The current military superannuation schemes have a reversionary component on the members death. That is, when a member in receipt of an indexed pension dies, their surviving spouse will continue to receive a percentage of the deceaseds military superannuation pension.
This rate is 67% for MSBS with the effective DFRDB rate slightly more. This is considerably less than the reversionary rate of 82.5% for the pre-2004 parliamentary scheme.
The 2007 Podger Report into Military Superannuation seeks to reduce this percentage to 62.5 % for the proposed new military superannuation scheme . We firmly oppose such a suggestion.
There is no valid reason why the reversionary rate of pension for a surviving spouse of a military superannuation pensioner should be less than that for the comparative parliamentary pension schemes.
We want the Government give us an assurance that, in any future military superannuation scheme, the reversionary rate will not be reduced below that of the current MSBS rate (67%)
We want the Government to increase the reversionary rate for the DFRB/DFRDB and MSBS schemes to the level of the pre-2004 parliamentary scheme.