Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is disappointing that the Treasury Laws Amendment (Putting Consumers First—Establishment of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority) Bill 2017 is coming forward in this form, and without additional promises of resourcing. I think anyone who has looked at the complaints-handling systems in this area would probably agree that some things could be done better. But, when you ask the people who actually work in those bodies that exist at the moment, 'What could be done to better improve complaints, say, around superannuation?', one of the loud responses that comes back is, 'Properly resource us.' In the context where this government regularly takes the axe to the Public Service and where it sees public servants not as people who work for the benefit of the community but instead simply as a cost to be cut, it's not surprising that people find themselves facing, potentially, long waiting times to get their various disputes resolved.

One of the things we've seen with the royal commission that the government was dragged kicking and screaming to support was that of course it couldn't let pass by an opportunity to attack industry superannuation funds, even though those funds often return much better returns than other funds. I say this as someone with a foot in both camps. I have an industry fund but also a private fossil fuel-free fund in Future Fund. I say this not being on one side of the chamber that feels they have a vested interest to either defend or attack, but it is very, very clear the government will use every opportunity it can to attack what it perceived to be funds that have union links, and so it is with this bill.

The government comes along and says, 'Well, here's a couple of complaints-handling authorities where we could make a difference'. Then it looks at the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal and, for reasons that are not really made out, asserts that there is a problem that can't be fixed with better resourcing and so decides that the tribunal needs to be abolished and rolled into a new organisation. One of the things that concern me about that is that this is all being done without any promise of additional resourcing. It is not at all clear from all the things we've heard from members of the government—concerns about trying to get their disputes resolved—that this not necessarily going to fix that at all. At the end of the day this is as much about ideology and responding to political pressures as it is about making a sensible decision about dealing with the governance of superannuation funds. You look at every other area with superannuation funds—changes to directorships and the like—and it is making these changes on an evidence-free basis, purely on the basis of ideology. I worry that is the case with this bill as well.

There have been some suggestions made that the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal has been far too legalistic. One of the things the people who work there have impressed on me in my discussions with them is that many of the complaints are resolved informally, without the need to proceed through the formal complaints process. Whether or not they're counted in the statistics that government members rely on, I don't know, but it has certainly been the case that, although they're called a tribunal, in many respects they've actually operated almost like an ombudsman: they've helped take complaints and resolve them, often without having to initiate formal processes with funds, as one might expect and one might hope. It is not at all clear that that process is going to continue or, at least, that there'll be a separate, dedicated level of resources given to that industry.

It is also concerning in that respect that we see this slow privatisation of complaints handling mechanisms and of government authorities, because—putting aside the principal position, the ideology of that—one of the things that does, for example, is remove the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal, to the extent that it's covered by FOI and AAT, from that process, removes it from that oversight. I'm not saying that every decision of the complaints tribunal could be taken to one of those bodies but, certainly, the internal processes were governed by that. The more that governments take bodies that make decisions out of the public realm, slot them over and say, 'We're going to create a new private company now,' the less oversight there is over the way these organisations do business. We've got laws that demand that people get paid superannuation. It's not an option now: if you're an employer you have to pay it for your employee. So, we have a federal law that says we have to funnel huge amounts of money into these schemes. Given that they're federally regulated, you'd expect that when complaints arise there should also be some federal oversight of those complaints. But taking away AAT and taking away FOI in the way that I'm advised will happen as a result of this is not right.

The previous member said: 'Oh, well, this is all good. It's got the support of the industry.' Again, that's not right. Industry Super—again, an organisation that I don't have any particular ties to; I'm not here to bat for them politically, one way or the other—have come out and said: 'No, we don't support this change. We think there's a better way of dealing with complaints within superannuation.'

So I was hopeful that some of the good elements of this bill might have been able to prevail in the amendments that were moved in the Senate—I believe by the opposition—around the issue of the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal. Sadly, they didn't succeed. There were some other amendments that we proposed that I understand did succeed, and that's good. They made the bill slightly better. But without some further attention being paid to and the further case being made out as to why the SCT should be rolled in together with all of these other bodies then that aspect of the bill can't be supported, because it will make a change for which no case has been made and which could be fixed through other means—if the government wanted to stop attacking the Public Service and instead support it. And it has the potential for a number of deleterious consequences, including less oversight.

I imagine that this bill is going to sail through this place in the way that it sailed through the Senate, but I think opposition to that point, in particular, needs to be made, because it's an issue that was raised with the government when this bill was being progressed. They've steadfastly—I think perhaps for ideological reasons—refused to countenance any change to deal with that issue. As a result, opposition to that part of the bill has to be placed on record.

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