A senior industry stakeholder has identified a significant gap in the current superannuation system that could provide a very effective solution for aging SMSF trustees who are looking to find an alternative retirement savings vehicle more appropriate to their stage of life.
Smarter SMSF technical and education manager Tim Miller said he finds this issue always presents itself when clients suffer from capacity constraints or health issues that will potentially prevent them from running their own super fund in future days.
“Whenever I start talking about retirement strategies and [issues like this] from a technical point of view, I’m still bothered, to an appreciable degree, about that we don’t have a more sustainable small APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority) [fund] environment,” Miller told attendees at the SMSF Association Technical Summit 2026 in Sydney last week.
“Particularly now with what we’ve seen with regards to the changes in the definition of self-managed super funds allowing for the appointment of the public trustee from 1 July.”
To this end, in late June the Treasury Laws Amendment (Delivering an Efficient and Trusted Tax System) Act 2026 introduced changes to section 17A of the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act that define the continuation of an SMSF on the death of a member.
The move means a public trustee can now act on behalf of deceased or incapacitated SMSF trustees to provide continuity for a fund.
“That capacity to actually appoint a professional trustee and still maintain the structural integrity of a self-managed super fund I think still [highlights] a missed opportunity in our space as our clients age and potentially don’t want to move their [retirement savings into] a retail fund or [industry funds] and other [structure] and attract the tax that goes with it,” Miller said.
“So I still think there are areas that have been missed in our industry from an entire sustainability point of view.”
Darin Tyson-Chan
Editor
Darin is the founder and publisher of Benchmark Media, an independent publishing house whose mastheads include financialobserver, selfmanagedsuper and smstrusteenews. He has been covering the financial services space for over a decade and in this time he has worked for a variety of trade publications. Darin has also written for the Money section published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Articles by Darin