Australian Treasury, Strengthening APRA’s Crisis Management Powers, September 2012, page 34 (click to enlarge)
It’s been a big week for your humble blogger, vis-a-vis finding incriminating evidence on government websites.
Here’s another example of something I have warned of (repeatedly) since the inception of this blog, now coming to fruition.
That like so many other countries in the Western world since 2008, our government too would, someday, use the pretext of “crisis management” to steal your super to prop up an insolvent financial system.
Today, we learn that the Orwellian euphemism that has been chosen to describe this process in Australia, is “direction powers”.
From the Australian Treasury’s Consultation Paper, Strengthening APRA’s Crisis Management Powers, September 2012 (my bold emphasis added):
…it is being considered whether APRA should have new direction powers in relation to superannuation.
The purpose of the direction powers would be for the rectification of significant problems, in the nature of an enforcement power.
Possible triggers for the issue of a direction might include:
- a breach of the RSE licensee law or licence condition;
- an anticipated breach of the RSE licensee law or licence condition;
- promoting instability in the Australian financial system;
- conducting affairs in an improper or financially unsound way; and
- where the failure to issue the direction would materially prejudice the interests or reasonable expectations of beneficiaries of the superannuation entity.
Note carefully what is being described here.
Earlier in the same document, the Treasury department bemoaned that:
APRA has comprehensive direction powers in relation to ADIs, general insurers and life insurers but not in relation to RSE licensees, even though the superannuation sector holds approximately $1.4 trillion in savings and a number of superannuation entities hold tens of billions of dollars in assets.
Oh dear! All that money, just sitting there making private sector fund managers rich on fees, and they (the government) don’t have the power to direct what happens to it. Sacre bleu!
Treasury went on to say that APRA needs an “early intervention tool” that is “preemptive”, and so allows it to “address a superannuation entity’s deterioration or non-compliance with prudential requirements”:
Australian Treasury, Strengthening APRA’s Crisis Management Powers, September 2012, page 34 (click to enlarge)
Now here is where the cunning comes in.
How do you ensure that you give yourself the ability to “trigger” your new “enforcement power”, in order to give “direction” to a superannuation fund to … oh let’s say … direct a percentage of its (ie, yours, dear reader) money into government bonds to support the national government’s solvency? Or to the shares of a collapsing bank? Or to the shares in a new “bridging institution”, as directed by the FSB under its new, G20-wide bank resolution “bail-in” regime?
Easy.
You establish a set of “triggers” for your new “direction power”. Just like those they have listed above. Including, most notably, the trigger that — in their judgment — “the failure to issue the direction would materially prejudice the interests or reasonable expectations of beneficiaries of the superannuation entity.”
In other words, if APRA (or the IMF, or FSB, who now tell APRA what to do) were to decide that it “would materially prejudice” your interests if they did NOT “direct” your super fund to do whatever the government wants, then that is all the “trigger” they need to enforce a “direction” on your super savings.
Don’t believe me?
Think I’m twisting what they said?
Read it again.
Very carefully.
With special note of this:
Enhancing direction powers in superannuation would allow APRA to detail specifically how an entity must address an identified concern. Direction powers would enable APRA to direct the entity as to what should be done to remedy the situation…
What if the “identified concern” is that “failure to issue the direction would materially prejudice the interests or reasonable expectations of beneficiaries of the superannuation entity”?
Or what if the “identified concern” is simply that the super funds are not parking your money in the “investments” that the government wants them to, and that this is or could be “promoting instability in the Australian financial system” — another one of the “triggers” listed?
By this action, the government is effectively abrogating to itself what is essentially an unlimited power to “direct” your super fund to do “specifically” whatever the government says with your money, under the dangerously broad, and subjective, Big-Brother-Knows-Best pretext that “failure to issue the direction would materially prejudice” your interests.
See also:
Your Super Screwed By The Laboral Party
Stealing Our Super – I DARE You To Ignore This Now
Barnaby Is Right 
Comments