ANOTHER FRYDENBERG FIZZER

10 December 2020

The sorry saga of the Government’s bumbling attempts to bring order to the financial advice industry has another chapter.

The Government has closed the door on Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA), admitting it has been an abject failure just three years after establishing it.

Buried deep in the Treasurer’s mumbo-jumbo press release about “streamlining” the industry was the acknowledgment FASEA is to be wound up.

Labor has been hounding the Government about the failure of FASEA since its inception.

It bungled the development of standards tests for financial advisers at the very time the Hayne Royal Commission was shining a spotlight on the need for an overhaul of a workforce which was struggling to make the transition from a salesforce to a profession.

The Ripoll Review of 2009 identified the need to improve standards in the financial advice industry. But it took the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Government another six years to legislate FASEA and another 11 years to decide to close it down.

Between the Government’s bungled Future of Financial Advice reforms and this latest fail, the setting and policing of standards in the industry is still in turmoil.