Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones has urged brokers to “lean into” their code of practice review and learn from sectors where governments had to step in to resolve issues.

“If we have problems across any of the financial advice areas, and those problems are generating consumer harms, a government will have to act,” he told the National Insurance Brokers Association pre-election breakfast yesterday.

“We’ve got plenty of things on our plate at the moment, so we encourage you to lean into the process of improving the code of practice, and modernising and updating the code of practice.

“We have seen the results of inaction in other areas where professions have failed to modernise and failed to lean into very real challenges that exist across industries.”

Mr Jones, who is not standing at tomorrow’s federal election, noted in one of his last speeches as a Labor minister that brokers do not feature highly in Australian Financial Complaints Authority disputes. 

“We think brokers play an absolutely critical role in dealing with information asymmetry in a marketplace where insurance is under stress, and where the price of insurance is creating stresses on businesses and households,” he said.

Mr Jones said that, more broadly, in the past three years he has focused on financial advice problems, particularly around retirement, after past reforms failed to achieve results.  

“What we’d done is created this Meccano set of regulation. Every single bit of it on its own made sense, but collectively what it did was not only protect consumers from bad advice, it protected them from any advice, and nobody can say that was a good outcome.”

He is confident there is enough momentum behind current reforms to ensure a better advice industry and more “safe doors” for people to access advice, although work is ongoing.

“We are about two-thirds of the way through on that project. I’m a big advocate for four-year terms because if we had another year on this term, that project will have been completed.”

Other speakers at the NIBA event in Sydney included independent MP Zali Steggall and NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg.

Submissions to the independent review of the NIBA code of practice close today.

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