Financial planners are facing up to higher education, professional and ethical standards, but financial planning is far from the only profession for which ethics is an issue, and nowhere is it a greater issue than in the area of euthanasia.
The 2016 FPA Professionals Congress in Perth heard on Friday morning the broadcaster Andrew Denton describe the ethical issues surrounding euthanasia he has been exposed to while looking for an answer to: “[It’s a]clear ethical question I have been asking doctors and politicians for the past 18 months: Why should anyone who is dying in untreatable pain be told they have to suffer longer”?
Denton said that along the way he found the professional ethics of those treating people with incurable conditions often conflicted with their personal ethics, and in some cases the professionals allowed their personal ethics to override their professional obligations.
Denton said a palliative care specialist had explained that to him.
“‘You have to listen to your patients,’ he told me,” Denton said.
“‘You have to ask your patients what they want and what they don’t want – especially the parts about what they don’t want’.”
Denton said the specialist’s professional ethics “instruct [him] that his patients’ wishes are the most important thing”.
“But [his] personal ethics conflict with his professional ones,” Denton said.
“Because he shares the values of the Catholic institutions that he works for, he believes it’s unethical to intentionally hasten someone’s death.”
Denton told the FPA congress that these are “hard ethical questions”.
“You need to decide for yourself how and if they relate to your work,” he said.
“For example, are you doing what the client wants you to do to help them lead their desired life, or do you sometimes sit in judgement on their choices, and maybe even resist?
“The core ethical value I am reminded of over the past 18 months is this. It’s not new, but it’s good to be reminded of it: Before we act in a way that will affect others, we need to truly consider what those actions will mean for others.
“Or as one nurse put it to me: ‘We need to do this much better; we need to do the right thing for each other, human to human’.
“I am sure that applies in your office as much as it does in mine.”
Earlier, the chair of the FPA, Neil Kendall, told delegates that financial planners routinely face ethical dilemmas, and working out how to solve them can be both confronting and challenging.
“Sometimes you get those really tricky questions where you think, I don’t know what the answer’s going to be to this,” he said.
“Have you ever had that call: ‘I’m leaving my partner – what should I do? What about: my super fund paid me out more than my account balance. What should I do?’ And I know you’ve all had this discussion: ‘These are my assets, but these are the ones I tell Centrelink about’.
“Like it or not, we face ethical dilemmas every time we sit in front of clients.
“They put questions in front of us to which a fair deal of thought needs to go into what are the right and wrong answers. And that’s part of what we do as professionals.”
At the Women in Finance breakfast on Friday morning, the writer and broadcaster Catherine McGregor AM said that as a transgender woman her experiences of financial planning had been overwhelmingly positive and ethical, but aspects of the superannuation industry still left something to be desired.
“My exposure to financial planning has been through females exclusively,” she said.
“I’ve got a female financial planner who happened to share a particular expertise and it was word-of-mouth networking which is possibly, I suspect, the way a lot of you [find] business. I knew the woman because she’d been in the army and I knew she was familiar with the military [superannuation] scheme, which is a bit peculiar.
“She is really good and I’ve had really good, ethical, positive experiences. I felt like I was in good hands. Your part of it was not the difficult part.
“The bit I found difficult is the superannuation industry, and I spoke to them only a couple of weeks back on the Gold Coast: good people, but dealing with a very, very clunky system.
“So your part of it isn’t the problem in my experience. The problem I had was that the military system was fantastic – I changed my name legally, produced the documentation, and my super fund went over like that.
“I have done part-time teaching at universities, I’ve done part-time journalism. All those funds have still not recognised my gender change. And frankly I can’t be bothered having the fight, because [the funds] have got such tiny amounts in them. The academic super fund said [it would cost] $250 to withdraw the $137 that’s in there. And I thought, ‘I might get back to you about that’.
“So that part has been clunky. But my exposure to the industry, your industry, has been incredibly positive: very ethical, and I know you are aiming at trying to get more standardised entry-level qualifications and you’re on a journey of your own there. But I’ve felt in very good hands and encountered nothing like people trying to flog me products that had linkages to their brand.
“It’s been very ethical, and very, very positive.”
