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

I don't think that it is reasonable to say that trustees, particularly in some of the better performing funds, are not interested or engaging with their members. In fact, the written evidence to the committee around this bill, from a number of trustees, was that they had reached out as part of the Protecting Your Super reforms, they got high levels of responses relative to other kinds of things that they tried to do and they worked very hard to engage on the questions that the government has required them to engage on in the way anticipated by the last tranche of legislation that we dealt with. But there is a limit to how this approach can work, and you know there's a limit. You know that there are only so many email blasts that you can send out that anyone at all will respond to. I do think that government has an obligation to deal with the informational overload that consumers experience in relation to a whole range of things, specifically in relation to financial products.

I come back, again, to the counterfactual. There are other ways that funds could be enabled to receive the data that would allow them to make responsible decisions consistent with their duties as trustees, and your advice to the chamber is that government didn't contemplate these. Your advice is that, instead, you've stubbornly persisted with a mechanism that is clunky and difficult and swims against the tide of human psychological reality. Humans are not going to engage. People are not going to engage with the process as you describe it. It just seems to me clunky and difficult. I'm not sure that we're going to get very much further on it, but I do wish to place on record how impractical this is and my disappointment that government is being so stubborn in just dealing with real-world realities on this front.