Hands up those who think fees should be disclosed to all clients of financial planners.
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Hands up if the next time you walk in to your local bank branch you are happy to be harangued by a teller about a complex investment, where the teller stands to receive a secret bonus for closing the sale.
Hands up if you think it is too much to ask of financial planners to actually make contact with their clients at least once every two years and ask if they want to continue the relationship.
Seems like commonsense, doesn't it. But the banks and AMP do not see it like that. They have been waging a campaign against the previous Labor government's Future of Financial Advice laws.
Thankfully, as it turns out for consumers, their counter-attack against the consumer protections struck terrible timing.
At about the same time as Commonwealth Bank was pushing all of its levers to get a wind-back of consumer protections, one of the biggest scandals ever in financial planning was unfolding at the bank.
And just this month a senate committee was holding public hearings into the collapse of a managed forestry scheme called Timbercorp.
While the trees were never planted, the financial advisers received their commissions. The investments in Timbercorp were made with loans from ANZ.
At about the same time that victims were telling their stories to the senate committee, ANZ was unveiling another record profit.
Sure, what changed is that crossbench senators including Jacqui Lambie and Ricky Muir changed their minds on supporting the rollback after hearing from Timbercorp victims.
Led by Labor senator Sam Dastyari and independent senator Nick Xenophon, the Senate last week voted to overturn the Coalition's rollback.
That means we are back to Labor's original 2013 reforms. Predictably, the big banks, through their lobby groups, are screaming blue murder.
They thought they had the rollback in the bag, once and for all, and through the good offices of Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, had succeeded in playing consumers for suckers.
Despite saying how they want certainty, the banks, who employ most of the planners, will only settle for certainty on their terms. They will not rest.
Expect to hear from the banks' lobby groups about how the cost of advice is going to go up because their costs will be higher and how the best-interest test creates legal uncertainty.
Under Labor's original best-interest test, planners are required by law to put their clients' best interests ahead of their own.
There is a series of steps advisers have to take to satisfy the test, plus a "catch-all" that says the planner must do whatever else is necessary to put their clients' interests before their own.
The Coalition's rollback included the removal of the catch-all. Advisers doing the right thing have nothing whatsoever to fear from the catch-all.
But it does strengthen the hand of the regulator to pursue legal action against planners who do the wrong thing. Guess what? That is just what consumers expect. Hands up to that.
