Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, I present the following reports of the committee together with evidence received by the committee: Statutory oversight of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, February 2011; and Report on the 2009-10 annual reports of bodies established under the ASIC Act, February 2011.

Ordered that the reports be made parliamentary papers.

I am pleased to speak to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services reports Statutory oversight of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, February 2011; and Report on the 2009-10 annual reports of bodies established under the ASIC Act.

At the outset I would like to thank the members of the committee for their continued hard work and efforts in overseeing ASIC, the regulatory body, and also in the number of inquiries that we have from time to time. I also thank the secretariat for their hard work and everything they do to make possible the work of the committee members themselves. I wanted to place that on the record.

Section 243 the ASIC Act directs the committee to inquire into and report on ASIC’s activities and matters relating to those activities to which parliament’s attention should be directed. On 1 August 2010, responsibility for supervision of real-time trading on Australia’s domestic licence market was transferred to ASIC from the Australian Stock Exchange. ASIC has also been given responsibility for licensing and monitoring consumer credit providers, received additional consumer protection powers and, from April this year, will be responsible for the national business names register as well.

The transfer of these responsibilities has occurred relatively smoothly. While it will take another six to 12 months for the benefits to be fully assessed, ASIC can report improvements in monitoring broker conduct. The time from problem identification to formal investigation has also decreased. The committee will continue to monitor these functions and review their impact on ASIC’s overall performance and resources. The committee has previously reported to the House that it was closely monitoring the progress of ASIC’s investigation into the collapse of Storm Financial as well as a number of other investigations.

On 22 December 2010, ASIC announced that it would commence proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia against Storm Financial and other financial service providers, including the Bank of Queensland, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Macquarie Bank. The committee is pleased that decisions are being taken. It remains concerned for investors who face the loss of their savings and in some cases their homes because of investments about which they may not have received adequate information and advice.

The report on annual reports has been prepared in accordance with section 243 of the ASIC Act. The report examines the annual reports of the following bodies established under that act: the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board, the Australian Accounting Standards Board, the Companies Auditors and Liquidators Disciplinary Board, the Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee, the Financial Reporting Panel, the Financial Reporting Council and the Takeovers Panel.

The committee was generally satisfied with these reports. It has made some comments on matters concerning the Companies Auditors and Liquidators Disciplinary Board and, in particular, the Financial Reporting Panel, to which I might direct my final remarks. The committee notes the referral of four matters to the Financial Reporting Panel in August 2010. This represents a big change. Prior to August 2010, the panel had not made a determination on a single referral of a dispute between ASIC and companies. The committee also notes that, having been referred in August 2010, the matters were resolved by October that same year. The committee has asked ASIC about the low number of past referrals and will be discussing this issue at its next oversight hearing. The committee holds its next hearing with ASIC on 11 March and will continue to pursue a number of the issues discussed in these reports and raised in the House today.

I again thank the secretariat and the committee members for their continued hard work and diligence in these areas.

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