2 hours ago
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Opinion
April 11, 2026 — 5:01am
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.
Last week federal Treasury released three consultation papers in direct response to the collapse of Shield and First Guardian, two super funds that wiped out more than $1.2 billion in retirement savings from over 12,000 Australians.
They want to clean up the mess and ensure something like this can never happen again. And if it does, members will be compensated by the players with the deepest pockets.
They also want to change the rules that made it possible, closing the loopholes that let people advertise on social media, call your number once you’d clicked, deploy you into platforms and investments you didn’t understand, collect fees from your super balance along the way, and then disappear when it all fell apart.
So here is what the Treasury is proposing. Cold calls to sell super products would be banned outright. There would be a mandatory waiting period before any switch of your super can go through, giving you time to think it over or talk to someone you actually trust.
Lead generators would need to hold a proper financial services licence for the first time, making them accountable under the same rules that govern financial advisers, and investment platforms would face clear, legally binding requirements to check what they’re putting on their investment menus.
Most of that is exactly right, and long overdue.
But here is where it gets complicated. In looking for the deepest pockets to hold accountable, Treasury has landed on ‘platforms’ – also known as wrap accounts – as the problem.
Their consultation papers frame platform-based super as inherently riskier than a traditional fund, and float the idea of restricting certain platform operating models, particularly where the trustee has little genuine oversight of what goes on their own investment menu.
North chief executive Edwina Maloney, who runs one of Australia’s largest platforms, says that misreads how the system actually works. By the time an investment reaches a member through a platform, it has been vetted by the platform itself, approved by the adviser’s licensee, assessed by the adviser personally, and regulated as its own separate scheme. That is more oversight than a standard super fund applies, not less.
“Choice is not of itself bad. Choice enables tailoring. It enables outcomes to be tailored to the client and their family’s individual circumstances. And that is very important as we get to retirement,” she said in an interview.
She’s not wrong. What failed in the Shield and First Guardian cases was misconduct across multiple points in the chain, including governance failures across multiple platforms, some of which have since admitted they did not meet their own due diligence obligations.
Tightening what platforms are required to check before putting an investment on their shelf is fair, and I support it. But going after the supermarket primarily because it has the deepest pockets to fund misdemeanour, when the problems started in the car park and a few less-salubrious restaurants, is a different thing altogether.
And yet, the government proposal that worries me most isn’t about platforms at all. It’s about advice fees.
The government wants to restrict advice fees being paid from your super when the advice involves switching funds. I understand why. In the Shield and First Guardian cases that’s precisely how the misconduct was funded.
But here’s the thing. There are plenty of people sitting in super funds that are underperforming, overcharging and not serving them well as they head for retirement. They need someone to look at their situation honestly and help them move somewhere better. I’ve encouraged people to do exactly that.
The trouble is that genuinely independent advice that reviews your fund, considers all the options and might simply tell you to stay put or move to another fund, is actually very difficult to find.
Most advisers have built businesses around platforms – selecting the investments from their menu and optimising them every year. They earn ongoing fees for managing your investments inside them.
So when you walk in asking for an independent review, the restaurant has often already decided which menu it prefers. That’s not always wrong. But it’s not always disclosed clearly or openly either.
The question you need to ask any adviser before you agree to anything is this: will you make more money if you move my super than if you don’t? If the answer is yes, that is a conflict of interest, and you need to know about it before you decide anything.
Most people don’t know to ask it. And even if they do, they may not understand the answer. That is exactly the gap the government is trying to close.
The risk is that it closes it too broadly. Done clumsily, a restriction on advice fees makes all switching advice harder to fund, not just the dodgy kind.
The people who most need help working out whether they’re in the right place become the hardest to serve economically. Then everyone else stays put, even if they’re in lazy funds, not by choice but because there is no financial model to offer them help they can afford.
As Edwina puts it, the risk is that someone arrives at an adviser’s door and is told they’re simply not worth serving because they can’t pay upfront. “That would be a very poor outcome,” she says.
I agree. Whether you eat at the chef’s private restaurant or the well-run one down the road, good advice that acts in your best interests should be accessible to everyone. Not just the wealthy. That’s the standard these reforms need to be held to.
Unsurprisingly, the super sector has broadly welcomed the proposals. ASFA chief executive Mary Delahunty says, “prevention is better than compensation” and that better licensing and stronger advertising frameworks will be “much-needed guardrails.”
The Super Members Council, goes further, calling for like-for-like comparisons at the point of switching so consumers can genuinely see what a move will cost them in retirement. “They deserve clear information that genuinely helps them understand the difference – so they’re not left comparing apples with oranges,” says acting CEO Georgia Brumby. I agree.
And finally, there is something important that has disappeared in all of this. The second tranche of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms, which included the creation of a new class of adviser sitting between the free guidance your super fund provides and the full cost of a comprehensive financial planner, is now on ice.
Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino has publicly acknowledged that the Shield and First Guardian fallout has stalled them, and there is no longer any certainty about when, or even whether, that new class of adviser will proceed. That is worrying.
At exactly the moment we are debating how to stop people being exploited when they seek advice, we have paused the reforms that would have made good advice for ordinary people easier to find in the first place. That is the real unfinished business in all of this.
Bec Wilson is author of the bestseller How to Have an Epic Retirement and the newly released Prime Time: 27 Lessons for the New Midlife. She writes a weekly newsletter at epicretirement.net and hosts the Prime Time podcast.
- Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their own personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.
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