Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero

4 min read
4 min read

Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero

Op Ed published in the Australian Financial Review, 14 July 2025

By Mary Delahunty, ASFA CEO 

As Treasurer Jim Chalmers prepares to lead a national conversation on productivity, Australia finds itself at a moment of extraordinary potential.

Productivity, properly understood, is not about working harder; it’s about enabling innovation, improving efficiency, and transforming the systems that underpin our economy. The productivity challenge is not unique to Australia, but this country has a unique national asset that gives us a head start in tackling it – our multitrillion-dollar superannuation system.

Harnessed effectively, Australia has the institutional investment capacity to turn this productivity conversation into a national opportunity that delivers both economic dividends and generational progress.

With more than $4.1 trillion in funds under management and growing, super represents one of the most powerful investment engines in the world. Thirty years after compulsory super came into effect, ASFA, the superannuation peak body, estimates that institutional super funds have funded about 14 per cent of Australia’s capital stock, which generates domestic economic activity.

Super investments span listed equities, infrastructure, property and venture capital, all asset classes that directly affect the productivity frontier.

This isn’t theoretical. ASFA’s research shows that superannuation has already lifted Australia’s productivity and GDP by about 2 per cent. Higher productivity translates into higher living standards. For the average full-time worker, we have calculated that translates to a $2500 superannuation productivity dividend into pre-tax wages every year. That is real money flowing into Australians’ pockets.

With institutional super funds needing to deploy about $40 billion in new investments each quarter, or half a million dollars a day, the scale of future opportunity is immense.

A few changes will help to realise that opportunity.

Firstly, government should consider how performance benchmarks in the superannuation performance test can best reflect forward-looking sectors such as clean energy, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.

Currently, and broadly speaking, sensitivity to performance benchmarks can result in strategic asset allocation for some funds towards classes that are more easily benchmarked – such as listed equities – at the expense of unlisted or private equity investments. It’s in these asset classes that the biggest leaps in productivity could be realised, but super funds need to know they don’t risk falling afoul of shorter horizon performance requirements.

One of the most profound opportunities lies in Australia’s energy transition – this is a chance to reshape our productive economy. ASFA estimates that new fixed capital investment will need to be around 5 per cent higher than business-as-usual over the next three decades to meet the demands of net zero. This investment will not only decarbonise our infrastructure – it will modernise it, making our economy more efficient, resilient, and innovative.

This is where superannuation can lead. Institutional investors – including super funds – and the government have already agreed to the principle of an energy transition accord, signed at the investor roundtable in November last year. Now we need to make the reforms to put it into action.

Creating structured pathways for publicprivate investment co-ordination, including streamlined approvals and co-investment mechanisms for nationally significant projects, could unlock billions in patient capital for energy infrastructure, electrification, and low-emissions technologies. Because these investments improve the movement of goods, services, and people, and facilitate more efficient economic activity, they become core drivers of productivity.

Other measures, such as loosening reporting requirements on super funds for investing in Australian residential property and ensuring that potential reforms to the regulation of private markets do not unduly hinder participation by superannuation funds, will also help.

Chalmers’ initiative to lead the productivity conversation is timely and welcome. To achieve a level of progress that truly delivers prosperity, the conversation must be unconstrained by tradition and dare to go beyond the ‘‘bosses versus workers” narrative which risks anchoring the outcomes to ‘‘ways of working” and misses the opportunity to consider the role of capital to deliver a national vision.

The productivity challenge isn’t a State of Origin-style team-versus-team battle, it’s an understanding of what drives the modern Australian economy and one where those enabling productivity growth must have a seat at the table. We must include the institutional investors who, through the unique super system, are positioned to drive the next wave of productivity growth.

Our capacity to accelerate Australia’s productivity growth has never been greater. We have the capital, the institutions, and the ambition. What we need now is alignment between policy, investment, and purpose.

Mary Delahunty is the chief executive of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia.

 

 

Picture of By Mary Delahunty

By Mary Delahunty

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Derek Thompson

Via live link

Best Selling Author, Podcast Host of 'Plain English'

Sessions

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

Few speakers can match Derek Thompson‘s ability to synthesize mega-trends in society, labor, economics, technology, and politics. Put another way: Derek trawls the data sets and does the forecasting and deep reporting necessary to help us better understand how we live, how we vote, how we spend, and how we work.

In his paradigm-shifting #1 New York Times bestseller, Abundance (co-written with Ezra Klein), this award-winning journalist reveals how our policies and culture have pushed us into a world of scarcity (not enough housing, workers, or progress)—and offers a radical new path towards a world where housing is affordable, energy is plentiful, and innovation flourishes across industries.

He shares a compelling vision of a future where we have more than enough for everybody, and a practical, actionable roadmap for how to get there. It starts with taking more risks, building more expansively, and recognizing that we all have the power to create a world of abundance. “Everything’s utopian until it’s reality,” he says.

Carmen Beverley-Smith

Executive Director - Superannuation, Life & Private Health Insurance, APRA

Sessions

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

Carmen joined APRA in March 2023 and holds the role of Executive Director, Life and Private Health Insurance and Superannuation.  

She has had an esteemed career in financial services, spanning over 25 years. She has held diverse leadership roles at Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including across risk, transformation and change, product and portfolio development, and sales and service. 

Prior to joining APRA, she held the role of General Manager, Risk Transformation Delivery Integration at Westpac. This involved leading the group-wide implementation of a suite of solutions to uplift risk management capability and develop data, analytics and reporting. 

Carmen leads with a values-driven approach and a particular interest in developing and mentoring talent. 

She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Accounting, is a certified Chartered Accountant and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. 

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.