REBECCA LEVINGSTON:
Twenty‑two minutes to 10. Are you thinking about retiring? You’re not alone. There’s millions of Aussies on the precipice of retirement. How do you know, though, if you’ve got enough money or what to do with your money? Stephen Jones is the Assistant Treasurer of Australia. He’s thinking about retirement, not his but yours. Morning, Stephen.
STEPHEN JONES:
I’m glad you clarified that. Good to be with you, Rebecca.
LEVINGSTON:
Good to have you in Brisbane. Who did you have breakfast with this morning?
JONES:
I was meeting with a bunch of financial advisers, talking to them about what we needed to do to get more advisers, more advice into the industry. You know, in Queensland there’s about a million Queenslanders who are either at or approaching retirement and they’re, because of super, retiring with more money than ever before, because of Medicare and medicines and health care, they’re living longer, but they don’t have access to the advice they need to make that money go well for them.
LEVINGSTON:
Okay. So, a million Queenslanders getting ready to retire. Any idea how many financial advisers exist to give the right kind of advice?
JONES:
In Queensland, 3,224.
LEVINGSTON:
So, not enough.
JONES:
Not enough is the short answer. The numbers just don’t square up.
LEVINGSTON:
Yes.
JONES:
So, I’m looking at this and I’m working out how can we get more advisers into the industry, but also how can we get more information and advice? So I’m looking at superannuation funds as a likely candidate. How can people who often ring their funds and say, “I’m planning for retirement, have I got enough super? What should I be doing? How does it interact with the pension? What about my wife?” And the funds because of the laws we’ve got at the moment say, “Sorry, we can’t answer those questions. You’ll have to go to an adviser”, and the adviser will say to them, “Sorry, my books are full. I can’t help with you that information.”
LEVINGSTON:
Yeah, cause it’s confusing for people and it’s stressful. You’re at that point in your life where you do want to feel like it’s okay to step back from work, but you want to feel comfortable. Pick your crisis at the moment, cost of living, housing, whatever it is. What is the average super balance that Australians are retiring with right now because you said we’re retiring with more money than ever. What is it?
JONES:
Two hundred thousand dollars – that’s real money. Obviously, when you pick an average, there will be a lot of people with a lot of more and a lot of people with a lot less and we’re trying to get that number up so people can have dignified retirement. And 1 July, people’s superannuation clicked over to 11 per cent, so that’s good – sorry, 10.5 per cent. That’s a good thing. And it will move to 12 per cent between now and 2025. Every year it will click up an extra half a per cent. $200,000 is good but even $200,000, you’re going to have a retirement with a blended income of pension and private savings, so therein lies some complexity with the tax system as well, and what about if your partner is still working or if you’ve got a residual mortgage that you have got to pay off? So people need some basic info and advice. I’d rather they got it from someone who knew what they were talking about than going to TikTok or Instagram.
LEVINGSTON:
Yeah. Is there TikTok for superannuation? Probably at the moment. You’re listening to Stephen Jones, who is the Assistant Treasurer in Australia. He is in Brisbane today, had breakfast today with financial advisers keen on ramping up the availability of advice, trusted and accurate advice, that you can get as you approach retirement and I wonder if you’ve got a story to share this morning. Did you get advice on retirement and what to do with your money? Has that played out well for you? If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d love to hear from you. 1300 222 612 or send me a text, 0467 922 612.
Stephen Jones, you said about a million Queenslanders approaching retirement, only about 3,200 – so, that’s registered advisers because you could be registered, but not necessarily practicing in that area, as well. So, the disparity might even be greater.
JONES:
That is right. And, look, here’s the reason: we said after the global financial crisis and after a number of spectacular collapses and some really poor behaviour in the financial advice area, we’ve got to professionalise the industry. We’ve got to put in place new standards. We’ve got to ensure we lift the bar. We didn’t do that just once. We did that about four times. So, the Royal Commission came along and we lifted the bar. So, put in place layer after layer after layer of well‑meaning regulation, which was all designed to protect consumers from bad advice, but what it’s done, it’s also protecting consumers from good advice because there’s just not enough people and not enough avenues to get the advice, and that’s what my job is to fix.
