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

It's been quite a tortuous process to get here and this is a far-from-perfect piece of legislation. This is a piece of legislation which was designed by the government to avoid the need for a royal commission into the banking and financial services sector, which didn't quite work out for the government. They've tried all the tricks to try to avoid a royal commission and they were dragged kicking and screaming into holding a royal commission in the end.

In October 2016, in an attempt to distract attention from the urgent need for a royal commission into banking and financial services, the Prime Minister promised that we would get:

… a low-cost, speedy tribunal to deal with these types of consumer complaints, customer complaints against banks, and this will be real action …

But a little while later, the Minister for Revenue and Financial Services, who is at the table, had to walk back from this and argue that the Prime Minister had really only meant. 'A little T tribunal; not a big T tribunal,' a distinction which failed to register with observers around the country, who really, with all due respect, had no idea what the minister was talking about.

Now, of course, we also have the 2017 budget announcing that the new body would be called the Australian Financial Complaints Authority—it's true, it's not a tribunal; the minister's right there. But this is also a misnomer, because the minister in the Senate confirmed that AFCA will be just another ombudsman scheme in the form of a private company limited by guarantee, so it's not really an authority. There are already, of course—and this is the key point—two of these services in existence for financial services disputes, the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Credit and Investments Ombudsman. So any suggestion that this bill is a groundbreaking reform which finally gives consumers rights that they previously did not have is simply not the case. This is simply a piece of administration. This is simply a piece of tidying up.

The bill abolishes three existing financial sector complaints-handling bodies: the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Credit and Investments Ombudsman and also the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal. For the first of these three bodies, the bill is in many respects just a merger and a rebranding—that's all it is. There is no, or very little, improvement in consumer outcomes contained in this bill. I know both of these bodies very well, as a former minister who, in a previous government, held the portfolio of the minister at the table. I had responsibility for these ombudsman services, and they were very good—

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