QAR first tranche should go further on super advice fees – FSC
Just hours after the Government’s first tranche Quality of Advice Review legislation was introduced to the Parliament yesterday, the Financial Services Council (FSC) was urging amendments.
While welcoming the introduction of the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes legislation, the FSC chief executive, Blake Briggs pointed to the need for amendments around the approval of advice fees within superannuation.
He said the FSC was concerned that, without the amendments, the Government risked “missing the opportunity to remove costly regulatory duplication that currently requires both financial advisers and superannuation trustees to approve advice fee deductions from superannuation accounts”.
“Industry encourages the Assistant Treasurer to make the most of the opportunity to remove onerous duplication and red tape that has contributed to advice becoming unaffordable for millions of Australian consumers,” Briggs said.
“We support the Government’s aim of ensuring more Australians can access financial advice through their superannuation, but despite the many positives in the Bill we are concerned that it will entrench unnecessary obligations on superannuation trustees that would be costly to maintain and act against the delivery of affordable financial advice.
“The FSC encourages the Government to continue to consult through parliamentary processes to address industry’s concerns and to ensure financial advice is more affordable for Australian consumers.”
This Government had pledged to reduce pointless red tape and reduce the cost of advice. So far it’s done nothing to work towards this and now it wants to pass new legislation that would increase massively the red tape and burden on advisers just to get paid! If trustees have to review advice documents to approve each payment it’ll make the system unworkable. Not to mention it’ll be weaponised by funds against external advisers.
Advisers need to be treated as professionals (I thought that was the point of the exam and education requirements) and trusted to act in their clients best interest and charge appropriately. If an adviser is found to be breaching this duty, the consequences should be severe but the starting assumption of guild is not only insulting, it’s adding endless pointless extra work and cost to the 99% of us doing the right thing.
This Government is full of lifelong bureacrats who have never worked in the real world and don’t understand the implications of their half baked ideas. Staggering to think they could be worse than the prior Govt for this industry but we need them gone asap.