For the thirty years after the war occupational superannuation plans (bene-
fiting from long-standing tax concessions) grew rapidly among public sector
and, more haphazardly, among private sector workers. Australia was the only
major English-speaking country not to have an earnings-related contributory
scheme during this period. Thwarted twice already, the conservative side of
politics, represented by the newly created Liberal Party, in power from 1949
until 1972, gave up on the idea. The Whitlam Labor government set up a
National Superannuation Committee of Inquiry in 1973, whose 1979 recom-
mendations gave a third andfinal endorsement to an earnings-related public
pension scheme. But by that time Labor had been voted out emphatically,
and the conservative Fraser government ignored the endorsement.
Meanwhile trade unions, peeved that higher pensions remained the
preserve of the higher paid, started agitating for superannuation for trade
unionists. The Federated Storemen and Packers Union, inspired by earlier
waterfront successes, won employer-paid superannuation for its members in
1979 (St Anne 2012, p. 12). By September 1985 superannuation had become a
central objective of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the peak
organizing body of the union movement. Australia’s deteriorating economic
conditions—inflation and unemployment were each near 9 per cent in the
mid-1980s—had convinced the newly elected Hawke Labor government, and
a more economically sophisticated union leadership, that limiting cash-in-
hand pay rises would help control inflation (Love 2008, p. 92).
Compulsory superannuation emerged in a deal between a Labor govern-
ment and Australia’s trade union movement, which resulted in half of work-
ers’6 per cent pay rise in 1986 diverted into special retirement funds managed
in trust by representatives of trade unions and employer associations. In that
year, the government and the ACTU successfully convinced Australia’s Con-
ciliation and Arbitration Commission (CAC), an industrial tribunal, that such
amounts should be diverted into industry superannuation funds. Employer
groups appealed, but the High Court agreed superannuation was an‘industrial
matter’, foreshadowing its inclusion of hundreds of‘award’agreements that
governed the pay and conditions across Australian enterprises and industry.^9
Australia’s unusual and highly centralized industrial relations system was able
to foster the spread of superannuation across vast swathes of the workforce
without parliamentary involvement. It was the then-renamed Industrial Rela-
tions Commission’s rejection of the ACTU–government claim for a further
increase in superannuation in 1991 that prompted the Hawke government to
legislate in 1992.
(^9) The CAC decision covered only workers subject to federal, rather than state, awards.
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