WHEN IS TERMINAL CANCER NOT ENOUGH?

Dear Parliamentarian, a recent enquiry to ASIC about a terminally ill Adviser demonstrates the absolute brutality the Morrison Government has imposed on the Advice industry over the past 7 years.

After failure of the FASEA entity, Minister Hume moved the functionality of the Legislation to ASIC to administer from 1/1/2022, unfortunately however, the Minister retained the draconian FASEA rules.

It is quite apparent this is an attempt to redirect the vicious FASEA blame outcomes onto ASIC whilst maintaining their objective of removing Advisers to please their donors and trying to stay popular within the industry with an election approaching.

We wish to point out that ASIC are not the executors of this treatment meted out to a terminally ill Adviser, they are bound by the constraints emanating from the Ministers office.

During March of this year, we approached ASIC about an Adviser who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer in the last quarter of 2021 and had commenced an intensive chemotherapy program to survive. At this point the Adviser had failed the FASEA Exam once and needed a second failure by 1/1/2022 to qualify for the 9-month exemption until September 2022 to pass the exam whilst operating the practice. Unfortunately the Adviser was too ill to sit for the final exam opportunity in 2021 and finished 2021 with only one Exam failure.

This is the precise response from ASIC via an email when we requested some leniency for the terminally ill Member –

ASIC is unlikely to grant relief to a person because they were, for example:

• taking a career break;
• taking a break due to health related issues; or
• employed in another role or occupation.  

Yes, these rules are bizarrely unfair and no doubt made ‘on the run’ by Minister Hume.

A terminal illness and subsequent treatment during a global pandemic are apparently not good enough to get some mercy from Minister Hume. The Adviser was then offered a ‘merciful’ pathway by paying $3487 to ASIC for a review which will no doubt takes many months to complete and unlikely to succeed by their own assessment.

In the meantime, this terminally ill Adviser cannot work in the practice [for only failing once], cannot study due to fatigue and must pay ASIC $3465 for an assessment to get a chance of working with clients to feed the family.

The only good news for this Adviser is the treatment has started to work offering hope of survival, but the ongoing treatment precludes studying for an Exam format that has been specifically designed to make Advisers fail.

Unfortunately for this Adviser and thousands of other experienced Advisers, the next termination that are facing is the September 2022 deadline to pass a bizarre, ridiculous and largely irrelevant Exam before they are exterminated from the Industry.

Just the way Minister Hume & Co planned it.

The Minister has discretion with amending the circumstances with the Exam, Minister Hume has unfortunately declined to exercise these powers. It should also be pointed out that ASIC did offer the Adviser an opportunity to submit a preliminary summary of the circumstances for initial assessment/opinion before paying the $3467.

We have passed on the ASIC correspondence to Shadow Stephen Jones’s office for consideration.