Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Don't worry, we're not done with you yet—sorry, Deputy Speaker; when I say 'you', I don't mean you, I mean the member for Wakefield. But the question now is: how do we as a parliament rebuild a sense of confidence at the heart of our economic system? That's what this legislation is seeking to address. Not in isolation, but as a critical part of rebuilding the confidence in the regulatory system so that ASIC can do its job.

I know that the royal commission also highlighted question marks about how ASIC were doing their role. There are differences of opinion amongst members about whether the burden and the obligation, and the volume of work that ASIC have—and, yes, sometimes there are debates around resources as well—raise a question about whether regulators can do their task. But when regulators come to us and say, 'We need a power to be able to do our job better,' we don't take it at face value—because I'm not a big fan of independent regulators, is the truth. But our task, then, is to at least seriously consider the consequences, the benefits, and whether we should go through it.

That's what we're doing in this piece of simple legislation today, as a result of the Financial System Inquiry. It recommended the introduction of design and distribution obligations and a product intervention power so that improved design and distribution practices would allow interventions to be made where there is a significant consumer detriment. So this is a bill that should be welcomed. It should be a bill that's a standard, or the foundation of, potentially, more to come. It should be part of a package of what we do in this place—absent the concerns of partisan politics—to focus on what we need to do to have the financial service system that this country needs to build and to grease the next stage of economic development of our nation's future.

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