Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Genetic Testing Protections in Life Insurance and Other Measures) Bill 2025 and express my support for this bill. I commend the Assistant Treasurer for bringing forward this bill. It legislates important changes, two of which I've been advocating for some time.

This bill includes four key provisions. Firstly, schedule 1 limits the use of genetic testing by life insurers. Schedule 2 creates licensing exemptions for foreign financial institutions, including international market makers. Schedule 3 standardises the legislative framework for Australia's involvement with multilateral development banks and schedule 4 removes the requirement for stage 2 registration of the better advice act.

To start on life insurance, schedule 1 of this bill is a long overdue outcome of Australians seeking preventive health care. Preventive health care is the future of health in Australia, and we need to be encouraging more, not fewer, people seeking potentially life-saving genetic testing. They should not have to avoid this sort of testing based on the concern that the information they obtain could potentially be used against them by insurers who would seek to exclude people from insurance products. This bill would introduce formal protection against life insurers accessing and using genetic information for determining life insurance product eligibility and premiums. This is very welcome and this is so important.

But to be honest, we have been slow to act on this. In 2003, the Australian Law Reform Commission first recommended that the life insurance industry needed safeguards around the use of genetic testing—that is, 23 years ago. In 2018, a joint parliamentary inquiry into the life insurance industry recommended a moratorium on the use of genetic testing results in life insurance. In 2019, the life insurance industry introduced a partial industry-led moratorium to set policy limits. While I commend the industry for taking the first step, it's overdue that Australia committed to the change. I wrote to the Assistant Treasurer about this issue back in 2023 and again in 2025, when I was contacted by members of my community and also by others, particularly Dr Jane Tiller from Monash University, who has been a leading light in this area. I think the point is that we have come to the right conclusion. I welcome this bill. I support this bill, and I would also say that parliament needs to work at a greater speed than we currently do when issues are raised with us over a long period of time. I also recognise the Council of Australian Life Insurance, CALI, for getting behind some of these changes. It is really important that the life insurance industry is working with these changes as opposed to trying to fight them.

The additional component of the bill that I'd like to talk to in particular is the market makers bill. Some sensible changes, particularly the foreign financial services provider legislation in schedule 2, will provide certain exemptions to foreign financial service providers from licensing requirements under the Corporations Act, including for market makers and providers under comparable regimes. This is a commonsense change. This issue was actually raised with me at a pop-up office in Kings Cross by a constituent who was concerned last year with the uncertainty around this legislation and the need for action to be taken here, so I welcome the government's action on this. I'm really proud to have been advocating really loudly and proudly on this issue, and I think that this is an appropriate resolution.

Finally, schedule 4 of the bill follows through on the government's commitment to scrap the proposed phase 2 of the better advice reforms from 2021, which would make advisers undertake duplicated licensing arrangements every year, set to commence in July 2026. The financial advice profession is in such a decline that it is becoming prohibitively expensive to obtain financial advice, and those who need it are least able to afford it. We need to be doing all that we can to bring more financial advisers into the system, having lost thousands of them in the last few years. So I welcome any legislation that provides appropriate safeguards but that makes it easier and reduces some of the duplicate red tape for financial advisers. So thank you to the government and the ministers for action on these bills, and I commend this bill to the House.

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