‘We’re on track and we’re on time’, Minister Jones says on QAR

“So many of these things are out of my control,” he told ifa.

“There might be another, hopefully, there isn’t, but another unforeseen thing that the whole of government has to focus on which pushes things out of the current queue.”

What the minister did, however, say is that everything is currently “on track”.

“Everything I know at the moment means that we are on track for this raft to be introduced in the first parliamentary session, sort of in the first quarter of next year, plus our next lot of draft legislation out and available in industry in early 2024 and back in Parliament in 2024,” the minister said.

“We’re on track to meet the timelines we’ve been discussing.”

Complexities with SOAs

The complexity of SOAs is that they have tentacles into other areas of advice regulation, according to the minister.

“Every time you think you have something in isolation, like your statements of advice, you realise that the driver of that is the safe harbour test, and the best interest duty which we were always going to deal with in tranche two, and we can’t do one without the other,” Mr Jones said.

“We’re pretty sure we know what we want to do but we haven’t got all detail consulted. In short, every time you pick at this you find there’s an interconnected bit that needs to be dealt with.”

For SOAs to have formed the first tranche of the government’s legislation, Mr Jones said a step in the consultation process would have needed to be skipped.

“What we’ve attempted to do is consult deeply with people on policy design and legislation design, and we would have to have basically skipped a step and didn’t want to do that,” the minister said.

And while consultation with industry regarding SOAs has wrapped up, the minister said he still needs to get the whole government to comply with the changes.

“We’re pretty certain that we know what we want to do here, we’ve then got to make sure that the whole of government is locked in behind that, and then announce what we want to do.”

Despite the myriad complexities, Mr Jones assured that “you won’t have to wait much longer”.

Legislation is not always the issue

Speaking to ifa last week, the chief executive officer of the Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA), Sarah Abood, said that parts of the Corporations Act that dictate the make-up of SOAs are not “too terrible”.

“What’s in the Corps Act is important and sets the tone, and sets the scene, but the way those laws are implemented is also very important and it’s been observed by many that what’s in the Corps Act currently is not too terrible. When you read it, it seems fair enough, and yet somehow, we’ve ended up with 80, sometimes 100-plus page SOAs,” Ms Abood explained.

Mr Jones acknowledged this on Wednesday and said that while it’s his job to work on the legislation, it’s the licensees’ role to enforce the law and refrain from moving beyond it.

“When licensees come to me and say, ‘Things are broken, we can’t make the system work’, I say, ‘Great, I’m going to work on the [legislation], but you’ve got a big job to do as well because you are the guys that are setting the standard rules, forms, processes to your cohort’,” Mr Jones explained.

“We’re [the government] dealing with the regulators, the licensees, the product manufacturers as a group, and we say to them, ‘You can’t all say there’s a problem, and you want things to change but you won’t change the way you’re doing things as well’.”

The government is consulting on the first tranche of legislation until 6 December. After that’s wrapped up, the minister expects the policy confirmation of the details on SOAs and other elements of the second tranche to be released before Christmas, with further legislation to be put to consultation next year.