AIOFP pens ‘direct and candid’ open letter to opposition leader Dutton

The Association of Independently Owned Financial Professionals’ (AIOFP) executive director Peter Johnston has penned an open letter to opposition leader Peter Dutton following news that the party are undergoing an internal review to assess where it can improve.

In the open letter, Mr Johnston provided “some direct and candid feedback” where he outlined a number of areas where the Liberal party went “so terribly wrong” with advice-related policies.

Mr Johnston pointed at a number of “draconian” legislation such as FASEA and the life insurance framework (LIF) that he argued were brought in to “frustrate and intimidate” Australian advisers.

“The FASEA Exam concept is a bizarrely structured strategy to remove Advisers from the industry,” the open letter reads.

“Where else in the education global universe do students have to fail twice [not once] before they can sit for a final exam attempt to stay in the industry? Over 1,000 predominately over 50s advisers are facing elimination from the industry on October 1st if they do not pass a Masters level three-hour exam on ethics where the questions have been designed to be ambiguous at best to fail them.

“There are hundreds of age 60-plus advisers who have physical complications with eyesight or IT skills who are stressed out because they have not sat for an exam for literally decades – but they are very good at their craft.”

The open letter comes after Mr Johnston challenged the Albanese government to act quickly on making an impact in the advice sector, calling for “minimum 50 per cent” of regulation imposed on the industry in recent years to be wiped out.

“It could be done in a day,” he said during a recent appearance on the ifa Show podcast.

“It doesn’t have to go on for months and months and months with bureaucrats. It should be people from the industry – people from AFCA representing consumers and people from ASIC. They could sit in a room in an afternoon and point out all the stuff which is just ridiculously useless and just get rid of it.”

On the same episode, Mr Johnston argued that there is “no doubt”  the 13 associations that are currently active in the industry is too many.

“There's 13 associations, it is ridiculous. Now, if you compare that to the mortgage brokering industry, there's two. They both got on and they got it fixed,” he said.

“Canberra sits back and says, ‘[the advice industry] are just a rabble.’

“So it's got to be rationalised. We go back about four years ago, there was 30,000 member advisers back then. Now there's 17,000, there's still 13 associations. Something’s got to give.”

Listen to the full podcast with Mr Johnston here.

Neil Griffiths

Neil is the Deputy Editor of the wealth titles, including ifa and InvestorDaily.

Neil is also the host of the ifa show podcast.