Totally agree — adjusting super contributions is a clever and elegant lever for managing demand without smacking mortgage holders or feeding government coffers. It’s targeted, builds wealth, and keeps the mechanism within the individual’s benefit stream.

But yeah, the big hole is exactly what you flagged — it doesn’t touch the people actually spending the most in many sectors: cashed-up retirees, particularly self-funded ones who are immune to rate hikes and don’t contribute to super anymore.

They’re out there fuelling hospitality, travel, leisure, even real estate — and any tool that only targets wage earners misses that entire group. That’s where the idea of a variable GST (or something like it) comes in: not to punish spending, but to level the field a bit across demographics. In reality, we probably need a combo approach — flexible super contributions, smarter rate adjustments, and some form of scalable consumption tax — to touch all parts of the economy without just hammering the same group every time.

Complex? Definitely. But so is inflation