September super news

4 min read
4 min read

The Royal Commission superannuation hearings

The fifth round of Royal Commission hearings focusing on superannuation came to a close on Friday 17 August.

Over the two weeks, the ASFA team closely monitored the proceedings and provided a daily update for members.

At the conclusion of evidence, Commissioner Hayne AC QC and Senior Counsel Assisting Mr Michael Hodge QC indicated the next steps in relation to matters raised during this fifth round of hearings.

Written submissions will be invited both from parties having leave to appear and from the public more generally in relation to the policy issues identified in this round of hearings. These should be made, through the Commission’s website, by 5pm Friday 21 September. ASFA is consulting with members in relation to its submission.

Lendlease and First State Super announce plans for US$2 billion multifamily investment vehicle

First State Super has joined forces with Lendlease to establish a new investment platform to develop and hold multifamily (residential for rent) assets in US gateway cities.

Lendlease and First State Super have each committed US$500 million in equity to the new vehicle and plan to create a US$2 billion portfolio of geographically diverse multifamily assets across the gateway cities of New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Lendlease will become the platform’s development, construction and investment manager. The vehicle will be seeded with two existing Lendlease multifamily projects that are currently being completed in Chicago and Boston with an end value of more than US$400 million.

The US multifamily sector is valued at more than US$3 trillion and has delivered higher and less volatile returns than most major US real estate sectors during the past 25 years. The strength of the sector has been underpinned by a major shift to renting, which has seen more than six million renter households created in the US over the past 10 years.

First State Super head of income & real assets, Damien Webb said: “We are excited to expand our strong and longstanding relationship with Lendlease into a market and sector that we believe has very attractive long-term fundamentals.”

August edition of SuperCPD out now

The latest issue of ASFA’s online CPD program, SuperCPD, is now available for subscribers. In addition to the regular CEO update, economic outlook and regulatory update, topics in the August edition look at the Productivity Commission’s draft recommendations; the government’s proposed retirement income framework; operational rules for AFCA; and reforms relating to superannuation guarantee compliance. SuperCPD provides a flexible online CPD solution that enables you to achieve your annual CPD requirements, while keeping up to date with industry reforms and best practice. For more information, visit ASFA’s website.

Artificial intelligence can predict your personality by tracking your eyes

New research reveals that your eyes may also be an indicator of your personality type, simply by the way they move.

Developed by the University of South Australia in partnership with the University of Stuttgart, Flinders University and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany, the research uses state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms to demonstrate a link between personality and eye movements.

Findings show that people’s eye movements reveal whether they are sociable, conscientious or curious, with the algorithm software reliably recognising four of the Big Five personality traits: neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Researchers tracked the eye movements of 42 participants as they undertook everyday tasks around a university campus, and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires.

UniSA’s Dr Tobias Loetscher says the study provides new links between previously under-investigated eye movements and personality traits and delivers important insights for emerging fields of social signal processing and social robotics.

“There’s certainly the potential for these findings to improve human-machine interactions,” Dr Loetscher says.

“This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals.”

More Reading

Q&A with IFM Investors’ David Whiteley
In-Depth In-Depth

Q&A with IFM Investors’ David Whiteley

Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero
In-Depth In-Depth

Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero

Understanding the Division 296 super tax
In-Depth In-Depth

Understanding the Division 296 super tax

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.