LEVINGSTON:
So, how are you going to remove that red tape?
JONES:
So, I’ve got three jobs of work going on at the moment. The first is about red tape reduction, removing all the obstacles that don’t provide any consumer protection but do make it harder for a licensed financial provider to provide information and advice to consumers. Hopefully, that will enable advisers to bring more customers in but also reduce the prices.
A second job of work is looking at how can we safely provide an environment where superannuation funds can provide information to their members. They stopped doing it in large part because of the reforms put in place over the last decade. We do have to ensure that we’re managing for conflicts of interest. So, don’t want to see a situation where someone is getting a commission for providing advice to somebody to buy a product from a superannuation fund that they work for. So, we’ve got to work through all of those conflicts to ensure that information and advice are being given by a fund that’s absolutely in the interests of the person who’s receiving it. And that’s what I’m dealing with the profession and with superannuation funds and with regulators and consumer groups through at the moment.
But my objective: ensuring that people can make good decisions because they have good information and they’re not going to, I don't know, Instagram influencers who have no license, have no knowledge, have no qualifications, and are providing broad and sometimes dangerous information to people.
LEVINGSTON:
Yep. And we’re all living longer as that new report from the Institute of Health and Welfare revealed this morning – blokes living to just under 80 years and women still outliving them to about 85 years. So, even though Australians retiring with more money, living longer as well, and you want to live well in retirement. That’s part of the goal of Stephen Jones, the Assistant Treasurer. This is ABC Radio Brisbane. My name is Rebecca Levingston.
Can we just pivot to a conversation we kicked off the show this morning with, Stephen? The obligation of banks when customers are getting scammed. And if I could show you my text screen at the moment, you would just see an array of heartbreaking situations, everything from $50 to $600,000. A call from Wayne that actually really just tugged at our hearts this morning. This is him talking about his, sorry, I’ll see if I can get it. There was a bloke who was talking about his wife’s nephew who had a mild intellectual impairment. Ten thousand dollars a day for six days was taken out of his account. He’s now in a hole $60,000. At the moment they haven’t been able to get it back. Should there be more obligation on banks to get that money back?
JONES:
Short answer: yes. But we need to have more obligations also right across the economy. I first got focused on this during the pandemic. I was sitting there like your listeners getting thousands of texts, not thousands, I exaggerate, but definitely hundreds of text messages over that time and scammers, phone calls, emails, the works, and I started saying, “What’s the role of the government in doing something about this?” And I looked at what was happening at that point in time. I was in opposition. Nothing. A little bit of education going on. I was thinking: no, this is not good enough. Turns out $3 billion in the last year lost to scammers, over a quarter of a million reported incidents. It breaks my heart and I’m sure it does you and your listeners. 10 per cent, people with disabilities. We’ve got to do better. So, I’ve got a program of work going on.
This week I announced, last week, sorry, I announced the establishment of a National Anti‑scam Centre. It will have three roles: disruption, education and assistance for scam victims. Locking that down. Now working on codes of practice which will apply in the first instances to banks, telecommunications companies and social media platforms. Why those three? Because they’re the scam operators’ ecosystem and they’ve all got to lift the bar. Banks have got to do more but the problem is the standards are it’s really grey who’s responsible for what. So I want to make it crystal clear. If banks don’t meet their obligations, then yes, they’re on the hook.
LEVINGSTON:
Right. Because, I mean, you’re looking at the UK example now where they’re really about to ramp up and force banks to compensate victims. I mean, some of them have done it voluntarily. A tiny per centage, I think, of the industry here in Australia has done it. I was talking to Michael Atkin earlier this morning, he said even things like slowing the transaction time, would Australia do something like that?
JONES:
Absolutely on the agenda. The whole momentum over the past 10 years is: quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Tap and go, make payments go faster, peer‑to‑peer payments, you know, transact today and it’s in the other person’s account in an hour’s time. That’s great. It makes commerce really efficient. But it also makes scamming efficient. So, we’ve got to slow it down. Some friction in the system. So, the sorts of things you were talking about an example where somebody made four lots of $10,000 transactions out of an account, I’m looking at stuff which is what I would describe as out‑of‑character transactions. If somebody has never spent more than $400 out of an account, you know, per week in their life but all of a sudden is making four lots of – that’s out of character. We should slow that down. We should hold that payment up until we can confirm that it’s deliberate and intended. If there’s, if it’s going to a known scam account, one of the things the National Anti‑scam Centre will do is share information in real‑time when we know that there is a scam activity going on or an account that’s associated with criminal activity, flag that with the bank. If somebody tries to transfer money into that, that’s the type of flag – we would definitely put a hold and slow that one down.
