Advisers must engage government for better regulation

Speaking at the 2018 FSC Summit in Melbourne on Wednesday, UNSW law professor and former ASIC Queensland regional commissioner Pamela Hanrahan said      the regulatory scheme needs to be overhauled to remove problematic “trivia and exceptions”, but added this is unlikely to happen.

“The most difficult thing for politicians to do will be to reduce the amount of nonsense, counterproductive legislation we have at the moment,” she said.

“The last thing they’re going to do is come out of the royal commission to say to the general public ‘we’re going to get rid of three-quarters of this regime’, but we will never fix it until we do.”

Ms Hanrahan said that in the future, advisers will need to engage with regulators with a view to producing more useful regulation.

“We need to think really constructively about how we can get better quality regulation, how do we provide politicians with the cover and the support that they can trust what the industry says and not get hijacked,” she said.

“Think about participating in a constructive, non-self-interested way to get better quality regulations.”