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Ex-NSW premier joins insurer MetLife ahead of commissions fight
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US-based insurance group MetLife has recruited former NSW premier Nathan Rees from the Finance Sector Union to run government and regulator relations for its Australian outpost.
The former Labor leader and union boss, who served as the state’s premier from September 2008 to December 2009, has joined MetLife Australia as head of external affairs and public policy after a three-year stint as the FSU’s national assistant secretary.
As Finance Sector Union deputy, Nathan Rees recruited self-employed financial advisers.
Elke Meitzel
The appointment comes as the life insurance industry is preparing for yet another regulatory review of commission payments made to financial advisers for selling insurance products.
Less than an hour after Labor’s Stephen Jones said insurance commissions were “a problem”, Liberal MP and ex-planner Bert van Manen called them a “perfectly valid form of remuneration”. Despite his endorsement, financial services minister Jane Hume says the government will also wait on the LIF review's findings before making a call on the issue.
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Financial planners are more often kicked than heaped with bouquets in the Federal Parliament and so when politicians come along prepared to listen to financial planners and challenge the positions and decisions of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission then they are much to be treasured.
And in recent years financial planners found some parliamentarians prepared, if not to champion their cause, then to at least not condemn them out of hand to question why financial planners were having to deal with presumed guilt even when events were perpetrated by accountants, product manufacturers or lawyers.
And among the parliamentarians to have given financial planners are fair hearing were the Liberal Member for the Sydney Northern Beaches seat of Mackellar, Jason Falinski, Queensland Liberal backbencher and former financial adviser, Bert Van Manen, and, of course, the somewhat pugnacious Queensland Senator, Amanda Stoker.
The first federal parliamentary sitting days are thrown into confusion by the new case of coronavirus in Perth, with West Australian politicians arriving in Canberra instructed to immediately quarantine and get tested.