When a colleague at Australian Catholic Super approached Leah Bennett to ask what the fund was doing about some of the issues First Nations people face when dealing with superannuation funds, Bennett was caught off guard.
At the time, Bennett had only been working in the superannuation industry a few months after starting her financial services career as a fraud analyst in organisations including Commonwealth Bank, CUSCAL, MasterCard and Tabcorp. But a colleague of Bennett had been considering the findings of the Hayne royal commission and had questions.
“At this point, she didn’t know that I was Aboriginal,” Bennett says. “I worked in financial crime…and so that’s why she’d inquired. And I was like, I don’t actually know what you’re talking about – I’m still trying to learn super, you know?”
Bennett did some research and rewatched the commission’s public hearings. As issues became clear to her, she decided to act.
“I created a gap analysis, essentially, of all the issues that were brought up in the royal commission with all of the potential solutions,” she says.
“I took this to my boss, and I said, ‘Here’s everything that I’ve discovered from this royal commission. This closely ties into what I do, and I’m Aboriginal as well, and I feel like I can do something about this’.”
The matter was raised to then-ACS chief executive Greg Cantor, who green-lighted a plan. Bennett says that in less than 12 months ACS (which later merged with UniSuper) had implemented all the relevant recommendations from the royal commission.
“We had trained the entire company on cultural competency,” she says.
“We had implemented processes and procedures around alternative forms of identification. We had trained two of our call centre staff to be the Indigenous liaisons within the call centre.
“I was working quite closely with our payments team on claims [such as] death benefits and all this sort of stuff; and we had set up a RAP [Reconciliation Action Plan] as well.
“And we were a small organisation – I think we had 110 staff. We didn’t have a lot of budget.”
Bennett recounts this experience now, as managing director of First Nations Foundation, to illustrate what super funds can do if they apply a business-wide effort into addressing a problem.
Barriers and roadblocks
As Bennett became acutely aware, for many First Nations Australians engaging with the superannuation system means negotiating barriers and roadblocks that simply do not exist for other people.
Bennett, a Wiradjuri woman, knows exactly where the pain points are. She left ACS in late 2022 and says that since joining FNF in some ways she’s “been really, really discouraged to be out of this space for so long and to come back and see that we’re still facing some of the same challenges”.
“My message is not to the those that work operationally within the super funds, it’s to the directors that sit on the board,” she says.
“They are the ones that have the power and the influence and the say on how money is spent within that organisation. They have the ability to create resources within an organisation. If you want change, we need to be at the table to have a conversation at a board level, or even in an executive level within an organisation. We just need to be at the table.”
Bennett says some super funds are much further advanced in addressing First Nations people’s issues, but for others their engagement is still cursory or cosmetic.
“Coming into a working group once every three months or having an Aboriginal person show up at your Reconciliation Action Plan committee meetings is insufficient,” she says.
“If you are seeing an Aboriginal person once every three months for two hours to talk about really deeply embedded issues, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to engage First Nations people more frequently as an organisation.
“And if you’re not ready to employ people because you don’t have a culturally safe work environment, you can still engage consultants to support the work that you’re doing.”
“You have to engage First Nations people more frequently as an organisation.
“It’s not about charity. It’s about equity.”
Deep operational issues
Bennett says there remain “deep operational issues” that grossly disproportionately affect Aboriginal fund members.
“An Aboriginal person will call a call centre and not be able to meet the identification requirements in order to be even able to have a conversation,” she says.
But that’s only where it starts. Identification processes, outdated forms, rigid call-centre scripts, and systems that don’t recognise Indigenous family structures mean many First Nations people often cannot even access their own super, let alone manage it.
“If I go work in a mine for a little bit, my employer fills out my super forms [and] maybe they put incorrect details on there,” Bennett says.
“Ten years later, I find out I’ve got superannuation hidden somewhere in an account. I call up a call centre, but they don’t know me. And that’s just minimum standards of access. We’re not even talking about outcomes yet.”
Beyond super fund operational issues, there are also legal matters that must be addressed. For example, “one of the biggest problems” is the issue of death benefits and Indigenous kinship structures, Bennett says.
“I have nephews…that I have helped raise as if they were my own children, yet they’re not considered [in law as] my children, they’re considered my nephews. I would call them my sons. That is a common story among First Nations people,” she says.
If super funds are serious about addressing First Nations issues Bennett says they must start by asking themselves a fundamental question: where are the First Nations employees, decision makers and managers within their businesses?
“Why are we almost a decade on from the royal commission, and most super funds, with teams of hundreds and thousands of people, haven’t come up with solutions?
It comes down to the lack of First Nations voices in the room making decisions operationally,” she says.
“What’s going on? Why is that not a priority? Don’t tell me there’s a lack of talent; it’s just very much a closed club.”
Cultural competence
Bennett says the first step to greater inclusion is to “get culturally competent the whole way through your organisation”.
But hiring First Nations employees must be a meaningful decision, not just a tick-a-box exercise to satisfy RAP [Reconciliation Action Plan] obligations.
And even if a fund isn’t ready to employ Indigenous staff directly, it can “still engage consultants to support the work that you’re doing” she says.
Bennett says First Nations Foundation plays a role as a bridge between industry and community. It holds an annual First Nations Super Summit that identifies issues to be picked up by working groups, and is supported by industry associations including ASFA and AFSI, and by regulators including APRA and the ATO.
“I’m really encouraged by the work that gets done by those that attend the working groups and those that attend the super summits, but the people that are capable of making real change really quick are sitting in boardrooms,” Bennett says.
The Foundation also runs working groups to tackle issues like hardship form standardisation and alternative ID processes. Despite this, progress is slow and uneven.
“Some super funds are really struggling to implement [alternative ID] internally,” she says.
“Their risk and compliance teams are apprehensive [or] haven’t taken it seriously.”
Despite the frustration, she remains hopeful that meaningful change can happen.
“Super funds really do act as an industry,” she says.
“They work collectively together to resolve issues [and] there’s less competitiveness.”
Bennett says it ultimately comes down to fairness.
“If you’re willing to take First Nations money and profit from it, you must be willing to provide them with the same standard of service you would provide anyone else,” she says.
