Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Delivering Better Financial Outcomes and Other Measures) Bill 2024. The coalition had a number of significant concerns about this bill in the form in which it was introduced in the other place. We made these concerns clear to the government, and I am very glad that the government has moved to address these concerns in its amendments that it already moved in the other place and in the amendments it has indicated that it will move today in this chamber.

On the basis of these amendments, the coalition will be supporting this bill. This bill represents the first legislative response to the Quality of Advice Review, commissioned by the former coalition government and delivered to the government in December 2022. This review was a significant initiative, commissioned by the former coalition government, and it was aimed specifically at improving the provision of financial advice for Australians. We are incredibly proud of the Quality of Advice Review and of the work that Michelle Levy did in preparing it. Financial advice should be accessible, and it should be affordable for all Australians. Right now, it is often neither.

It's crucial to remember that this initiative was driven by our commitment to ensuring that Australians can access quality advice to secure their own financial futures. However, we cannot ignore the significant delay in the introduction of this bill. This delay has caused deep uncertainty and concern within our struggling financial advice sector. Despite the comprehensiveness of the coalition's response to the Hayne royal commission, this Labor government has continued to wrap this sector with additional administrative burdens that lead to higher fees and higher taxes, and ultimately make advice less affordable and less accessible for ordinary, everyday Australians.

The protracted delay by this government in responding to the Quality of Advice Review has been led by this deeply disengaged, distracted and, quite frankly, disingenuous Assistant Treasurer, and it's left the financial advice industry in a state of limbo, facing uncertainty and instability—something that, in opposition, the current Assistant Treasurer vowed he would fix. He was very quick to criticise the coalition for implementing professionalisation of this sector and for implementing the recommendations of the Hayne royal commission, but then, once in government, his tune changed significantly. In fact, it's now taken Mr Jones a staggering 17 months to begin to respond to this important, clear, well-received and industry supported review. This is what happens when an Assistant Treasurer's instructions from the industry super fund lobbies get lost in the mail or don't come at all: he sits on his hands and he dithers.

In his time in this portfolio, Mr Jones has left a trail of destruction and administrative malpractice behind him. Just yesterday, we saw the government embarrassed into agreeing to list his Treasury Laws Amendment (Consumer Data Right) Bill 2022, which has been languishing on the program for more than a year, on the program for next August.

This is a bill that has bipartisan support. It could have gone through in non-controversial legislation months ago, and the industry has been crying out for that change. Yet somehow the bill has been allowed to languish there because the Assistant Treasurer has not been doing his job. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the conversation between the Assistant Treasurer and his boss, the Treasurer, took place, when he noticed that—just one more mess the Treasurer has had to sort out, caused by an Assistant Treasurer forced upon him because the Prime Minister doesn't necessarily trust him. We can see that from the report in the AFR on Monday, where Phil Coorey pointed out that the Prime Minister is now overriding the budget protocols set by the Treasurer and taking over policy approval unilaterally. This is because the Prime Minister doesn't trust the Treasurer and instead has an Assistant Treasurer and an assistant minister to the Treasurer to keep an eye on the Treasurer. Unfortunately, neither of those two gentlemen are doing their job.

In the case of this bill, instead of using the time to draft considered legislation, the minister has failed to get the very basics right, creating more problems than solutions. And of course this is not Minister Jones's first rodeo in creating more problems than he has been solving. He has the significant distinction in his caucus for potentially being the only minister that could compete with Minister Giles for hopelessness. Perhaps we will see a changing of the guard in the next few weeks. But I digress.

Our financial advice industry and our financial advisers deserve a regulatory framework that allows them to expand their client bases to better serve Australians. We must secure the future of our financial advice sector and prevent a scenario in which Australians are underadvised, underinsured and potentially even underbanked. It was essential that the government fix the errors in this bill to ensure that the bill fulfils its intended purpose of improving financial outcomes for all Australians, and we are very glad they have now finally done this.

The financial advice sector plays a critical role in ensuring that Australians can make informed decisions about their own finances, and any legislation affecting this sector must be very carefully crafted and error free. The government has been shamed into moving amendments that again fix this mess. The Assistant Treasurer has proven himself to be out of touch, out of his depth, and unable to deliver meaningful reforms that benefit the financial advice sector and, by extension, benefit all Australians.

In conclusion, while the coalition will now support this bill because of the amendments that are being moved, we condemn the government and this minister for making it so hard to simply get the right outcome for Australian financial advisers.