Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

GG () (): Financial advice is now virtually unaffordable in Australia. The average piece of financial advice costs $5,000. That is largely a result of enormous regulatory costs which have been placed upon small businesses. The government have done nothing to improve the affordability and accessibility of financial advice, and the minister, Stephen Jones, who sat on its hands for 12 months without a policy, has said that there will be some reforms, maybe by 2024. This is going to make a bad situation even worse. You have a government that is not prepared to move to ensure people can get financial advice. Of course, the government's idea for financial advice is we get it all from our super fund, because, in the government for vested interests, the only people those opposite get out of bed for are the unions and the super funds. It is a distorted way of thinking and a very sick approach to being the government of Australia.

One of the consequences of this is the government has allowed a new tax to be placed on small financial planning businesses. Now every single financial advisor has been forced to pay $3,200 to ASIC rather than just $1,000, so it is a massive increase and massive new tax on individual advisors because the government has allowed ASIC to place this new tax on these small businesses. All that means is that people will not be able to afford to get financial advice, the regulatory cost on these businesses will be crippling, and there will be fewer and fewer advisors and higher and higher costs in the future.