You've probably seen the news.
Over the weekend, [Labor/the Coalition] secured a [decisive/tentative] victory in the federal election. [Defying all odds/in a surprising rebuke to exit poll figures/in line with most predictions/as foretold in prophecy], [Anthony Albanese/Peter Dutton] has been [elected/reelected] as prime minister.
While it's hard to say definitively until we've gotten a clearer picture of the government's policy priorities over the next 100 days, it's widely believed that financial advisers, as a voting bloc, played a pivotal role in the 2025 election outcome.
So: what does [Labor’s/the Coalition’s] win mean for financial advice?
Perhaps we should consult with the outgoing Financial Services Minister. Not long ago, Stephen Jones emerged to offer some words of wisdom to his successor before returning to the loam: he said it would take just “six more months” to complete the advice reform project that began with his government’s 2023 response to the Quality of Advice Review.
Jones explained that because he'd spent so much time "getting that technical detail right," the new minister would be left with the "easier stuff" – i.e., getting the laws through parliament.
Maybe he’s right: just like arsenic, diluting your reform agenda to homeopathic concentrations makes it much easier to pass through the body (or body politic) without significant risk of injury1. But as we all know, the Delivering Better Financial Outcomes package isn’t the only policy priority for the advice sector.
Fortunately, Jones said six months would be enough time to complete both DBFO and “a couple more [projects].” Of course, he also said DBFO implementation details would be finalised “in the coming weeks” back in June 2023, so we have to account for the possibility that his definition of six months doesn’t align with the Gregorian calendar – nor the conventional laws of spacetime.
With that in mind, it would be wise for advisers to temper their expectations about the new minister’s ability to implement meaningful reforms by the end of the calendar year. And by “temper," to be clear, I mean “eliminate."
That’s a bit of a downer ending, though, isn’t it? Sure, we had some fun at the start with the placeholder election outcome bit (assuming you weren’t under the impression I’d accidentally published last week’s draft copy), but tying things off with a convoluted “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” isn’t a great start to anyone’s Thursday.
You might even be wondering why I opened the piece that way if this is where we’d end up. Was it a salve, like a lollipop before a root canal2? Have I been writing about advice law for so long that I’ve resorted to creative formatting just to engender a fleeting sense of novelty? Is this a deliberate attempt to sabotage any plans to strain my Advisely contributions through the bowels of some LLM?
Perhaps. But maybe I was also (very cleverly) satirising the exact kind of piece that comes out after every election – the ones that require you to buy into the fiction that the writer can explain “what it all means for advice” with any confidence.
You know what I’m talking about: they usually start with the nut graf detailing the most important facts about the election outcome. Then there’s typically a short biography of the incoming Financial Services Minister or a rundown of the incumbent minister’s achievements to date.
After that, they’ll often include a bulleted list of “quick wins” or “wishlist items” or whatever, and then they close up with some variation of “time will tell." Cue CTA, share buttons and a “related content” preview link about an ASIC ban from 2022.
You don’t need that. I don’t need that. And I’m beginning to think the implicit premise of these articles – that the future of the profession will necessarily be determined in Canberra every three years – might be a bit flawed.
I don’t say this to dismiss urgent concerns like the CSLR levy, nor to minimise the enormous efforts advisers (and professional associations) have put towards regulatory reform. But if we were to operate under the assumption that the future of advice won’t be decided by fiat, what could that future look like?
To me, that’s a far more interesting question. And it was Nathan Fradley’s video, published on Advisely two weeks ago, that really got me thinking about it.
If you haven’t seen it, Fradley takes aim at one of the more widespread industry bromides – namely, that the mega-SOA is a necessary evil brought on by an over-zealous regulator – and compares common assumptions with the actual text of ASIC’s regulatory guidance. He suggests that if an SOA ends up being longer than RG 175 itself (which is 103 pages), “maybe something’s wrong.”
You should watch the full video to get Fradley’s thoughts on the topic, but I also wanted to highlight how he frames the problem in terms of “anchoring value." He argues that the outsized focus on SOAs (and what they need to contain) makes it easy to fall into the trap of selling documentation rather than expertise.
This is obviously just one example, and the legislative framework around financial advice means that some industry concerns can’t be addressed without an Act of parliament. But I do think there’s fertile ground here for Advisely (and its team of expert contributors) to explore how the profession can define and sustain itself regardless of who’s currently unpacking the air fryer in Kirribilli House.
Should take us around six months, I’d say.
Advisely Team