LEVINGSTON:
Yeah, but you could speed up this whole process of accountability by putting your foot down with the banks. Can I take from what you’re saying here that we’re likely to go down the path that the UK has?
JONES:
We’re definitely going to lift the bar and we’re definitely going to ensure that banks are accountable for much more. When we look at what the UK does, we’ll probably look at something which travels in the same direction. In the UK, a) it’s voluntary at the moment. It will move to mandatory. If an individual themselves is liable and has been reckless and all the rest of it, it would be not only unfair but probably dangerous to hold the bank accountable for that, because it means the scammers can just operate with impunity knowing the bank will always underwrite the loss. So, we’ve got to get those rules in place.
And I have sat in and listened back to phone calls where bank operators have tried to talk somebody out of transferring money into an account that they have known was involved in dodgy stuff, and they insisted on doing it. So, you can see just those a couple of examples. I’ve got to work through what the high bar looks like. What the banks are responsible for: slowing down transactions, dodgy accounts, out‑of‑character transactions.
LEVINGSTON:
And over what time frame do you want this work to occur?
JONES:
Consulting over the period between now and Christmas on – not just with banks, with consumer groups and others as well, people with disabilities, first nation, et cetera, ensuring we’ve got a deep consultation process, but I want it up and running next year.
LEVINGSTON:
Stephen Jones, the Assistant Treasurer of Australia. Just a quick text from Tina in Ipswich who says, “I have my bank set up so every transaction is sent to my phone. I think all banks offer this. Everyone should activate it.” That sounds like a pretty simple quick way of just knowing if money is going in or out. Are you familiar with that?
JONES:
Look, there’s lots of things like that you can do. And the National Payment Platform has lots of new functionality which enables banks to switch these functions on or off. I never like to do one of these interviews, Rebecca, without giving out a few tips on the anti‑scamming.
LEVINGSTON:
Go on.
JONES:
Can I be blunt? Don’t press the bloody blue links on your SMSs. That’s a scammers’ paradise. Don’t press the bloody blue links. I’m not saying every one of them is dodgy but scammers operate by sending you a text that looks legitimate. They put a URL, one of those blue links, in there, which takes you off to a website that looks legitimate, and it’s a fake and you upload your information and that’s how they operate. So, tip one: don’t press the bloody blue link.
LEVINGSTON:
I’m going to cut that out and use that as a promotion. Don’t press the bloody blue links. It’s a scam!
JONES:
Tip two: don’t let someone remote access into your computer. So, time after time, I see examples of people who have let somebody – typical scam call goes like this, “I’ve noticed that somebody’s trying to hack into your computer or there’s viral activity on your computer. I’m calling from Telstra, your service provider. Can you just let me access your computer so I can put a firewall up to block this and I’ll put some antivirus software in?” What they’re really doing is, they’re the hacker, they’re the scammer and they’re searching your computer for your banking details. They’re putting tracking software in there. Boom! You’re gone. So, just don’t let somebody do it. Don’t let somebody remote access your computer and don’t give your personal information out, your PIN numbers, all the rest of it. If you just did those three things, we could cut down on a whole bunch of the scam activity that’s going on.
LEVINGSTON:
Good tips. Stephen Jones. All right. I didn’t even mention the fact that you were singing along to Mamma Mia when you entered the studio.
JONES:
That carbon dates me. I think there’s a dance that goes with it as well. I seem to recall, you know, doing something that looked like the bus stop all the way back then.
LEVINGSTON:
Well, I’m saving Dancing Queen up then for after 10 o’clock when I have the Mamma Mia stars in, but I’ll give you another ABBA song to sing along to as you make your way out. Is that okay?
JONES:
Good on you. Great to talk to you.