Yes - and that was a terrible decision. Australia could have put super contributions into a collective pool, and used the money to increase equality and fund above-poverty-line universal pensions, but it didn't. Instead they put it in individually owned accounts - inequality and poverty is much higher in Australia as a consequence. Elderly women are the most impoverished demographic in the country.
> What you want is a defined benefit federal savings program (like social security), but that needs to be funded by taxing incomes, not by seizing existing private retirement savings.
No, what you want is a collective fund like Norway's - you are talking like this doesn't exist. It would be very straightforward to tax super balances (particularly large ones) and move money into a collective pool.
> Some nations have that and others don't, but it's not a sovereign wealth fund. Please don't confuse the two issues being discussed.
Norway's SWF is literally a pension fund, and explicitly has the goal of creating equally shared wealth.
> SWFs, OTOH, are created when a nation gets some unexpected windfall that is short lived, and it wants to smooth the life of that windfall into the future.
No, that is one reason SWFs are created, but there are many - Australia's own SWF for instance was not created for this reason.
> But in Australia, the extraction of coal and iron results in a much smaller surplus spread over a much larger population, and so Australia's mineral wealth, while large in absolute terms, does not support the same level of surplus income per person as Norway's oil wealth
If we lack the surplus income of Norway, how have we managed to create a pool of wealth 3x as big from surplus incomes, in spite of wasting much more of it on fees each year?
> Australia is very much dependent on all the jobs that mining creates, but that is not surplus income, it is income that has to be earned with labor.
This is incoherent - both oil and mining resources require labor to extract. There's nothing special about oil or resources compared to any other type of capital - you can make a fund out of any type of capital.
