2 days ago
Mark Bouris rails against Labor's controversial super, unrealised gains tax; issues alarming message to young Australians
Millionaire and businessman Mark Bouris has cautioned younger Australians to be aware of the dangerous risks posed by Labor's contentious super, unrealised gains tax, stating 'every young person' in the country 'should be worried'.
Labor's plan to double the tax rate from 15 to 30 per cent on super accounts over $3 million looks set to pass both houses when parliament resumes in July, with the Greens expected to join with Labor in the Senate to ram the legislation through.
However, the plan, which also targets unrealised capital gains has attracted a myriad of critics including top fund managers, leading economists and former Treasury officials who have argued the policy is reckless and unprecedented in nature.
Despite Treasurer Jim Chalmers repeatedly claiming the policy will only affect 80,000 Australians or 0.5 per cent of the population, industry magnates have outlined that due to the threshold not being indexed with inflation, millions of young Australians could fall victim to the tax in the coming decades.
In the latest episode of his Mentored+ podcast, Mr Bouris outlined that young Australians should be extremely concerned by the tax proposal, and that the super accounts of Australians starting work today would eventually be ransacked as a result.
'The people that are going to be affected by that the most is anyone starting work today, any new young person,' Mr Bouris said.
'So, if you're a young person saying this is great, because the rich people are going to transfer the wealth across to the younger people, you will be transferring it to your kids and it's going to keep going like that forever'.
The businessman who is best known for founding Wizard Home Loans, Australia's second largest non-bank mortgage lender also said that older Australians had struggled to amass superannuation savings with a low tax rate, and that the tax hike would only make things harder for younger Australians.
'Every young person in the country should be worried about this, and I'll tell you why: because every old person in the country has experienced building their superannuation up with only 15 per cent tax rate from day 1, for the last 30, 40 years'.
'We've had this, all of us had this fantastic low-tax situation with the money we earn in our super fund,' Mr Bouris said, adding that young people who accumulate more than $3 million worth of assets "will not have the same benefits that everyone else had had'.
Former Labor Prime Minister and chief architect of compulsory superannuation Paul Keating is reportedly incensed by the policy, telling industry super executives and union leaders last August the plan was 'unconscionable', and that it would turn superannuation into a low-and middle-income pension scheme.
Mr Bouris said the former ALP Prime Minister, who introduced compulsory superannuation in 1992 'must be feeling completely demoralised and probably to some extent betrayed' by the reforms, stating that Mr Keating had long argued for government to refrain from imposing excessive levies on super.
'All (Labor's changes) is going to do is put more strain on government when people retire, because people are not going to retire with enough money because they are going to be paying too much tax," he said.
'So if you're a young person and you're saying, 'Oh, this is great', because you're gonna get rich people to transfer the wealth across to the younger people – uh-uh."
From July 12 the majority of Australian workers will have 12 per cent of their wages paid to a superannuation fund, representing a 0.5 per cent increase from the current threshold.
