There is little that annoys the Australian business community, its media spruikers and the Liberal party more than being shown how badly they perform. The best example of this is the superannuation industry where once again it has been revealed that industry funds have comprehensively outperformed those run by banks. Little wonder then that instead of attempting to improve, the business community is instead crying foul and trying to destroy the entire system.

This week, superannuation research house Chant West released the results of fund performances over the 2017-18 financial year. And yet again the news was not good for bank-run retail funds.

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Not one of them made the top 10, and industry funds once again dominated. The best performing fund was Hostplus, which is mainly for employees in hospitality and tourism.

This will be of little surprise to anyone who has been paying even the slightest attention to the superannuation industry. Industry super funds have consistently and repeatedly outperformed retail funds.

Perhaps we are being too hard on the retail funds – maybe the top 10 is just an outlier.

Fortunately, Chant West also has the average performance of industry and retail funds broken down into time periods.

And whether we use one month, a quarter, a year, three, five, 10 or 15 years, industry funds on average have had better rates of return than retail funds.

If you didn’t know better, you would almost think retail funds are more concerned with generating profits for their shareholders than returns for their fund members.

The recent Productivity Commission report into the superannuation industry was just one of the latest to find that industry funds outperformed retail funds.

The report, which looked at the performance of individual funds, found that more than half the retail MySuper funds were underperforming – and worst of all, they were the biggest of such funds; the minority of industry funds that were underperforming were among the smallest of the type.

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As I noted at the time, most people in dud MySuper funds are in retail funds, and most people in retail MySuper funds are in dud funds.

Not that Kelly O’Dwyer, the minister for revenue and financial services, would admit to such a thing.

In one of the more bizarre interviews, O’Dwyer could not bring herself to acknowledge to Sky News’ David Speers that retail funds were being whipped.

Speers asked O’Dwyer a dozen times whether “industry funds systematically outperformed for-profit funds” and she would not answer, preferring only to say that “industry funds on the whole have performed very well and I agree with that”.

One might also argue that Queensland did not lose the State of Origin but NSW performed very well.

It’s always an issue when your arguments crash into the wall of reality. You either have to face up to it, or you refuse to acknowledge it exists.

It makes for embarrassing interviews and worse public policy.

But O’Dwyer has been ably abetted in this abject rejection of facts by the business community, led by the Business Council of Australia. Its executive director, Andrew Bragg, laughably suggested in an op-ed in theAustralian Financial Review that industry super funds were becoming the equivalent of “Super PACs” in the United States, that had a “war chest” of “considerably political influence”.

When Industry Super Australia’s chair, Peter Collins, wrote to the BCA pointing out the errors in Bragg’s conspiracy theories, the response was apoplectic.

The BCA chief executive, Jennifer Westacott, suggested the letter was an attack on “free speech”, while the former BCA president Tony Shepherd, taking a big sip from the hyperbole glass, suggested it was evidence of “a decline in moral and ethical standards in the west”.

Rather wonderfully, Bragg’s article, which ended with the suggestion that changes were needed to be made to industry super funds because “workers are waiting for better value”, linked to an article by journalist Adele Ferguson. In that article, Ferguson cited research by the former head of research at the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, who found that if the $577bn worth of assets in retail super funds “had been managed in the same way as industry funds, retail super members would be better off about $15.5bn a year”.

Oops.

It’s the problem with those trumpeting the need for industry super to change – the actual lack of evidence that it is not working.

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The concern within the industry is that in the face of overwhelming defeat, the retail sector would rather blow up the system entirely by moving to one default fund – say the Future Fund – than to a system recommended by the Productivity Commission, which would inevitably see dud retail funds frozen out.

The Productivity Commission considered such an option and found that it would introduce “an actual or implied government guarantee in the Australian superannuation system” that would not necessarily produce the best outcomes. It argued that it would lead to more conservative investment strategies designed to avoid the government needing to “top up” the fund than actually see fund members get the best returns.

And for the past 15 years, the best returns have come from industry funds.

Yes, there are big problems with multiple superannuation accounts, and people paying for insurance that is mostly not needed. But overwhelmingly the problem with the superannuation industry is the retail side.

No amount of conspiracy theories have been able to disguise the fact that compared with industry super funds, the banks, which presumably are the experts in generating wealth, have been thrashed.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australian columnist