Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) | Hansard source

With respect, Minister, I suppose we are receiving different advice, which is that there are real impediments to trustees obtaining the necessary information to make the decisions as imagined in your scheme. I'm asking you whether you have any concerns about that. I know that you've worked in the sector; you often make that point in debates about superannuation. It just strikes me that what you've established is an arrangement where funds are already writing letters to one cohort of people and trying to get them to write back and opt in. We all know how difficult it is to get anybody to engage, on a paper basis, with questions about long-range financial planning. That's not an optimal set of relationships between trustees and their members. On top of that, you've now established a circumstance where the only way that a trustee may ensure that a group of vulnerable workers are provided with group insurance is, by your evidence, to individually write to them and ask them about their occupation so that can then be matched up against some set of categories that has been established elsewhere. It seems a very clunky way to proceed, and the advice to Labor from many of the stakeholders we are speaking to is that it will present real impediments—that this is going to be very difficult to implement and will not provide the sorts of protections that you assert it will provide for vulnerable people.