Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm a little interested in the Australian situation with the super funds. In particular, I understand that one of the major criticisms of the Australian super funds is that the returns quoted in the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority are based on the total assets of the super fund rather than different investment options.
Is anybody familiar with that? Okay. Well, I understand, just from spending some time in Australia and also doing research on the subject—and being interested, because I was an investor there for a period of time—that the largest problem with the super funds in Australia is that the reporting functions take the total fund, the return on investment for the total fund, rather than the individual investment options that the funds offer. In fact, if you look at even the total funds before the economic global crisis in Australia, you see that over 35% of those funds had over a 9% return, and 10% of the super funds had double-digit returns.
So on the point that was raised earlier by the NDP, you have to look at it in a different context. If just the entire fund were looked at instead of specific performance options in the funds, obviously you would have a different return on investment, and since the global economic downturn, we've all had some sort of hit on our stock markets and investments generally.
Now, I did have the opportunity of doing an MBA in finance. During that period of time I discovered that there were four sentences that were used a lot. One was “competitive marketplace” and another was “economy of supply”. The third was “spread the risk”, and the fourth was “wake up, dummy”, which I heard a lot.