Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

"The actions of the Abbott Government in undermining consumer protections by weakening the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) Laws."

Last Friday, the Minister for Finance and still acting Assistant Treasurer, Senator Mathias Cormann, took initial steps to remove important consumer protections from Labor's Future of Financial Advice reforms. Make no mistake, if the minister is successful in pushing through these changes, the Abbott government must take full and unambiguous responsibility for the scandals that will inevitably result. Labor in this place will vote down the proposed changes in their current form and use whatever Senate tools, be they disallowance motions or other, available to ensure that these important protections are not watered down. Labor will use whatever power it has to ensure that consumers are protected against a handful of criminals operating in the financial services industry who have given the many good financial planners out there a bad name.

When the Hon. Bernie Ripoll, now Labor's financial services spokesman, drafted the FoFA legislation in the wake of a series of horrific and costly collapses, it was after an exhaustive period of detailed public consultation. Throughout 2009, everyone from indebted victims, financial experts through to the big banks were given the opportunity to participate in developing these laws. But, last week, we had the co-author of the 'budget of broken promises', Senator Mathias Cormann, supported by a Liberal Party-dominated Senate committee, push for a repeal of this legislation.

I have spent much of the short time that I have been in this place listening to people who have been ripped off, often by fraud, deception and collusion, and left penniless by a financial advice industry that previously had no firm legal obligation to act in the best interests of their clients. I have sat on the Senate inquiry into the performance of ASIC and heard the horrific stories of fraud, abuse and utter dereliction of a basic fiduciary duty by players across the financial services industry—all the way from the boiler rooms to the nation's biggest, and supposedly respected, banks. Thousands of families were left out-of-pocket by the collapse of Storm Financial. The names Timbercorp, Opes Prime, Fincorp—