Paul Keating Slams ‘Little Bitchy Liberals’ For Messing With Superannuation

Paul Keating — former Prime Minister, and sometime conversational savage — has lashed out at the government, slamming “little bitchy Liberals” for trying to undermine superannuation.

For context: next year employers will be forced to pay higher superannuation contributions to staff, but a group of government backbenchers are trying to stop that from happening.

This morning Keating tore strips off them on RN Breakfast, calling them a “miserable little backbench group” who were trying to undermine our retirement system.

“The last thing we want is some bitchy performance from the Liberal party, trying to knock off the wages of ordinary people,” he said.

He called our superannuation scheme the best in the world “because it’s all personally vested in everyone’s name, not some government fund”.

“And these, these monkeys, want to destroy it,” he said.

“They’d like to crack it open for for housing deposits, they’d like to crack it open for health, they’d like to crack it open because they want to be rid of it.”

Paul Keating’s Highlight Reel

Paul Keating generally keeps pretty quiet nowadays, but back in his heyday he was famed for being an absolute savage.

There’s even a private Facebook group with more than 64,000 members called “THE PAUL KEATING INSULT APPRECIATION SOCIETY“.

Most famous perhaps is Keating’s iconic “I want to do you slowly” speech, which he directed at the Opposition when asked why he wouldn’t call an early election.

One of his favourite targets was John Hewson, who was Liberal leader in the 90s. Keating once described his performance as “like being flogged with warm lettuce”.

Another former Liberal leader, Andrew Peacock, was compared to “painted, perfumed gigolos”. Brutally, he also once said, “I suppose that the Honourable Gentleman’s hair, like his intellect, will recede into the darkness”.

Keating also liked to target John Howard (and his eyebrows), once calling him “a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze, but nobody will cut it down to replace him”.

He also once called Howard-era minister Wilson Tuckey a “boxhead” who would be “flat out counting past ten” and Howard’s former treasurer Peter Costello “the greatest L plater of all time”.

But his insults weren’t always dedicated to his Liberal opponents — he once told former ALP MP Jim McClelland, “just because you swallowed a fucking dictionary when you were about 15 doesn’t give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us”.

Oh, to have a seat in Question Time in the 90s.

What Was Keating Actually Saying About Our Super?

Keating’s comments were in reference to superannuation, which has gotten a lot of attention this year.

First, the government allowed people financially affected by the pandemic to take money out of their retirement funds early. People could take out a maximum of $20,000 — a move that could cost young people $100,000 in compound interest over the next few decades.

Now the government is under pressure from its own backbenchers to scrap an increase to the super guarantee rate, which would give people more for their retirement.

The super guarantee is legislated to rise incrementally from 9.5 percent to 12 percent over the next few years, but given our recession the government has left the door open to deferring that. Meanwhile, politicians pocket 15.4 percent for their super (nothing to see here folks).

Keating was the one who introduced compulsory superannuation in the early 90s, after our last recession. He said he’d already heard all the arguments against lifting the super guarantee back then.

“All this was said to me in 1992, ‘Oh if you put the superannuation guarantee on, you know you’ll just lift the cost of wages’,” he said.

“You know, you could hear all the small business organisations out with a handkerchief out crying.”

Groups like the Grattan Institute and the Reserve Bank have warned increasing super contributions could reduce workers’ take home pay, or rob them of a wage rise. Given that we’re not exactly rolling in wage growth right now, other economists say an increase to super might be the only way we actually get an increase.

Figures released yesterday showed that less than half of our national income is spent on employee wages — the first time in 60 years that’s happened.

Meanwhile company profits have actually risen, which is why Keating says they can afford the super increase.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in the profit share in the economy, and a longtime decline in the labour share of the economy, now what we’re talking about here is 2.5 percent, 0.5 percent a year.” he said.

He said super made it possible to fund large projects that banks can’t finance, and it should be “putting money into investments, into infrastructure, aged care”.

“Instead of that, what have we got, a bunch of little bitchy Liberals trying to knock off 2.5% of people’s income for the rest of their lives.”