Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If it was not part of the recommendations, in that light, it should be eschewed. The time frame is a concern; the industry is very worried about the time frame. It took three months and 10 days to get this enormous change, this enormous new raft of financial regulation, into the Australian financial services sector. It is far too short. In fact, the government has shown in the last few years that they cannot organise a piece of legislation to get through this place in under about two years, and they expect the financial services industry to adapt to these changes which are not yet through parliament in less than three months. That is far too short; it should not be allowed.

As I draw towards the close I would like to focus on some of the words that came from the Ripoll inquiry. This is a quote:

The committee is of the general view that situations where investors lose their entire savings because of poor financial advice are more often a problem of enforcing existing regulations, rather than being due to regulatory inadequacy.

That is an amazing statement. The committee that the government set up, dominated by government members, has said that the framework is not too bad, but what is happening here is that it is not properly enforced. But they have come back now and presented a pair of bills which are about laying a whole new layer of regulation over this industry. This is a recurring theme with the government.

Last week we had new regulation in the transport industry. We are having new regulation, obviously, in the carbon area where companies are going to have to actually invent new accounting methods to those they have used traditionally. Red tape is the number one issue that my constituents come to me about. They say, 'We are drowning in it'—and here we have just another raft of red tape which is going to tie the industry up. Even the government Office of Best Practice Regulation says that the government did not have adequate information before it to assess the impact of these bills.

On the balance we cannot possibly support these bills. We will be moving some amendments which will be more in line with what the Ripoll inquiry recommended. That was the point of the inquiry and it was the point of the announced decision, and now we are being asked to support something which is entirely different. I will be opposing these bills unless, of course, the government is to take on our amendments and allow us to achieve good quantitative change.

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