Does a trust that owns shares in a corporation create an individual with significant control?

It can, but a trust itself, like a corporation, can't be recorded as an individual with significant control — only a natural person can hold that status under the Business Corporations Act's transparency register rules. Where a trust holds shares meeting the relevant threshold, the analysis has to look through the trust to identify which individual or individuals connected to it actually have the relevant level of ownership, control, or influence, which can depend on the trust's specific terms and who holds particular powers under it.

Depending on how the trust is structured, this might point to a trustee who controls how the shares are voted, a beneficiary with a sufficiently fixed and significant entitlement to the trust's property, or in some cases both, rather than a single obvious answer. Discretionary trusts, where beneficiaries don't have a fixed entitlement and a trustee holds broad decision-making power, tend to raise particularly nuanced questions about who actually qualifies.

Because trust ownership structures vary so much and the right answer depends closely on the trust's actual terms, this is an area where getting professional advice specific to the trust in question is genuinely worthwhile rather than guessing.