Opposition assistant treasury spokesman Mathias Cormann has agreed with industry chiefs that Australia's financial advice sector needs to take tougher action if it is to rid the industry of 'bad apples'.
Cormann made the comments as part of his address to the 'No More Practice' live event in Sydney yesterday.
"It's easy to get distracted by generic commentary that is not necessarily always based on fact and sort of get intimidated in terms of the way you approach things," Cormann said.
"I guess my one message to you here today is to be confident about what you do and be quite assertive. Yes of course when there are things that go wrong, and if there are bad apples, there should be strong action against that."
In a panel session immediately before Cormann's address, Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia chief executive Pauline Vamos raised the issue of Australia's financial advisory sector still engaging with "many bad apples".
"The majority [of advisers] are great but you've got many bad apples and people talk about those bad apples and what you really need to do is to have a concerted effort to get rid of them," Vamos said.
"I still see, and I deal with a lot of adviser groups, they get rid of an adviser and know where the adviser has gone to yet they haven't rung the new head of the dealer group and said 'this guy is a crook?'"
When asked whose role it was to rid the sector of below par participants, she said it was "the industry's role".
"If we really want to improve the industry then you've got to do that. You've got to ring ASIC, you've got to ring the dealer group," she said.
"You've got to really try and get these people out of the industry because you're never going to get anywhere if you don't."
Association of Financial Advisers chief executive Richard Klipin agreed with Vamos.
"If there are people that we know are doing the wrong thing and are breaching the law and they continually to breach the law then they have to be exited from the industry and so we've got to get better at that," Klipin said.
"So I think the landscape for mine is a collaborative one and so we don't have bad apples, if you like, heading from one place to another.
"But overall the conversations that we've having with young kids who are at university doing bachelor degrees is fabulously positive. We've just got to make sure they come into an industry that has a robust future."
FPA chief executive Mark Rantall said it was unanimous that the bad apples have "got to go", stating that it's "all our responsibility".
Asked whether the panel believed the industry was working in a collaborative manner for the "noble cause" - getting advisers to act at every level of the food chain, Klipin said it was not yet at that point.
"Of course we're not there. We sat in front of the Productivity Commission last week and we presented after the ISN [Industry Super Network] presented. There are still all of these sectional turf wars, everyone has their own patch to protect," he said.
"The reality is, if we actually get our act together, irrespective of whether we're in the not-for-profit sector, the big instos or the advice chain, ultimately we're all going to win because we're delivering more and better outcomes to the entire community rather than trying to fit for a sectional piece of it.
"So if there is one thing that this part of the market has got to learn out of the FOFA [Future of Financial Advice] piece it's that if we're not united we will be wedged, we will be divided and we will be conquered and in a sense we'll have our own ability to drive our own future taken away from us."
Rantall said he is convinced that, as an industry, "we've got to step back when we're talking about collaboration".
"We talk about industry and we use that terminology really loosely and I think what's going to evolve is that there is a difference between industry and a profession," he said.
"A profession is something that's yours, you own it, the individual owns it. Nobody else owns it other than the individual and I think that the younger generation is desperate to come into a profession where they can be respected."
