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As part of the Stronger Super reforms announced by the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, the Hon Bill Shorten MP, on 16 December 2010, the Government announced its support, or support in principle, for 139 of the 177 recommendations of the Super System Review (SSR). The majority of these supported recommendations were referred for consultation with industry and other stakeholders before implementation. On 1 February 2011, the Minister announced a Peak Consultative Group to head this process.
Four streams within the reforms were identified: MySuper, SuperStream, Governance, and Self Managed Superannuation Funds (SMSFs), with a working group of stakeholders and regulators established for each. These Working Groups reported into the Peak Consultative Group.
This process ran from late February to the end of June 2011 with many hours of discussion producing pages of issues and suggestions. Treasury officials participated in all Working Group and Peak Consultative Group meetings as part of the process for developing advice to the Minister on how the reforms should be implemented.
The attached report represents a summary of these discussions. By definition it is not a full record of all issues covered but aims to provide a high level overview of the outcomes. Treasury is aware of the detailed suggestions provided by stakeholders as part of this process and will take these into account in providing its advice to the Government.
The vast majority of the Stronger Super reforms were strongly endorsed through the consultation process. In these cases, a suggested approach to their implementation was generally able to be developed if time permitted. It must be recognised, however, that the scope of these reforms is vast and, in some cases, covered areas recognised as very complex. The combination of the breadth of the review and a fairly compressed window of time meant that some of the supported recommendations could not be addressed to the desired level. We have noted this where relevant and suggested that further consultation would be beneficial. In a few areas it was not possible to achieve consensus on the most appropriate way to implement Government policy as articulated in the Stronger Super report. In these cases, we have set out the different perspectives to assist the Government in developing its position.