It is approaching a month since the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, promoted Kelly O’Dwyer to Assistant Treasurer and into the Cabinet, and financial services lobbyists have been finding that there has been more than just a change of minister.
What those lobbyists have found is that, somewhat unusually, O’Dwyer has inherited only a few of the key financial services specialist staffers who had advised her predecessor, Josh Frydenberg, who was also promoted into the Cabinet as Minister for Resources, Energy and Northern Australia.
Surprising some observers, Frydenberg’s chief of staff, former Financial Services Council (FSC) staffer and BT Financial Group Head of Government and Industry Affairs, Martin Codina, opted to move out of the financial services arena by following his boss into the new portfolio. So did a number of Codina’s team.
What this has meant for groups such as the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA), the Financial Planning Association (FPA) and, indeed, the FSC is that they are now dealing with some new faces as they attempt to continue discussion around issues such as the Life Insurance Framework (LIF) and grapple with their various approaches to the Financial System Inquiry (FSI) and the findings of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services Inquiry into proposals to lift the professional, ethical and education standards in the financial services industry.
While a change of minister and some ministerial personnel should not, ordinarily, significantly alter the dynamics of an issue such as the LIF Process, those within the AFA, FPA and FSC who have been heavily involved in the process can vouch for the degree to which Frydenberg and his team were responsible for setting both the tone and the tempo.
There is no debate about the degree to which the former Assistant Treasurer made his expectations clear to the participants and laid out the timetable which he expected to be met. The bottom line is that the Frydenberg timetable was significantly advanced by the time the Cabinet changes occurred and he was required to pass responsibility to O’Dwyer.
At the time of going to press, while all of the major stakeholders in the LIF process had made contact with O’Dwyer’s office, the minister had still not held formal meetings with the parties to outline her views on the issue.
Importantly, the AFA has continued to call for clarity around some of the fine detail of the LIF arrangements, not least the claw-back and what really constitutes “churn”.
It will therefore fall to O’Dwyer and her advisory team to assess whether the final shape of the framework provides an equitable and sustainable outcome.
While the minister is not expected to seriously depart from the broad course pursued by her predecessor on the LIF, a number of statements from Turnbull and his new Treasurer, Scott Morrison, have given the major financial services lobby groups food for thought on other key policy fronts, not least superannuation tax concessions.
Where former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott and former Treasurer, Joe Hockey, maintained the Government’s pre-election mantra that there would be no adverse policy changes to superannuation, Turnbull and Morrison have acknowledged that many of the tax options are back on the table.
