[maxsanic]

"With your super it's important to look at long-term performance. The average return over 10 years for AustralianSuper's Balanced option is 9.32% per annum to 30 June 20221. This financial year (1 July 2021 – 30 June 2022) has been one of market ups and downs.4 July 2022"

https://www.google.com/search?q=australi...verage+ROI&oq=australia+super+average+ROI&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i10i160l2.16342j0j4&client=ms-android-oppo-rvo3&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#:~:text=With%20your%20super,4%20July%202022

No, you cannot just do a raw read off of returns like this. These returns are reported from an Australia point of view and therefore denominated in AUD. One of the main reasons why it's easier to chalk up big returns is due to translation gains from the rapid depreciation of the AUD. The converse also holds true, our SWF performance gets impacted with significant translation losses due to the general appreciation of SGD against most other currencies.

Based on your link, this particular Australia Super logs a 9.3% p.a. return from June 2021 - June 2022. However, the AUD depreciated massively against the SGD in the same period from 1.31 in 2011 down to 1.00 by 2021. If you work out the math that's roughly only 6.4% p.a. on SGD terms.

Even then we must view this in perspective, this 6.4% p.a. comes from taking up the balanced option, i.e. this is not capital guaranteed and returns gyrate significantly according to market volatility. It's more equivalent to us investing through CPFIS in a balanced portfolio consisting a mix of equities and fixed income themed funds. The nature of such returns is very different from the government capital guaranteed and fixed formula driven interest rate mechanism.

While one can definitely argue that CPF should allow citizens to max out their entire OA for CPFIS purposes and invite professional fund companies to come up with some simple thematic funds, this is another topic for discussion and comes with its own set of pros and cons. My POV is it's not fair to compare the CPF blended 3.5% interest to what is essentially a RSP that invests in mutual funds. 

When Singaporeans say they want more returns than the ~3.5% now, I don't think they are referring to change the whole mechanism into an unprotected balanced mutual fund investment, most of the time they want the CPF to give them much higher returns and yet follow the same mechanism we are all getting now. That's not really financially feasible unless global interest rates rise to the very high levels in 1980s - 1990s.