Part · Your Own Money

They rent your own furniture back to you.

This is the page that turns a story about greedy corporations into something stranger and harder to escape. The buyers of Australia's privatised monopolies aren't only foreign funds and investment banks. Increasingly they are you — through the 12% of every wage now compulsorily paid into superannuation, funnelled into the very toll roads, airports, ports and power lines you already pay to use.

Compulsory by law

First, remember that this money isn't optional. Since 1 July 2025, employers must pay 12% of your wages into super — up from 9% a decade ago. It's the second-largest forced transfer in your financial life after tax, and you have almost no say in what it buys.

12%
of every wage now compulsorily diverted into superannuation — a $4-trillion-plus pool of the nation's savings, hunting for exactly the kind of stable, inflation-protected income streams that privatised monopolies provide.

A monopoly with a government-blessed price that rises at the greater of CPI or 4% forever is, to a pension fund, close to the perfect asset. So the same policy machine that sells the public monopoly also, through compulsory super, manufactures the buyer. verified

Source: ATO — Super Guarantee rises to 12% from 1 July 2025.

IFM Investors: your super, holding the monopolies

The clearest single example is IFM Investors — an asset manager owned by around 16 Australian industry super funds, investing their members' money. Its infrastructure portfolio reads like a map of everything this site is about.

Airports

Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Darwin airports; and a stake in Sydney Airport (taken private in 2022).

Ports

NSW Ports — Port Botany and Port Kembla, the gateways for a huge share of the state's freight.

Power networks

About half of Ausgrid (with AustralianSuper) and roughly a quarter of Endeavour Energy.

Toll roads

The single largest shareholding in Transurban itself — the company that runs almost every toll road you drive.

So when you fly, ship a package, switch on a light or pay a toll, there's a good chance a slice of the charge flows to a company owned, in part, by your own retirement fund. That isn't a scandal in itself — it's how the system is built. The scandal is that it's dressed up as "private investment" when it's your compelled savings, and that you are simultaneously the customer being charged the rising price. verified "~16 funds" / AUM vary by source

Sources: IFM Investors (ownership by industry super funds; asset list); The Conversation — super funds & electricity infrastructure. The exact fund count (15–17) and total assets under management vary by source and year.

The loop, in one road

Take WestConnex. It is 20.5% owned by AustralianSuper — one of the country's biggest funds, holding millions of ordinary workers' retirement money. Now follow a single toll.

You're taxedroad is built with public money → Government sells 51%$9.3bn, 2018 → You pay a tollrising CPI-or-4% → Your super owns 20.5%minus its fee ↺ Fund reports a "great return"

The return your fund earns on that toll road is real — but it's a return generated by charging you, net of the management fee the fund takes for the privilege. It is, quite literally, renting you back your own road and skimming a margin at both ends of the transaction. A genuinely public road would simply have charged you less, or nothing, in the first place. verified "net of fees" loop = illustrative, not one audited figure

Sources: Investment Magazine — AustralianSuper 20.5% of WestConnex; ownership figures per §tolls. The "toll minus fee back to you" loop is an accurate characterisation of the ownership facts, offered as illustration — not a single audited number.

"But super funds getting good returns is good for you"

It's the obvious objection, and it deserves an honest answer.

The defence

"Infrastructure gives members steady, inflation-linked returns for retirement. Better your own fund owns the toll road than a foreign billionaire."

The catch

The "return" is manufactured by charging those same members — and everyone else — a monopoly price engineered to rise above inflation. It's not wealth created; it's wealth transferred, with a fee clipped on the way.

Better your fund than a foreigner, sure. But that's a choice between two bad options that the privatisation created in the first place. The honest comparison isn't "your super vs a foreign fund" — it's "your super owning a toll road that bills you" vs "a public road that never billed you at all." The compulsory-super buyer launders the politics of privatisation: it lets a government sell a public monopoly and tell workers they're the ones profiting, while they pay the rising toll every morning.

You can't even opt out of the road

Here's the final trap. You can switch super funds, but you can't easily avoid the assets — the big funds and IFM hold overlapping stakes across the same airports, ports, networks and toll roads. And you certainly can't avoid using them: there's one road network, one power grid, one port handling your imports. The monopoly is unavoidable on both sides of the ledger — as a saver and as a customer. That's what makes it a rort rather than an investment.

Cross-references: The toll roads · Power bills · Ports & the sell-off · Who cashes in. Citations on Sources.