The AIOFP shares KOOYONG LESSONS

“The Liberal Party’s Amelia Hamer has conceded defeat in the seat of Kooyong after an intense, week-long battle with independent Monique Ryan. It’ll be the teal independent’s second term in parliament after she took the seat from former federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg in 2022.”

ABC Website

Now that the Seat of Kooyong has been held by the Teals with a wafer thin margin, we will respond to Member and external questions about our role in this Seat after our 2022 political activities.

The experience we have had trying to deal with the Liberal Party over the past 6 months has been astonishingly chaotic, it is no wonder the ALP totally outplayed them when it counted. The short answer is we did not play any role this time around, but we tried to….

In 2022 we put in place a strategy to recommend Frydenberg being positioned last on the ballot to 280 Financial Advisers living in the Kooyong electorate and assumed they had 50 clients also in the seat – that’s 14,280 potential votes. No doubt this played a role in helping the TEALS to seize control of the Seat, but after the negative role Frydenberg played in our Professions demise from 2014 to 2022 we were pleased to see him evicted regardless of who won the seat.

Please note we have never dealt with the Teals at any time, they are now an even larger waste of political space.

You may recall in late 2021 then Minister Hume was trying to ram the CSLR Legislation through the Senate with the current conditions before the Election to please their Institutional supporters via the FSC. In response we distributed the Frydenberg 2019 Document [page 36 of the attached] recommending the original CSLR conditions as prescribed by Hayne and Ramsay be maintained a day before the vote to the Senate cross benches and the legislation was subsequently rejected.

Hume then declared her hatred for the AIOFP [but really just me], despite only fleetingly meeting her once within a group many years ago.

Since last December we had tried to contact Liberal candidate for the Kooyong Seat Amelia Hamer on numerous occasions to offer a fund raising lunch in her Electorate and support from local Financial Advisers, much the same as we did for Tim Wilson. We even went back via Liberal HQ to get Ms Hamers attention to no avail. We had AIOFP members ready to attend a lunch and still had the data base of 280 Advisers to contact which could have made a difference. Considering Ms Hammer is predicted to lose by around 300 votes, we could have been a decisive influence in the outcome.

Lessons learnt? This scenario demonstrates the AIOFP can be a significant political player and the more Canberra realises this the better for our Profession and consumers. The final piece in the puzzle of Ms Hamer’s behaviour is she was one of Senator Hume’s recent Advisers…..Now that’s a clear case of ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face’!