State Super

State Super

State Super took its current form in 1919 with the launch of the State Superannuation Scheme, a defined-benefit plan for New South Wales government employees. It later added three more public-sector schemes — SASS, PSS, and the basic benefit section — and closed all of them to new members by the end of 1992, leaving a closed, maturing pool of retiree liabilities. CEO John Livanas and CIO Charles Wu now manage the runoff of those legacy obligations, which anchored a 2014 operational merger with TCorp and SRWS that each entity survived with its own investment consultant intact. The fund's deployment is split across direct real estate and infrastructure, supplemented by allocations to external managers. Direct property holdings include four Sydney office buildings, the Tweed Heads and Plumpton shopping centres, an industrial estate in Port Melbourne, and a stake in the Westfield Knox regional mall in Victoria. Infrastructure positions read like an Australian public-works map — Flinders Ports, Peninsula Link, and the AllGas Distribution Network on the domestic side, plus Yorkshire Water, Northern Gas Networks, Birmingham Airport, and Bristol Airport in the UK, and the Stockholm Arlanda Express rail link. The fund is also an investor in Land Registry Services NSW. The team operates from a single office in Sydney. While headcount numbers and precise AUM remain undisclosed, the footprint implies an institutional allocation measured in the low tens of billions of Australian dollars. State Super co-owns Frontier Advisors, the Melbourne-based asset consultant, alongside three of the country’s largest industry super funds: AustralianSuper, HESTA, and Cbus. Its industry memberships track the governance and climate-focused bodies that shape Australian institutional practice — the Investor Group on Climate Change, the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, and the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia among them. The structural differentiator is the closed nature of the underlying schemes. No new member has entered since 1992, which makes State Super a long-duration runoff vehicle, not a going-concern accumulation fund. That shapes every portfolio decision: asset-liability matching trumps growth, liquidity management is calibrated to a known, declining benefit schedule, and the co-owned asset consultant Frontier Advisors provides a dedicated research feed that the large industry funds share.