September 2024 super news

3 min read
3 min read

TelstraSuper and Equip Super announce intent to merge

The boards of TelstraSuper and Equip Super have announced they have entered into a merger agreement that would create a combined profit-to-member fund with around $60 billion in funds under management.

The agreement confirms both parties’ intention to explore a merger and sets out the framework that will be used to assess, consider and prepare for the implementation of a merger. The two funds will now undertake further due diligence including confirming the initial view that the merger is in the best financial interests of members of each fund.

The merger is expected to achieve significant scale benefits, delivering improved retirement outcomes for more than 225,000 members, while maintaining the personalised service already provided by the two funds. 

Pending outcomes of due diligence, it is expected that the merger would be executed via a Successor Fund Transfer in late 2025.

Super funds finish August in positive territory despite early jitters

Super funds delivered positive returns in August despite the jitters at the start of the month, according to Chant West’s latest data. 

Despite some sharp share market falls in early August, the median growth fund (61 to 80% in growth assets) finished the month in positive territory with a return of 0.3%, bringing the return over the first two months of FY25 to 2.3%.

Chant West Senior Investment Research Manager, Mano Mohankumar, says that the catalysts for the market volatility in early August were flow-on effects from the Bank of Japan raising interest rates and increased fears of a recession in the US resulting from weaker job data.

“Despite sharp share market falls in early August, both Australian shares and international shares hedged finished the month in positive territory. The volatility experienced in August is another reminder to super fund members of the importance of maintaining a long-term focus and not getting distracted by short-term noise.”

Gender norms continue to hamper progress on financial equality
despite gains in pay, participation & Paris

According to the latest Financy Women’s Index (FWX), Australia needs to do more to challenge outdated gender norms, which continue to contribute to a “two steps forward, one step back” rate of progress on gender financial equality.

The FWX, which tracks timeframes to economic equality every quarter, slipped to 77.5 points in the June quarter of 2024, down by 0.2 points from a revised 77.7 points in March. Despite the decline, the Index has improved over the past 12 months, gaining 2.36 points from 74.8 points in June 2023.

Financy founder and CEO Bianca Hartge-Hazelman noted that despite the gains women are making in the labour market participation and on the sporting field as evidenced by the Paris Olympics, persistent gender norms are still holding back female progress relative to men.

The headline FWX score for the June quarter was buoyed by a record-breaking improvement in the national gender pay gap, which fell to 11.5% in May as reported in August. This improvement, reflecting increased wages for early childhood educators and aged care workers, helped lift the FWX Gender Pay Gap sub-index to 88.5 points, up from 88 points in March.

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Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.  She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organisational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. 

Edmondson’s latest book, Right Kind of Wrong (Atria), builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well. First published in the US and the UK in September, 2023, the book is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organisational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

 

Daniel Mulino MP

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Born in Brindisi, Italy, Daniel was a young child when he moved with his family to Australia. He grew up in Canberra and completed his first degrees – arts and law – at the ANU. He then completed a Master of Economics (University of Sydney) and a PhD in economics from Yale.

He lectured at Monash University, was an economic adviser in the Gillard government and was a Victorian MP from 2014 to 2018. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer of Victoria, Daniel helped deliver major infrastructure projects and developed innovative financing structures for community projects.

In 2018 he was preselected for the new federal seat of Fraser and became its first MP at the 2019 election, re-elected in 2022 and 2025. From 2022 to 2025, Daniel was chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Economics Committee in which he chaired inquiries; economic dynamism, competition and business formation and insurers’ responses to 2022 major floods claims.

In 2025, he became the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services.

In August 2022, Daniel published ‘Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia’, which aims to explore the ways in which an insurance approach can improve the effectiveness of government service delivery.