How we invest our super is changing – and not necessarily for the better

April 11, 2026 — 5:01am

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When it comes to managing your super, especially as you get closer to retirement, you really have two broad paths to choose from. I find it helps to think of them like two different ways of eating out.

The first is a well-run large scale mass-market restaurant with a carefully standardised menu. Think of your big industry or retail super fund as exactly that. In these, big professional investment teams do the cooking.

The menu has been curated tightly, the ingredients vetted for cost and importance, and the whole thing runs at scale for millions of members. Your job is to pick what suits you from what’s on the menu, using the waiter’s help.

For most Australians building their retirement savings over a working life, this is a genuinely good option. Reliable, cost-effective, and much more sophisticated than it used to be.

The second suits people with more complex needs. Think of it as hiring a professional chef who shops at a premium wholesale supermarket on your behalf and tailors your meal plan. The chef is your financial adviser, and the supermarket is an investment platform, one that ordinary consumers can’t just walk into.

But here’s what most people don’t realise: many of these chefs work inside what are effectively chain restaurants. The franchise has already decided which products they allow their chefs to use from the supermarket and which dishes are on the approved menu.

While we are debating how to stop people being exploited when they seek advice, we have paused the reforms that would have made it that advice easier to find.

Your chef personalises your experience within that framework, and they genuinely can do a great deal for you within it. But by the time your meal arrives, quite a few hands have shaped what was possible.

Knowing that helps you understand and ask more about who their menus are really designed for, who typically dines at their restaurant, and whether you can or should afford it.

Hold on to that picture. Because this week, the government walked into both restaurants, looked around at what had been going wrong, and decided it was time to rewrite the rules for everyone inside.

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© The Sydney Morning Herald