Meg's Musings – October 2024

The last month has been interesting both in terms of what has happened and also what hasn’t.

When it comes to things that have finally happened – it was great to see Treasury release some draft regulations (finally) on implementing the long promised legacy pension amnesty. This was first announced years ago, by a different Government, and seemed to have died of neglect. But lo, there is now something to actually talk about and a consultation opportunity.

We covered the two key elements of the proposal in our blogs here and here during the month. Personally I’d love to devote this month’s entire newsletter to them but even I have to admit this issue is highly relevant to a small number of us and not interesting at all to many others. So I will show some restraint.

For now, I’ll just flag that I think we have a little further to go in order to get some good law here – but I’m optimistic that industry will have the opportunity to collaborate with Treasury to get that right.

On the “hasn’t happened” side of the ledger – I still can’t quite believe that we’re no closer to knowing our future when it comes to Division 296 tax (the new tax proposed for those with more than $3m in super).

I honestly expected the Government to either succeed or fail on that law by now and most importantly, we would know one way or the other.

Depending on who you believe, either the Government doesn’t have the numbers in the Senate and so is avoiding pushing the legislation through the House of Representatives. OR all is quiet because “deals are being done” to make sure it sails through both houses. I guess we will wait and see.

For now, though, we’re continuing to build out our resources to help advisers, accountants and trustees understand this tax and work out how to respond. In fact, we have amassed so much material we’ve brought it all together here.

We’ve gone to town and included all manner of content – some overview explanations of how it would work (including a downloadable guide for trustees), papers sharing modelling we’ve done to compare investing inside and outside of super if the new tax comes in and more. And there’s even more available in our 'Heffron Super Companion' (the world’s best 'wikipedia for SMSFs'). At least if it actually does get legislated, we will have everything you need to know about it!

Select the button below to learn more about Super Companion.