The annual super performance test was introduced in 2021, by the previous Coalition government, as a way to hold registrable superannuation entity (RSE) licensees to account for any super fund underperformance through enforcing greater transparency. The annual test, conducted by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), also allowed members of funds and products to move to better-performing funds and improve their retirement outcomes.

Essentially, APRA assesses the performance of super investment options every year against tailored benchmarks. This has applied to MySuper products since 2021 and was recently extended to trustee directed products (a subset of the choice sector) in 2023. According to estimates, the annual test covered 80 MySuper products, which accounted for 14 million member accounts containing $900 billion in assets, and around 805 trustee directed products consisting of a further four million member accounts and $360 billion in assets.

Products that fail the test are subject to clear legislated consequences. Where the test is failed for one year, the trustees must write to affected members notifying them that the product they have invested in has failed the test. Where a product fails the test two years in a row, it is closed to new members until it passes a future test. In addition, funds that fail the test will often be subjected to heightened supervision from APRA to ensure that trustees are delivering better outcomes for their members.

However, the current government has initiated a review of these performance tests after receiving feedback from the industry that the tests may have unintended consequences, including focusing on investment implementation over other measures of performance, encouraging short-term decision making, incentivising super funds to “hug” benchmarks, reducing investment flexibility, and reducing choice, diversification and active management. Moving to mitigate this, the government has released a consultation paper which considers improvements to the performance test to improve its sophistication while still ensuring the test holds trustees to account for delivering the best outcomes.