Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is my great pleasure to support the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Enhancing Supervision and Enforcement) Bill 2009. Obviously the global economic downturn and financial crisis has woken us up from a 20-year love affair with laissez-faire approaches to regulation. We now know that gaps or holes in the regulation of financial markets and financial entities are really time bombs for the future. The good thing about this bill is that it ensures there is appropriate regulation of financial entities. Chifley once said:

Private banking systems make the community the victim of every wave of optimism or pessimism that surges through the minds of financial speculators.

Obviously this government has one key aim—to ensure that the emotions of Wall Street or the financial markets do not hurt people living in main street in places like Craigmore, Gawler or the Clare Valley in my electorate. To help all Australians through the effects of the global financial crisis we have introduced the Nation Building and Jobs Plan to provide immediate stimulus and to ensure the long-term productive capacity of our economy, with 70 per cent of the stimulus invested in infrastructure throughout the electorate and $291 million for rail on the Gawler to Adelaide line, creating 200 jobs in Victoria making concrete sleepers. We are aware that the infrastructure spend in one part of the country helps people in other parts of the country—a concrete sleeper factory in this case. The Treasurer has been working tirelessly to deliver a budget that makes the tough choices to stimulate the economy and put us on the road to recovery. The Assistant Treasurer has worked diligently to propose the bill before the House today and he should be commended for it.

The bill introduces measures to regulate the non-operating holding companies, NOHCs, of companies that sell life insurance. The bill also harmonises the injunctions that may be ordered as enforcement measures in respect of those entities. The aim of these amendments is to ensure that corporations that sell life insurance and are part of a corporate group affected by the financial crisis remain solvent for their Australian customers. For Australians who have life insurance, particularly the many people in Wakefield, when they purchase their life insurance and make sacrifices to pay the ongoing fees, it is important that they do not inadvertently enter corporate structures that are vulnerable to collapse. You cannot expect ordinary people to look into corporate structures that remain elusive to many learned people—politicians, journalists, lawyers and other experts. We cannot expect the man or woman in the street to know exactly what is going on behind the corporate veil, we cannot expect them to know the accounting or risk management policies—(Quorum formed.)

Yesterday, we saw the member for Paterson kicked out of this House for bad behaviour and today he is on a deliberate campaign to disrupt the people’s business. What a disgrace he is to his electorate and to his shadow portfolio.

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