The Compensation Scheme of Last Resort made headlines last week when the Australian Financial Review reported on cost blowouts and the Government considering forcing everyday Australians in the mainstream super system to pay into the scheme. The Super Members Council has strongly pushed back on the idea, warning it would embed and escalate moral hazard.

The CSLR was created in 2023 to compensate victims of financial misconduct when all other avenues to recover lost money had been exhausted. Importantly, it had a clear design principle at its core: the part of the financial services system from which consumer harms had arisen should bear the cost. It would be a major breach of that key principle to ask 12 million hard-working Australians who put their super into the safety of highly regulated profit-to-member funds to pay into the scheme.

Those millions of Mums and Dads across Australia already pay for the significant costs of regulation for their part of the super system. They should not now be forced to pay twice to fund collapses in riskier parts of the broader financial services system – that’s just not right. 

In our strong messages on consumer safety last week, we outlined urgent reform ideas to close regulatory gaps, strengthen protections and prevent consumer harm. These reforms are needed to protect Australians – and to avert compensation bills snowballing even further. The time to act is now. 

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