Scott Morrison should shut his mouth — it’s your Super

We should get really pissed off when politicians start telling fund managers what they should do with our money.

The Australian Government continues to work for big corporations when it comes to Australians’ superannuation. This goes back to Bill Shorten’s FOFA (Freedom of Financial Advice) legislation which handed billions of dollars in fees back to the big banks and made it unaffordable for Australian’s to get independent financial advice.

That is something we at Fin15 are working hard to change .

We believe that coal is bad for the environment and destroying our planet. So why would we invest money into making our future worse?

Besides that the world is moving rapidly to a low carbon economy — one without coal. Solar is also getting cheaper and is now competitive on a cost basis to coal. Coal demand from China is dropping and a quarter of EU states have closed their remaining coal power stations. India is using it as an energy hedge and their Adani mine they are developing in Queensland is simply designed to put downward pressure on coal prices by dramatically increasing global demand.

You see whilst demand is falling supply is going up. That makes for a dumb investment.

But of course politicians have ‘more important’ things driving their agendas than our future. They have corporate friends (or is it masters?) they need to keep happy and their mates in the coal industry are under pressure because so many smart investors are saying “why would I invest in an industry that will likely be dead in 50 years”.

When there is a rush for the exits and big corporations are under pressure from all sides and need their politician friends support. We saw George W Bush tell Americans to investing in property as the huge cracks in the US housing bubble became visible. Then we saw Howard tell Australians the Aussie share market was the best investment in late 2007 as the GFC began.

Now ScoMo wants to tell those who control our super that they should be investing your money in coal.

If he is saying that right after BHP reported an $8.3 billion dollar loss we should be wondering how bad the situation really is for these companies.

We at Fin15 think about long term financial confidence because our clients are investing for over 30 years and why would they want to put their money into an industry that could be gone by then?

We have seen the Ethical and Environmentally Sustainable investing can outperform and you can do this in a really well diversified way. Unfortunately Australians get a really raw deal when it comes to diversification for their super. That’s something we but that’s a post for another time.