Coalition super plan would be a gift to banks

Opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg wants to give a gift to the banks (“ Super wars escalate as Coalition leans into mortgage plan”, September 23). At present, if someone gets into negative equity because of slumping house prices, it is not in the interest of the banks to send them broke by taking their deposit and selling the property to cover the mortgage. The value might not be enough, so the banks leave the borrower alone in the expectation that they will pay down the mortgage and restore the bank’s safety. But if the mortgage were secured by a lien over the borrower’s super, the bank would then have an incentive to call the loan and sell the house, knowing that the difference would be recovered from the super collateral whenever the super amount was larger than the negative equity. The bank could then lend the money to a lower-risk borrower. This would leave the original borrower homeless and poorer, having forfeited the deposit and some of their super. We cannot rely on the banks to act in the interests of the borrowers. Bragg should drop this idea like a hot potato. Alan Stanley, Upper Corindi

The Coalition is now saying that people should be able to use their super “as collateral or to increase the size of a loan”. They’re still not happy with the decline (modest though it is) in house prices and think they’ve found a way to ensure their own financial benefit by ensuring that housing prices continue on the old path of exponentially rising. At the same time, they get to undermine Labor’s super program and ape their hero (One Nation) once again. So bad luck to the young, aspiring home owners who will have to keep paying more for their houses and will be forced to retire with significantly less super. Charmain Brinks, Newcastle

Your correspondent (and probably members of the opposition) seems to lack understanding about the management of superannuation ( Letters , September 23). He seems to think it is a source of money under the control of the government, but the government simply gives a tax benefit to encourage workers to save for retirement. To suggest that superannuation funds should be forced to invest in productivity boosting ventures in Australia would be like telling people who wanted to buy shares on the market that they first had to invest in ventures of the government’s choosing. Of course, superannuation funds, both industry and private, are free to invest in such ventures, but there must be a financial benefit to the members. Neil Reckord, Gordon (ACT)

Jenna Price is absolutely right to be ringing the alarm bells about parricide as the extreme end of a plague of ageism-linked elder abuse that is endemic in our society (“ System failures drive deadly surge in family violence ”, September 23). In 2025, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that 15 per cent, or nearly 600,000 people living in the community, had reported experiencing elder abuse in the past year, most commonly within their homes, with psychological abuse the most common and then successively neglect, financial abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse.