STEPHEN JONES:
Well, great to be with you this morning, and great to be joined by this amazing bunch of colleagues – my favourite colleagues – together with Dr Jane Tiller from Monash University, and I’ll explain the reason for that in a moment. Because this morning the Labor government is releasing its consultation document on the treatment of genetic testing information in life insurance.
Most people would be unaware that the Disability Discrimination Act provides an exemption, a general exemption, in relation to discrimination that enables insurers, life insurers, to utilise the data from genetic testing information in relation to their rating of insurance premiums and, in fact, their offering of life insurance.
We know that there’s a lot of community concern about this. A lot of community concern about discriminating on the basis of a genetic condition when offering a life insurance product. The Albanese government is concerned to ensure two things: firstly, that we don’t have provisions within our law which discourage people from getting genetic tests and then having the treatments or the interventions that are necessary if they discover that they’ve got a medical condition or a predisposition. We want to encourage people to be able to do that and we don’t want to have provisions within our law or within our economy which discourage that.
But we also want to ensure that life insurance, as a means of protecting yourself and your family against risks, death, disability, income protection, that these provisions are available to everyone, and people with certain disabilities or genetic predispositions aren’t discriminated against.
So, we're commencing a consultation on how we will deal with this. So, today I’m releasing this options paper on how we might take this forward. And you can assume the reason that we’re releasing this options paper is we’re deeply – we share the concerns that the community has. We’re deeply concerned about it, and we want to work with the community organisations that have expressed their concerns about potential and actual discrimination. We also want to work with the industry, the life insurance industry, because we want to ensure that the way we structure the law in this industry encourages everyone to take out protection against life’s risks.
Happy to take questions.
JOURNALIST:
Minister, how does Australia compare to other countries like Canada and the UK? How do our laws compare to them? Are we better or worse?
JONES:
You’d have to say we’re behind the pack. And when I looked at this, one of the things that moved me to accept the recommendations and consider the recommendations of the excellent report that has been done by Monash University was that we are out of step with other like jurisdictions. We think, after a consultation process, we should consider the best ways to deal with this, but nobody should be under any illusion that if Australia acts to remove this exemption, that we’d be a standout in the rest of the world. We wouldn’t be.
JOURNALIST:
How long is this likely to take until we can see some action?
JONES:
This time of year, obviously we’re running out of runway to do it now and the end of the year. So, the consultation until the end of January (2024) and then we’ll take the results from that and, you know, government will do the regular consideration that we do and any legislation necessary. So that will take a bit of time, but we’re committed to this consultation process. We wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t intend to do something.
JOURNALIST:
To be aiming for maybe this time next year?
JONES:
Well, these are matters for government to consider in the normal course of events. And there’s a lot on at the moment, as you would know. But one thing I can guarantee you is the colleagues that I have behind me have been pushing for action on this ever since I became the minister. And in the case of Deb O’Neill, I know that she was a part of a joint parliamentary committee that looked at this issue several years ago in the previous government and encouraged previous governments to take action on that. In the case of Josh Burns, conducted a number of community meetings with his constituency. So, I know that these people are going to be pushing government to ensure that we get action.
JOURNALIST:
Is there any evidence that people are currently suffering discrimination? Monash University has done a report. Does that find that that is the case?
JONES:
The Monash University report – Jane’s here from Monash; you may want to separately ask her some questions. The Monash University report provides a good basis on which government can take some action. And what is clear from that report, and from other conversations that we’ve had, is that there is some reticence within the community to get necessary genetic tests because they have an apprehension that they may have their life insurance affected by that. So, there’s a general apprehension within the community. And that’s at the core of it. You know, we want – if Australians have access to the benefits of genetic testing and the new and novel medical procedures that are available, we don’t want them to be dissuaded from accessing that information and those treatments because of arrangements with life insurance or other products.
JOURNALIST:
The current moratorium has an upper limit of about $500,000 for life insurance. I mean, in this day and age, is that enough to, you know, help you cover the cost of housing, your mortgage or anything if something goes wrong?
JONES:
One of the things that’s minded me to take this another step forward is the limitations within the existing industry code, whether it’s the thresholds or the knowledge across industry or amongst consumers about the operation of that code. There is an option that is included within the consultation paper to let things run, maybe update the code or to just legislate the code or to do something different. And that’s what we want community feedback on, whether, for example, the thresholds are sufficient or the way that the code is operating is sufficient.
I guess you can take it as read that we wouldn’t be initiating this consultation process if we didn’t want to dig into those issues.
JOURNALIST:
So, the punters affected by this are up against the big financial might of the insurance industry. Can you give some guarantee that the government will come down on the side of individuals rather than big money in this instance?
JONES:
I just ask you to take a look at what we’ve done in the first 18 months of this government in the area of consumer protection. The unfair contracts legislation, which we legislated in our first six months, came into effect about four weeks ago giving the ACCC the power to take action on the side of consumers where big businesses are issuing standard form contracts which are basically anti‑consumer.
The stuff we’ve done in the area of scams and consumer protection to ensure that we’ve established a National Anti‑Scam Commission. Early days yet, but the first quarterly report that I released this morning shows that it’s working, and we’ve actually had a reduction in the moneys lost to scams for the first time in years. The stuff that we’re doing in so many – the competition stuff that my colleague Andrew Leigh is working on, the stuff that I’m doing in the area of financial advice, the stuff that I’m doing around lifting the standards of service provision in the superannuation industry, the legislation of the compensation scheme of last resort – I could go on and on and on. We’ve got a consultation out at the moment in relation to digital platforms. All of this builds a picture of a government which is committed to ensure that our laws are pro‑consumer, and the enforcement of those laws are pro‑consumer and what we do in the area of life insurance will be coming from the same place – pro‑consumer. Thanks so much.