Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) | Hansard source

I am concerned about your working assumptions about individual decision-making, financial literacy and engagement with financial questions. This goes a little to some of the questions that Senator Whish-Wilson was asking. Over the last four or five years in this place, the Senate Standing Committees on Economics have considered a range of scenarios where, essentially, consumer behaviour is suboptimal because humans are just naturally not inclined to deal with complex questions around probability and risk, particularly where they run over the long term. In the scenario we're talking about, we're talking about a young security guard, under 26, who's been classified incorrectly as low risk on the basis of information provided by the employer to the trustee. There are two questions arising from this. Has the trustee acted reasonably, and are they exposed to action from dependants? That's a narrow legal consequence and a broader policy consequence. Are you comfortable, really, with these scenarios, where the trustees are so dependent on very active engagement from young people with their superannuation insurance arrangements, when all of the evidence before us, over many years, indicates that that is actually just not the real-world experience of how people, and young people in particular, engage with financial products?