Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

It's a real pleasure to make some remarks in relation to the Treasury Laws Amendment (Delivering Better Financial Outcomes and Other Measures) Bill 2024. It was only a few weeks ago that we had a hearing into this bill. At that hearing, the government appeared to defend drafting that was pointed out as being problematic by parts of industry and by the opposition. This is another bill that Minister Jones and the government have bungled. In fact, so many of these Treasury laws amendment bills have been bungled and have needed to be heavily amended.

One of the roles that I perform here in this parliament is working with Senator Walsh on the Senate Standing Committee on Economics. We scrutinise the Treasury laws amendments regularly. I am staggered by the scale of the amendments that have been required to be delivered to not just this bill but all these bills. Sometimes it is a bill which has been proposed by Dr Leigh and sometimes they're bills from Minister Jones. I don't think it really matters; they all seem to be hugely messy processes.

The point that was made on this bill is that the drafting was going to mean that every piece of advice needed to be checked by the trustee and that it may have introduced some uncertainty around whether or not financial advice can be paid for from the superannuation account. This position was defended by government, as I said before. Now the government has capitulated and agreed to make the amendments we had flagged that now give confidence that people who wish to pay for financial advice from their superannuation account can do just that. That is a positive.

I give credit to the government for agreeing to amend the legislation in the way that we had suggested they do, but I put on record that this is a very small reform in the financial advice space. The government inherited a very good review by Michelle Levy which pointed out that financial advice is now almost unaffordable in Australia if you are an average worker. That is very bad.

There is no question that this particular sector has had a great journey of improvement over these last 10 years or so, and there is no doubt that parliamentary inquiries, royal commissions and the like have pointed out that there have been a lot of bad apples in the financial advice sector. But my sense now is that, with all the reforms that have passed through this parliament over the past few years, the bar is at a point where not many people can meet the bar. There are very few financial advisers, and the result of that is that it is very expensive to get financial advice. That is a bad thing, because we want Australians to avail themselves of the best possible financial advice, given professionally and without conflicts.

We recognise that Australians live in a country where taxation affairs are complex—financial affairs are always complex—and financial advice can actually help people get the outcomes that they want for themselves and for the people they love. That is why it is so disappointing that the government inherited a very clear and concise review into financial advice which showed how it could strip away the bureaucracy, strip away the red tape and ensure that there would be a greater supply of financial advice at a lower cost and all government has done is cherry-pick a few little ideas, which it has bungled up until now. Here we are at the last hour, in the last few minutes before the guillotine blade comes down, and the government has had to amend its own legislation after previously arguing that the legislation was all good.

I welcome the government's flexibility. We're very pleased that the sector can benefit from having clearly drafted legislation which is going to allow people to get advice from their super fund. But we want to see the government move on the rest of the Levy review. We want to see the government deliver the rest of those reforms. We'd like to see the government do a lot of things in this space. But I have to say that now, having had more than two years in office, the government is very slow and, generally speaking, only gets out of bed for the unions and the big super funds if they ask for something. It is a consequence of being a government for vested interests that really the only focus of the government, and the thing by which all their economic policies are driven, is feathering the nests of their best friends and fellow travellers, in financial terms and in policy terms.

So we very much welcome this capitulation from Minister Jones, who has battled in the job, you've got to say. He really has struggled in this job, but we're very pleased that he has seen the light in the last few minutes before the guillotine.