The government has not ruled out making changes to superannuation tax concessions in the coming May budget, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says.
He said on Wednesday the government “hasn’t determined” whether it should change its position on the scheme.
Imposing a cap on super balances to which tax breaks still apply is something the government is “clearly” thinking about, the assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, said.
“We haven’t formed a view – a final view on that yet,” Jones told the ABC. “I’m not going to say we’re not thinking about it, clearly we are.”
The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) raised the prospect of a $5m cap on tax concessions on super in its pre-budget submission.
Caps are one of the issues under discussion since Chalmers raised the cost of the superannuation tax concessions to the budget in a speech to fund managers on Monday, making the point the scheme was about to cost more than the aged pension.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, backed the need to have a “conversation”, despite attacks from the opposition on “broken promises”, given Albanese and Chalmers had said during the election campaign there were no planned changes to the tax concessions.
Chalmers, speaking to ABC radio, denied the government had broken an election promise.
“I do genuinely believe that governments of either political persuasion should acknowledge the various costs and pressures on the budget at a time when we’ve got a lot of debt, where we need to fund decent aged care and decent health care and decent national security,” he said.
“At a time like that we need to acknowledge where some of these pressures lie. We haven’t changed our view. We haven’t taken any decisions, but we should be up for a national conversation about the future of some of these concessions which cost the budget a lot of money.”
Asked if there would be changes in the May budget, or if the government believed it would need an election mandate, Chalmers said: “We haven’t changed our view. We haven’t taken any decisions in this area.”
Asked another three times, Chalmers gave different versions of the same answer: “We haven’t decided to do that; we haven’t changed our position on that,” but when asked if he believed the government should change its position, Chalmers said: “We haven’t determined that.”
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Jones said the government was asking people to consider what a “reasonable contribution” from taxpayers was to assist in building retirement savings.
“Let me be very clear – this is not about the government saying to people ‘you can’t save more than $5m, $10m, $100m for their retirement,’” he said. “That’s not what we’re saying.
“We’re saying ‘what is a reasonable contribution that the Australian taxpayer through the budget should be making to assisting people to save for retirement incomes?’ To put that in context, the average retirement balance, the average superannuation fund balance at retirement is around about $150,000. That’s a long, long way from $100m.”
Jones confirmed no decision had been made, but key members of the Senate crossbench have expressed their support for discussions.
Treasury will release the latest tax expenditure statement at the end of the month, which will outline lost revenue to the budget in concessions, including the superannuation scheme.
Chalmers will hand down his second budget in May.