---
title: "What your super is being asked to do"
author: "Ben Russo"
datePublished: 2026-07-25T20:05:00.000Z
canonical: "https://lifestyledesires.com.au/post/00tipeo0vh51p/super-energy-transition-what-your-money-is-for"
---

There is a particular annoyance in discovering that the most boring money you own is not boring at all. Super is supposed to sit in the background like the fridge humming in the kitchen, out of mind until you are old enough to need it. Then a story arrives, maybe over a long black and a half-read email, and you realise your retirement balance is tangled up with [AustralianSuper’s return to Whitehaven Coal](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/06/australiansuper-coal-investment-superannuation-net-zero-pledge-climate) at the same moment funds are being urged to bankroll more of the clean-energy buildout that is meant to leave coal behind. The future, in other words, is already sitting in your account.

This is why [ABC News’s reporting](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116) on member Winnie Fu’s discomfort lands harder than a standard policy review. It is not only about whether Australia’s $4.5 trillion super pool can help close a funding gap. It is about whether the phrase “best interests” now means the highest defensible return on a spreadsheet, or the highest defensible return in a country that still has enough transmission lines, cheaper power and breathable summers left by the time you cash out.

> “A super fund being something that is supposed to help provide for us in the future, I think it is crucial that they look beyond just monetary return.”
>
> — Winnie Fu, [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116)

But the sceptic’s version of the same story deserves to arrive early, because it changes the mood. Super is not supposed to be a national wish list. Trustees are not climate ministers, and the last thing most members want is to discover their retirement has been volunteered for industrial policy. That is the nerve running through the government’s review of the performance test, and through [The Conversation’s warning](https://theconversation.com/the-government-wants-to-tap-4-trillion-in-super-to-address-australias-challenges-its-a-risky-strategy-287762) that a badly designed push into nation-building assets could turn a prudential system into a political one.

I think the real fight is narrower and more intimate than that. It is not “should Canberra force your fund to buy wind farms?” It is “what risks are funds allowed to recognise, and on what time horizon?” A [Lonergan Research survey for Mindful Money](https://mindfulmoney.nz/s/australia/docs/Lonergan%20Survey%20of%20the%20Australian%20Public%20Jan%202026.pdf) found many Australians want their retirement savings to reflect their values, but that appetite is hedged, as ordinary money decisions always are. People want returns. They also want fewer surprises, fewer coal holdings surfacing after net-zero promises, fewer years in which the economy they retire into is plainly more fragile than the one their glossy member statement implies.

## The benchmark in the room

The most persuasive case for more super money in the transition is not moral theatre. It is accounting. In the current design, the performance test is backward-looking enough that long-dated, unlisted infrastructure can look like a headache long before it looks like a smart asset. That matters because the transition needs exactly the kind of patient capital super funds claim to specialise in. When those assets sit outside the benchmark’s comfort zone, caution starts to masquerade as discipline.

![Transmission towers crossing open paddocks, the kind of long-lived infrastructure super funds are meant to finance](https://images.pexels.com/photos/16928001/pexels-photo-16928001.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=650&w=940)

That is the regulator-policy perspective in plain clothes. APRA and Treasury have to keep members from being trapped in dud projects, but they also risk teaching funds to hug the listed market and call it prudence. The least bad answer, as I read the available evidence, is not to order allocations into renewables. It is to stop penalising investments simply because they are illiquid, early or structured differently from a bank share. Reform the test, lengthen the lens, keep the fiduciary duty. Do not turn trustees into arms of government, but do stop rewarding the safest-looking short-term comparison set when the actual economy is being rebuilt on a longer clock.

[Mary Delahunty of ASFA](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116) has been arguing something close to this, in language gentler than the politics around it. Super can pursue returns, she says, and still recognise that nation-building is not charity if it produces durable cash flows and a more resilient economy.

> “Many Australians understand that can also come in the form of nation-building activities because not only does it give monetary return, but it can also give the double dividend of a social return.”
>
> — Mary Delahunty, [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116)

The member perspective and the sceptic perspective are not opposites here, not really. They are arguing about the same thing from different doors. Members like Fu want their money nowhere near assets that make the future messier. Sceptics want assurance that values talk is not cover for sloppy investing. Those positions meet, awkwardly but usefully, in disclosure, stewardship and benchmark reform. They separate again when the conversation slips into compulsion.

## The cheque is not the hard part

Even if you fixed that benchmark tomorrow, the numbers suggest super is still not the cavalry people imagine. [Market Forces’ analysis](https://www.marketforces.org.au/campaigns/super/passing-the-buck/) of 514 renewable and storage projects since 2020 found the top 30 super funds directly contributed just $771 million of roughly $99 billion invested, about 0.8 percent, with only six funds taking direct project stakes. Canadian pension funds alone put in $1.2 billion. That is not a scandal, exactly. It is a reminder that the loudest argument in the room is not always the biggest source of capital.

![Wind turbines and power lines in a rural field, showing the grid buildout that matters as much as capital](https://images.pexels.com/photos/22021242/pexels-photo-22021242.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=650&w=940)

The insider view from developers and investors is even less romantic. Money helps, of course, but money is not the first thing they complain about. In the [Clean Energy Investor Group’s 2026 outlook](https://www.ceig.org.au/clean-energy-outlook-2026/) 77 percent of respondents said the investment environment had worsened over the past year, and fewer than one in ten thought Australia was on track for 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030. Transmission topped the list of headaches. Planning uncertainty lingered. Tax settings stayed fussy. This is the part of the story that disappears when super gets cast as a hero with a chequebook. A fund can be willing, a member can be earnest, and a project can still sit there waiting for a line to the grid.

That is why I keep coming back to the bluntness of [Richie Merzian’s comments in the ABC piece](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116). Cheap capital matters because transition projects live or die on financing costs, but cheap capital is only useful if the path between approval and operation is real.

> “It also provides an additional source of capital, we want to keep the cost of capital low, to do that we want a lot of capital flowing in Australia.”
>
> — Richie Merzian, [ABC News](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-26/superannuation-renewable-energy-investment-funding-gap/106842116)

The missing phrase is “and then what?” Earlier this winter, [ABC reported on Transgrid’s billion-dollar grid blowout](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-16/transgrid-seeks-billion-dollar-bailout-over-bungled-power-line/106772276), a neat local reminder that the transition is an infrastructure story before it is a branding story. Semafor’s recent reporting on [Australia’s battery-import surge](https://www.semafor.com/article/07/13/2026/australias-renewables-shift-accelerates-on-battery-imports-surge) makes the same point from another angle: renewable supply can move fast, but the systems around it do not.

So what is your super being asked to do, exactly? Not save the climate. Not replace government. Not choose virtue over returns like some earnest teenager picking tote bags over numbers. It is being asked to admit that long-term member outcomes are shaped by more than the neatest short-term benchmark, and to act like a pool of patient capital rather than a frightened spectator. Sometimes that will mean direct renewable exposure. Sometimes it will mean tougher stewardship over fossil holdings. Sometimes it will simply mean being honest with members that a net-zero promise and a coal position cannot both sit quietly in the same portfolio forever.

I suspect this is why the story resonates outside policy circles. Most of us do not experience super as power. We experience it as deduction, abstraction, paperwork. Then, every now and again, the abstraction breaks and you realise it is one of the biggest economic votes you cast without meaning to. The energy transition is forcing that realisation into the open. The hard part now is not deciding whether retirement money should have values. It already does. The hard part is deciding whose version of prudence gets to count.