Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

We gave that commitment to the Australian people before the last election. Indeed, the commitments that we made at the last election to improve our financial advice laws were first announced back in March 2012, more than two years ago. Of course, they were based on the findings of the Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services into Labor's FoFA laws. At the time, we said, very transparently, that Labor's FoFA laws had some good bits in it, but also had some very bad bits in it. We said that we would keep the good bits, like the requirement for advisers to act in the best interests of their clients, and get rid of the bad bits. We said that we would fix the uncertainty that came with sloppy drafting by the previous government. We have said that transparently on the record for two and half years. So the Australian Bankers' Association, the Association of Financial Advisers, the Financial Planning Association, the Financial Services Council, Industry Super Australia, all of them, cannot possibly be surprised by what we were going to do because we laid it out very clearly into the lead up to the last election. It was part of our policy.