Treasurer Jim Chalmers is making the fund created to make sure public servants’ super won’t break the budget down the track, invest in affordable housing, green energy projects and critical infrastructure. And while these are important areas to invest in for the future of the country, the question is: Will the Future Fund’s returns be helped or hindered by this interference?

If they are, it could create budget problems in the future which then would make the taxpayer help bankroll public servants’ super.

The Australian’s Jack Quail reports that the Treasurer will give the Fund’s board, that determines where the money is invested, new national priorities, which can be summed up as:

1. To increase the supply of residential housing
2. To ­support the energy transition for the net-zero transformation
3. To deliver infrastructure ­projects that will improve domestic supply chains.

These are all necessary given the goals of governments nowadays, but the next related question has to be: Will these demands of the Treasurer lower the returns of the Fund?

For those scratchy on their Future Fund history, in 2006 the then-Treasurer, Peter Costello, established the Fund to help pay for the ballooning Commonwealth public sector’s superannuation payments, so he gave it $60bn ­and told the board headed up by ex-CBA boss, David Murray, to grow it.

He was later succeeded by Peter Costello and lately by former Labor minister, Greg Combet, and it now has a big $230 billion in the kitty and that’s why Treasurer Chalmers wants to use it, but the Coalition is worried about the political goals of Labor interfering with the future returns of the Fund.

If the projects it invests in are duds, then the capital or the money in the fund reduces, and if public servants’ super — which is more generous than other super funds — grows too fast there could be a problem, which would then fall back on the taxpayer.

To fight against the expected Coalition’s claims that Labor is using the Fund’s money to further projects that are politically driven, the Treasurer says he is locking up the Fund’s capital for six years to 2032-33 but this is a technical issue a lot of voters won’t easily comprehend.

Quail points out that last year David Murray wrote a paper for the Centre for Independent Studies where he warned about the Fund being a “tempting target for politicisation”, and “political freeloaders” risked raiding the investment vehicle for their own pet projects.

Right now, industry super funds are being pressured to to invest in ‘nation-building’ assets, and Murray warned then, that the Future Fund could easily come under the same pressure.

The idea of using Future Fund money for boosting housing supplies, helping the economy go greener for energy, to lower the cost of power bills and to improve infrastructure so roads, airports, docks and the electricity system that power technology, all are cutting edge, are good goals.

However, who does the Future Fund trust to do it so well that it makes good returns?

As Quail showed: “The performance of the Future Fund is key to the returns of a suite of off-budget spending investment vehicles established by Labor, including the $10bn Housing Australia Future Fund and the $15bn National Reconstruction Fund, as both are administered by its board. Last financial year, the fund delivered a return of 9.1%, taking its 10-year average rate of return to 8.3% and comfortably outpacing its target of 6.9% over that period.”

That’s great but will these good returns be sustained if politicians rifle the funds for national projects which get sold to us as political promises before an election?

History does show that many decisions to invest taxpayers’ money have not been great ones, though the Future Fund has bee an exception to that rule, up until now!