Working life can be hard. Often, it is also quite insecure. It can be difficult to know whether you have enough to get through to next payday, let alone to think about providing for your retirement.

So the idea of a retirement pension is an attractive one — a guaranteed income from when you stop work until you die, with no questions asked. Enough to live on and provide some level of comfort and supplement anything you have been able to put away while working.

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Workers in Australia won the right to an age pension with the passing of the Invalid and Old-aged Pensions Act 1908. Initially, the pension provided a means-tested income for men over 65 and women over 60, from 1910. However, the pension was not universal: First Nations people only began to receive the age pension in full in 1966.

The Gough Whitlam Labor government, in 1973, removed means testing for the pension for those over 75. In 1975, it extended that eligibility to those aged 70–74 also. Everyone, regardless of their means, received the age pension as an entitlement.

But beginning with Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government in 1978, universal access was gradually wound back.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary, a superannuation fund is “a retirement fund to which an employee (and usually also the employer) contributes during the period of employment, and which provides benefits after retirement”. In essence, it is intended as a private pension, whether as a substitute for the public pension or as a supplement.

Superannuation in Australia developed in parallel with the age pension.........

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