The Treasurer commissioned a Productivity Commission inquiry into the efficiency and effectiveness of Australia's superannuation system this week. I could have saved him a lot of time and money: hopeless and impotent are the short answers.
If the success of Australia's 23-year old compulsory saving -system is judged by its overheads and the extent to which it is has saved the government - and thereby taxpayers - money, it is a big failure.
Australia's gleaming $2 trillion super pile is, like the Great Pyramids, pointlessly huge. People are so captivated by the sheer size of it they completely forget the enormous costs of creating it. 
Ancient Egypt might have developed into a more prosperous nation had the Pharaohs not forcibly diverted so much of their workers' efforts into building feckless prisms.
No doubt the pyramids sustained some spiritual beliefs. So too does super - namely, that forcing people to save and offering large tax concessions saves the government money in the long-run by cutting pension costs.
It's a nice story, but sadly it's completely wrong.
As the Henry review and the actuarial submissions to it clearly attest, the cost of super tax concessions in forgone revenue far outweighs the savings in age pension costs. Ken Henry and his esteemed colleagues expressly advised against increasing the compulsory saving rate from 9 per cent (it's now 9.5 per cent).
Put another way this means Australians endure more taxation than they would otherwise. If the whole super enterprise were -disbanded, age pension payments would be higher, sure.
But the government would have more than enough money to afford them because it would tax more than $80 billion a year in employer super contributions at workers' marginal tax rates rather than the concessional rate of 15 per cent. With the leftover funds it could slash tax rates and let workers themselves decide whether to spend their earnings now or when they retire.
The world would be vastly simpler too; the army of accountants, regulators, consultants and lawyers paid to game, navigate and administer the morass of super rules would be obsolete.
What about efficiency? The cost of managing Australia's super assets is on average more than 1 per cent a year - that is, more than $20bn, or more than $1000 a year for every adult in Australia. This is scandalous, being about three times the OECD average, according to Grattan Institute -research.
A number of large super funds overseas, such as the US Thrift Savings Plan, are managed for 5 basis points a year - a 20th of the cost here.
Even so-called MySuper funds, the mandatory no-frills options instigated by Labor in 2013, cost about 80 basis points a year. No wonder the self-managed super sector has surged ahead of the rest.
Costs have fallen very gradually and have little prospect of falling far. In a compulsory system, there can never be genuine price completion that other industries endure. People naturally do not notice management fees taken from their future incomes many years before they receive them.
Barely 5 per cent of Australians bother to choose their super fund. And perhaps that's no wonder given the 190-odd funds large enough to be regulated by APRA offer about 44,000 different -investment options.
About a third of Australians would prefer $200 in cash now to $2000 in their super account, a recent survey showed.
Only a small share of super assets - about 17 per cent, according to Rainmaker, a firm that tracks the industry - are passively managed (that is, track some sort of index).
This suits the super - more specifically the asset management - industry because "active management" is far more lucrative and labour intensive.
But logic and experience amply show that basic index funds inevitably perform much better on average over long investment horizons, such as saving for retirement. "Beating the market" consistently after fees are deducted is close to impossible.
You can't blame people for not taking an interest in their super when they were never asked for a chunk of their earnings to be -siphoned away in the first place.
New Zealanders were asked, by the way, in a 1997 referendum on Australian-style compulsory super, which 92 per cent of them sensibly rejected.
What should the PC recommend? Default contributions to super funds should be managed passively by the Future Fund or the Reserve Bank for something around, say, 10 basis points a year.
People would be completely free to switch their balances to private providers - and pay about 10 times the cost - if they wished.
Much higher capital requirements should also be placed on APRA-managed super funds, in effect to compel them to merge, which would promote genuine competition and provide economies of scale.
Super funds should be forced to collect their management fees from workers' take-home pay - just as health insurance companies collect premiums - rather than opaquely deduct them from retirement savings.
I guarantee more attention would be paid to super fees.While we are inevitably stuck with compulsory super, reducing its cost dramatically would provide infinitely more benefit to Australian than fiddling with the GST or tampering with negative gearing. It will take huge political will, though. Trade unions and financial institutions, perhaps the two most powerful vested interests, are in lock step to keep things how they are.