Howarth pledges to respect advisers’ ‘professional judgement’

A change of government at the upcoming federal election would be a lot different for financial advisers than the last time the Coalition held office, according to shadow financial services minister Luke Howarth.

Appearing on an upcoming episode of The ifa Show, Howarth acknowledged that there had been Coalition governments that negatively “impacted this industry”.

“For that, I'm sorry, because over the last decade, the advice industry has been overburdened by layers and layers of new regulation, whether it's FOFA or FASEA and the Hayne royal commission, they've all put industry under a lot of pressure,” he said.

“Every minister is different, and one thing I can assure you now is that there has been renewal in the Coalition, and we are under new leadership under Peter Dutton.”

Giving something of a pre-election pitch to the advice community, Howarth said it was important to have a minister that will “tread carefully” when it comes to regulation.

“I know that under a Dutton coalition government … advisers will have a government that respects them and respects their professional judgement and hopefully get out of the way and let them get on with their job,” he added.

“And in the Shadow Treasurer as well, Angus Taylor, I've spoken to him in depth about this. He's a friend of the industry as well as people like Bert Van Manen that also came from the industry.

“I think there's been things done in the past that might have been done differently if I was there, but at the end of the day, I wasn't there and I'm new in this role and I'm sort of out listening to people and want to provide good leadership if we're given the opportunity to govern.”

The shadow minister stressed that he’s not looking to emulate the Albanese government, which he said made “a lot of promises that they haven't lived up to”, aiming instead to take a position of “let's not legislate for the hell of it”.

“I don't want to put in a whole lot of new legislation that's just going to cost Australians more money,” Howarth said.

“I come from the point of view, ‘well, how do we make people more money? How do we give people better advice? How do we reduce costs on sole trader, small business, family business, you know, how do we not push more costs on the people I represent?’

“So, the comments I've made around implementing the Levy review, looking at the Compensation Scheme of Last Resort to make sure that we reduce the annual fee there, those are sort of things that would be a priority for me.”

This extends, he said, to ensuring that the most impactful reforms are enacted quickly, such as reforming statements of advice and the best interest duty.

“We don't want to go back to the drawing board, unless there was specific advice that was going to impact in some way. But from what I've seen, it's about trying to simplify the regulation,” Howarth said.

He added: “We would want to implement quickly what was in that Levy review. And after speaking to many advisers, it is purely about reducing red tape and reducing costs. That's important and I think we would do that quickly.”

To hear more from Luke Howarth, tune in to our podcast from Thursday afternoon.