Financial Services and Superannuation Minister Bill Shorten has not yet decided whether to make public regulatory impact statements on financial advice reforms, a spokesman for his office said yesterday.
“No decisions have been made,” the spokesman said.
Asked whether Shorten was considering releasing information on the potential impact of the draft financial advice laws, the spokesman declined to comment.
The government’s planned Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms have prompted industry calls for a full, independent study of FOFA’s potential impact on the industry.
However, Parliamentary Joint Committee (PJC) chairman Bernie Ripoll has said he would not support another study because the work had been completed.
Association of Financial Advisers chief executive Richard Klipin said any previous studies done by the government should be made public.
“If the regulatory statement has been done, put it on the public record,” Klipin said.
“We’d all love to see it. To our knowledge, it hasn’t been done.”
In public hearings last month before the PJC on Corporations and Financial Services, a Treasury representative said the Office of Best Practice Regulation (OBPR) had run out of time to review the six separate regulatory impact statements presented by government.
“The government had made it very clear it wanted to introduce these bills and OBPR took the position that they couldn’t approve them in the time,” Treasury market group executive director Jim Murphy said at the time.
“And so that’s how we end up with this result.”
Also at the hearings, industry representatives estimated industry job losses of up to 35,000 as a result of FOFA.
Opposition treasury spokesman Mathias Cormann has since used the figures when speaking out against certain aspects of the reforms.
Ripoll said the numbers were wrong.
“What we saw out of the public hearings from the inquiry just recently in Sydney were some wild and outrageous figures claiming job losses which were mostly put forward by the opposition,” Ripoll told InvestorDaily.
He cited recent research by Rice Warner which said the industry would grow in dollar terms and number of jobs.
