This is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Assistant Treasurer, Senator Arthur Sinodinos, and Andrea Slattery, chief executive officer of SPAA, at the 2014 SPAA SMSF National Conference in Brisbane on February 19
As a Government coming in, you have your own election commitments and priority is to implement them and then, but while doing that, also to deal with urgent and unavoidable matters which had been left hanging from the previous Government. So the art of government early on is how you balance getting on with your own agenda while dealing with the unfinished agenda that’s already out there.
My priority has also been to get on with implementing our election commitments and in this space I cover tax, financial services, super and corporate law. And particularly in the financial services and superannuation areas, I was keen to get on with our major commitments.
One was around further amendment of the Future Financial Advice reforms, the so-called FoFA reforms. It was important there to get on with the job of implementing the commitments we’d made in Opposition, which we signalled very clearly, the areas where we wanted to reduce the cost of complying with FOFA, without detracting from the consumer protection that FOFA provides.
And I thank Sir Anthony Mason for what he said today, because he provided great clarity around some of those issues, including the issue of the best interest duty.
There’s been a lot of urban myth making and mythologising in recent times about some of the changes we were making there and none of the changes that we make there detracts from, as Sir Anthony said, what it in the common law and also the provisions that are in the Corporations [Act] around the duty of advisers to act in the interest of their clients. So I am very keen to get on with those changes, that’s an important part of my job.
And may I say…more broadly when it comes to financial advice there has been a bit of a view around that if you have really tight regulation of financial advice you can somehow prevent another financial collapse occurring.
We can’t guarantee against another collapse, whether it’s as a result of the GFC or something else, or [fraud], or all the rest of it. But what we can do is try and have a robust regulatory regime, which encourages the best possible advice being provided and then it’s really up to the market from there.
And we’re keen to further increase professionalism when it comes to financial advisers and we’re working with ASIC on further initiatives in that regard. Because this industry has sort of grown like topsey the last 10 or 15 years and it is important that, and the various associations I think are trying to do this, but as a Government we also reinforce what they’re trying to do and keep raising those standards in the interest of everybody.
Philosophically I like the idea of people being able to manage things for themselves but they need to have access to the best possible professional advice.
