Nearly a decade ago, Victoria's emergency services unions saw a problem coming and did something about it. In 2017, the Ambulance Employees Association, The Police Association and the United Firefighters Union collectively pushed for a review of the ESSS Defined Benefit Scheme. The Victorian Government agreed, consultants were engaged, and the unions lodged a joint submission setting out their concerns.
The findings should have set off alarm bells.
Nearly a decade ago, Victoria's emergency services unions saw a problem coming and did something about it. In 2017, the Ambulance Employees Association, The Police Association and the United Firefighters Union collectively pushed for a review of the ESSS Defined Benefit Scheme. The Victorian Government agreed, consultants were engaged, and the unions lodged a joint submission setting out their concerns.
The findings should have set off alarm bells.
What the review found
The report concluded that benefits under the ES DB Scheme had not kept pace with the significant changes to superannuation over the previous two decades. The scheme was designed in an era when compulsory super barely existed for most Australians. Back then, a defined benefit scheme for emergency services workers was genuinely generous. By 2017, that was no longer the case.
The report found that the once generous superannuation benefits offered to emergency service employees when the scheme was established had been significantly eroded. More pointedly, it found that the advantages emergency services workers once enjoyed over general superannuation standards had not just shrunk. They were increasingly falling below community standards.
And the report warned this would only get worse. With the Superannuation Guarantee legislated to rise to 12 per cent, every Australian in a standard accumulation fund would see their retirement savings grow accordingly. ESSS Defined Benefit members, locked into a formula designed around a much lower SG rate, would not.
The report's recommendation was clear: at a minimum, the current maximum benefit multiple ought to be removed as part of a redesign of the DB benefits.
Why it matters now
The SG rate reached 12 per cent in July 2025. The gap the 2017 report warned about is no longer a projection. It is here, and it compounds every year for the paramedics, firefighters and police officers who are required by law to be members of this scheme.
They do not get to choose their fund. They do not get to vote with their feet. What they are entitled to expect is a scheme that keeps its promise, and a government that acts on the advice it commissioned.
Nine years on, the 2017 review is still the most honest assessment of the ES DB Scheme on record. Its findings have never been disputed. Its central recommendation has never been actioned.
It is time that changed.
