Often, we do not see superannuation as real money. It is pie-in-the-sky stuff that is often not registered as something we own and can control. When we fail to really see it for what is, real money in large sums that is being continuously invested and accumulating in value over time, we also lose sight that this money, our money, is often being utilised to fund a broad range of industries that enact ecocide and genocide.

In the last few years, several events coalesced to make me begin to think differently about superannuation. Superannuation is something that we can all actively engage with on the micro level that has huge potential to change things on the macro level – the structural systems that are doing the most harm.

My lifelong friend Helen is and always has been a climate warrior. Her son, Leif Indigo Taylor Justham began my journey in properly understanding the power of my super. Leif worked from the standpoint that we each have power to change the world for the better. He was driven by his convictions and actively worked to bring awareness to harmful practices exacerbating climate change and habitat degradation. In March 2021, at just 21 years of age, he set out from Adelaide to cycle solo and unsupported around Australia's Highway 1 to promote the need to divest from polluting industries. Leif embarked on his pilgrimage with a mandate to speak to as many people and communities as he could to encourage everyone to change their superannuation fund to one that does not invest in fossil fuels or polluting industries. Leif taught people that more than $3 trillion are invested across all Australian super funds and that each of us can use the power of our money, however big or small,  to make a real difference. Knowing so many are focussed on their own safety and security often more than the greater good, Leif also shared studies that show that ethical superannuation can outperform conventional funds. Tragically, as he cycled across the Nullarbor on Tuesday 6th April 2021 Leif was struck by a truck and killed.^[1]

Today Leif’s family continue his legacy through the organisation they set up called ‘Change Your Super’ which provides advice and information about how people can redirect their money away from fossil fuels and polluting industries.^[2] After Leif’s heartbreaking death I started reading and researching more about superannuation and found information that really brought home, literally, the harm superannuation investment is doing to Country. In this case, my Barkandji Country.^[3]

Our Barka, or ‘the Darling River’ is the longest waterway in Australia, at 1,472km long. It has been ripped from and abused since the beginning of colonisation, and has been integral to the proliferation of many lucrative and highly damaging agricultural industries, the most catastrophic of which in recent times have been cotton and almonds. Our Barka has had weirs, dams and diversions and every violent incursion you could imagine imposed upon it in order to extract as much as is possible for private companies to make obscene amounts of money.^[4]

Within the last 20 years, almond-growing land in Australia has increased by 900%, with much of this growth having occurred in the Murray-Darling basin.^[5]

The crop's growing popularity means Australia is the world's second-largest almond-producing region outside of California, which produces more than 80 per cent of the world's almonds and billions of dollars of revenue.

Almonds are now Australia's most valuable horticultural export, bringing in more than $750 million worth of export revenue in 2022-23 alone.^[6]

By 2025, the farmgate value is expected to exceed $1.3 billion. However, almonds are also the most water-intensive crop. A 2020 analysis by Victorian researchers published by the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, showed that one kilogram of shelled almonds in Australia carried a water footprint of nearly 7,000 litres — that's more than eight litres for a single 1.2-gram almond. By comparison, according to the study, the water footprint of one kilogram of grapes was about 740 litres.^[7]

Almonds also create monocultures, as all other plants are eradicated by the vast amount of harmful pesticides that must be used to ensure their health. They use and kill more bees than any other crop, and bringing in bees to pollinate almonds has been likened to sending them to war in that so many are killed in the process. Because they require so much water, they are grown along waterways, and the barrage of chemicals required to keep them producing runs directly into our rivers.^[8]

To allow crops such as cotton and almonds, which require alarming quantities of water, to proliferate along waterways already under so much pressure and in danger of being lost is difficult to comprehend.^[9] That so few people know of this travesty, of the irreversible damage it is causing as they happily sip their almond-milk lattes, is maddening.

Most recently we have seen a series of regular and traumatic fish kills on our Barkandji Country. Over multiple years, millions of fish have floated dead to the surface, killed due to blackwater; a phenomenon that occurs after floods that sees accumulated organic matter wash from floodplains into waterways, breaking down and releasing carbon, which in turn causes catastrophic drops in oxygen levels resulting in fish deaths.^[10] While this may too often be conceptualised as a ‘natural phenomenon’ by various arms of government, the catastrophic effects of mismanagement of our Barka by authorities as well as water theft, illegal harvesting across floodplains and the relentless harm of agriculture on our Country underpin the very real cause of this ecological devastation.^[11]

The boom in almond plantings in the Murray-Darling Basin has been led by big business. Australia's largest almond grower is Canadian investment fund underpinned by superannuation monies, called PSP Investments. PSP have about 12,000ha under production, followed by ASX-listed Select Harvests, which grows about 9,000ha of almonds. Many other investment funds have been expanding their investments in almond orchards. Investment companies are buying up massive tracts of land directly on waterways right across Australia to exponentially increase almond production. And superannuation money is funding it.^[12]

The Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network (APAN), recently undertook a study of every superannuation company in Australia’s investments and found all of them, except Australian Ethical Super (who properly divested in December 2024) have ties to Zionist Israel, to weapon-making, technologies and a range of companies who have profited from and enabled the genocide of more than 50,000 Palestinian and people.^[13]

There are so many aspects of ecocide and genocide that we feel powerless to change. What are your barriers to taking control of your super to ensure you aren’t funding a genocide or ecocide? How can we work together to overcome these barriers both individually and as a powerful collective of people to get these messages out to our communities and enact divestment and refuse to give our money to companies and corporations that harm people and Country?

The Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network (APAN) have asked us all to stand with them, to write to our superannuation companies and to demand divestment and to change super funds if necessary.^[14] In answering this call, we can harness the power of our money to redirect it to investments that do not harm people or Country. Divestment is a tool of the masses that has already forced significant change and will continue to do so in the future.^[15] There is so much that we cannot change on an individual level, so much that needs structural change in terms of addressing ecocide and genocide. However, where we invest our money is always within our power and switching to an ethical superannuation fund is a step we can all take that as a collective action has the power to divert many millions of dollars away from problematic investments. Let’s take action, let’s not be complicit. Let’s be a force for good, together.

Zena Cumpston is a Barkandji woman with Ancestral and familial belonging to Wilcannia, Menindee and Broken Hill in western New South Wales. She mostly works as an artist, writer, educator and storyteller. Zena’s multidisciplinary practice is centred around protecting and celebrating Country. Through diverse adventures in storytelling she seeks to illuminate the innovation of her people, particularly focussing on plant knowledge. Zena strives to democratise research, creating projects that invite a wide audience and provide platforms and opportunities that empower her community and intergenerational learning opportunities.

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