key source for greater and more efficient investment in coming years.
Greg Combet, chair of both Industry Super and industry super fund manager (and holder of roughly $70 billion in infrastructure investments) IFM Investors, has also been a key figure in the government’s so-far-successful “we’re all in this together” recovery response, and is on the National COVID-19 Co-ordination Commission.
Combet has taken time out from his commission work recently to chip Wilson’s politicking.
It appears that even if Liberals instinctively want to destroy industry super, the government can at least temporarily put aside its hatred when it thinks it can benefit from the economic power of the sector.
At Liberal-linked Nine, however, they’re just getting started.
The right wing conservative cloacals of Nine network, an extension of the odious Costello’s political scrotum, will do anything to entrench greed throught the old lies of solidarity with values, the cheating, lying values of mediaeval dogma. They will use the romanist religious ratbag, an old Riverview skull full of rubbish in Fordham, hopelessly untrustworthy on matters of truth and fact, to spread propaganda, all for mates’ greed. The ancient superstitions rot out the little brains in these romanist and fundamentalist types. They cannot and will not think, behave, act decently.
Another ventriloquist’s dummy out of the trunk – this one out of the retail supers’, along with Hume – Mortimer Snerd and Effiie Klinker.
How much is their cut if they get to have their way with industry super?
Is the Coalition anything about government?
Rather being there as dogs in the manger to keep Labor out – while business dictates to, rapes and pillages society – tipping their party front as they go?
You could go further and accuse the LNP of hating the Industry funds precisely because they do have a lot of funds in hand, and a keen interest in investing in clean energy projects instead of fossil fuels.
A powerful enemy indeed, but not one they will be able to defeat – in fact their evil efforts are very likely to drive even more people out of the poorly performing retail funds.
I was enraged to see Q&A last provide a platform for that paid liar Bragg last night, although he did keep strictly to his script and did not make any serious attempt to promote his anarchistic IPA agenda.
Speers and Macdonald are not impressing me much so far – if they want to invite far right propagandists onto their shows, they should at least work overtime to expose their duplicity.
“Cash for comment” – how many times did a shock-jock have to slag certain companies ’til they paid him to advertise (“donate to”?) for them?
As for Spissy and Ronald – it’s Rosebutt’s ABC now, and she’ll drag it into the tabloid gutter as far as she likes …. so that eventually no one will complain about that (burr under the saddle-blanket of the Coal-ition) being sold off too.
Unfortunately that’s too true – it would be sad to see it go but it’s rapid deterioration is even sadder.
I want my 8 cents a day back.
I vaguely remember when the compulsory superannuation systems was brought in the intention was that it would invest in infrastructure, and such like, which are productive investments.
I find it difficult to see how playing teh stock market is a productive investment, for the most part.
“I find it difficult to see how playing teh stock market is a productive investment, for the most part.”
Judging by the retail funds’ performance, it isn’t.
Wanna play Monopoly – with real other people’s real money?
It really is a game of Monopoly if your Enterprise Bargaining Agreement requires you to use a particular fund.
One small addition to Bernard Keane’s astute analysis of the way the former Fairfax papers (now Nine) are upping the ante on trying to stick it to industry funds.
Quite apart from ex Lib government Treasurer Peter Costello as Nine Chair, and ex Australian editor Michael Stutchbury frothing about ‘union’ industry funds, today’s anti-industry fund editorial in the SMH was presumably overseen by the editor-in-chief of ALL the ex Fairfax papers, one James Chessell.
Among Chessell’s previous gigs, he was on the staff of the cigar-chomping former Lib government Treasurer Joe Hockey.
I’ve talked with Chessell about industry funds and can confirm he shares his former boss’s antagonisms and shibboleths towards the not-for-profit super sector.
Gerard Noonan
Chair Media Super (an industry fund)
Former editor, Australian Financial Review
Oh Gerard, I thought that ‘Media Super’ was an epithet meaning you had some other-worldly powers….