How former Teal MP would make advice reform a national conversation

Advocates for financial advice accessibility need to make government recognise that it is a live electoral issue if they want to see more rapid change, according to former Teal MP Zoe Daniel.  
 
“With respect, you need to find a way of elevating it, and the only way to do that – and it’s not cynical, it’s just reality – is to make the government understand that people care about this,” Daniel, who retreated from politics after last May’s election and is currently the board chair of Mental Health Victoria, told the Professional Planner Advice Policy Summit.  
 
“So those people who need financial advice, who are not currently getting it – they should care about them, because those people have a vote in their marginal seats. It’s a fairly simple equation.”  
 
Daniel Mulino told the Advice Policy Summit on Monday that the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes reforms remained a “high priority” for the government but that it needs to have better synergy with consumer protection policies after the collapse of Shield and First Guardian master funds.  A number of super and insurance leaders have called the slow-moving process “disappointing” but said that they would work to expand advice access “with or without” DBFO.  
 
Some commentators argue that efforts to get advice accessibility and affordability on the political agenda have been hindered by in-fighting among the half dozen or so associations that claim to represent the advice and superannuation industry, but industry bodies competing with each other for share of voice “is not unique”, Daniel said.  
 
“That cannibalisation occurs across every sector, which is why there’s a convening piece that needs to happen where the people that are developing those policy positions and whatever framework it is that you need to get into a room and nail down a cohesive position collaboratively that they can collectively prosecute in order to not cut across each other,” Daniel said.  
 
“And then you build the social licence – in the media, in social media, in communities, in government, and you have to do that hub and spoke model to get it moving. But the thing is there’s no short-term gain in this.  
 
“[Advice reform] has been an aspiration for some time, but my observation would be that every single policy pieces takes a couple of years of pounding the hallways and getting the back benchers on board by helping them to understand why it’s meaningful and important for them in their communities.”  
 
And lobbyists and advocates for financial advice accessibility forget that ministers are always bombarded with requests from industries to fix legislation and regulation – and that government might not have the solutions they want, either.  
 
“It sounds simpler than it is, but every minister constantly has people coming through the door with a problem,” Daniel said. “And my view is that governments don’t fix problems; communities and experts fix problems and deliver the solution to government, and that’s where you get your most effective outcome. In fact, if you expect the government to fix the problem, it’s probably going to make it worse.”  
 
Daniel lost her seat of Goldstein to shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson last May by a margin of 88 votes after winning it from him at the 2022 election. While Daniel said she had made it “her business to not get personal”, she did decry the growing influence of organisations like Advance Australia that spent heavily on attack advertising on Goldstein.  
 
“What we’re seeing in Australian politics currently is the rise of what you might call third parties or proxies; Advance Australia, Repeal the Teals, Teals Revealed – there were five of them operating in the electorate of Goldstein. We know that between they spent two and a half million dollars, predominantly on attack advertising into letterboxes, on billboards, on digital, and we have no federal truth in political advertising laws in Australia. 
 
“Tim would say he had no involvement in that, and that’s for him to say. But there were operatives campaigning against me, and if you were looking at the recent declaration of funding to those proxies they were funded by fossil fuel companies; obviously I stood on a pro-climate policy platform and those companies wanted to get me out of politics.”