If you're self-employed, you don't actually need to contribute. You can choose to make personal contributions voluntarily, but there's no legal requirement to pay the super guarantee (SG) for yourself. It is, however, tax advantaged to make contributions.

Employers must pay the SG for eligible employees, where eligibility is something like:

There has recently been noise and some changes around additional taxes on large balances. I'm sure this noise will only grow louder over time. Eventually IMO there will be some substantial change in terms of additional taxes on large balances - it's simply too large a pool of money for the Aus government to ignore..

Most of that damage is done by the cookie-cutter allocations of 60/40 stocks/bonds and friends. Likely even worse for (whole) life insurance schemes.

In the Australian system, you can allocate your super as you see fit if you jump through some hoops. And even the "standard" allocations available usually include an MSCI World equivalent so you can sidestep bonds if they don't manage to scare you out of it by labeling that strategy as very high risk.

What's more concerning about the system to me is how they keep bumping the forced savings rate and how politicians keep thinking of ways to get their filthy mittens on that pot.

For the first 10-ish years the savings rate was 3-4%, then that got bumped to 9% for the next 10. In the last decade, it has gone from 9.5 to 12%.

Only recently, did they start to discuss (still are? not sure) adding additional taxes on some balances. Obviously also to be applied to unrealized gains. It was marketed as targeting "only the super wealthy" of course, starting from 3 million dollarydoos. That's about 2 million in freedom-bald-eagle-cries dollars. Super wealthy my ass.

The whole situation is so ridiculous