Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am just talking about a pattern of behaviour by this Labor government. I do not intend to go through all 11 schedules in the bill, but I will also touch upon those schedules that the coalition is attempting to have segregated from the balance of the bill so that effectively the bill is split.

Schedules 3 and 4 deal with creating a regulatory framework for tax and financial advice services as well as other amendments to the Tax Agent Services Act. The carve-out was put in place sometime ago and it expires on 30 June this year. As I indicated already in my comments, the coalition sought to provide opportunity for the stakeholders—the people who inform the mums and dads of this nation about what they should be doing in their financial affairs—to have their feedback upon the approach that Labor was adopting. Labor said, 'We do not want the feedback, frankly, we are not prepared to listen, we will just what we want to do.'

The Financial Planning Association, the Financial Services Council and the Association of Financial Advisers have all raised concerns with respect to the changes contained within this bill. They are concerned about the fact that there has been a complete lack of consultation on the bill. They are concerned about the definitions used in the act. It is unclear, for example, if stockbrokers, insurance brokers and mortgage brokers are covered. There are concerns about possible negative interactions in relation to FoFA, the future of financial advice, reforms in this bill. They are also concerned about increased compliance costs resulting from the bill. That inevitably means one thing: extra compliance costs that are faced by tax agents, financial advisers and others will simply be passed through to consumers. We do not know what the impact of this is going to be. We know that all the peak bodies are concerned. We know that very good people like John Brogden are concerned, but we do not have the opportunity to discern what the impact will be because Labor will not enjoy the scrutiny.

This bill, in my view, represents one of the lowest points for the Australian Labor Party. The bill does need to be split so that the less controversial aspects can go through, although they should have gone through after parliamentary inquiry. In the absence of that, at least they can go through, but the more controversial aspects—schedules 3, 4 and 5—ought to be separated and the coalition attempts to do that with the amendments we have put forward.

See this speech in context