Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I was just ensuring that the House was aware of Senator Cormann's statements, Mr Deputy Speaker. We need to establish what actually went on yesterday. I think we know what went on. It was that during the day the Minister for Finance actually started to understand his own policy. I think he actually started to get what was going on. He certainly did not understand it in the morning, because he took to Twitter, the old finance minister, and said:

Our FOFA reforms do not re-introduce commissions.

He also said:

You should read my piece in AFR. Decision to pause regs taken last Friday.

I will deal with the last part first. It is a very strange media management strategy to take a decision on Friday to pause a government policy, be out defending it on the front page of the Financial Review and writing op-eds in its defence on Monday. It is a very strange media strategy, indeed.

I will turn to the substance. He said:

Our FoFA reforms do not reintroduce commissions.

That is pretty clear. I would have thought it pretty clear that commissions were being reintroduced, but maybe I misunderstood. We will go to what other people think. What does Alan Kohler think? He says:

… Minister, you are reintroducing sales commissions for general advice. The proposed amendment, and Coalition policy, is perfectly clear on that score.

Mr Kohler is correct. But it is not just Mr Kohler who thinks that. The people who actually know something about financial planning—that would be the financial planners—think commissions are being under government policy. And they do not like it. They do not support the reintroduction of commissions. On 19 March, the chair of the Financial Planning Association put out a bulletin to his members. He said, 'There is one glaring change which has been heavily lobbied for that we cannot support—the so-called general advice exemption. The Financial Planning Association strongly opposes the payment of commissions under general exemption. This is a retrograde policy that would allow remuneration by commission on the sale of investment and superannuation products to Australian consumers and to open the door to a bygone era of mis-selling and inappropriate advice.

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