Efforts supported by the Life Insurance Customer Group (LICG) to push for a change of the constitution of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) to oppose life insurance reforms have failed.
Members of the Association voted against a special resolution, which would have formally committed the AFA to being opposed to any form of Life Insurance Framework reforms, at an Extraordinary General Meeting held by the AFA in Canberra today.
The AFA said 842 votes were received of which 222 (26%) were in support of the resolution and 620 (74%) were against with 138 voting members of the AFA at the meeting.
Most of the votes were received as proxies with 485 proxies opposed to the change and 219 proxies supporting the resolution, which required 75% of members voting at the meeting, in person or via proxy, to support the change.
While the resolution was promoted by members of the LICG in the lead-up to the meeting, AFA and LICG member Mark Dunsford – who initially raised the call for the EGM and gathered proxy votes in favour of the resolution – sought to withdraw it at the start of the EGM.
Outgoing AFA President, Deborah Kent, who acted as chair, accepted the resolution and told members the democratic process called for under the EGM should take place and comments were received from supporters and opponents of the resolution before the vote.
“Once the meeting started the process was that the resolution was rejected by the original person who put it up but as the chair, I accepted the resolution on behalf of the association as I said it was in the best interest of our members,” Kent said.
“There were a lot of members who had voted via proxy both against and for and we felt that the democratic process should take its place and allow the resolution to be upheld and then debated and voted on.”
Kent said the vote was a clear mandate for the AFA and the board under her presidency regarding the work it had done so far regarding the LIF reforms.
The EGM took place at the AFA’s National Adviser Conference and was followed by its Annual General Meeting at which time new members formally took their place on the AFA Board following an election last month.
Very competent president is Ms Kent, hope the. New board listen to their members.
It is still unfortunately a broken AFA when over 30% of the members did not agree and sort change
This should sound alarm bells to the incoming board that the members expect to be included at every adverse turn to ensure that unity is formed and at least 95% agree particularly when their lively hoods family and clients are being jeopardise
I still believe there are far to many advisers that really don’t see the tradgic outcome of thei legislation in its current form or don’t want to?? She’ll be right mate ??
I respectfully recommend the new board look at this again now with hindsight and work to ensure all members concerns are addressed before it comes to this again or worse
Don’t let Thisbe the end of the fight to fight capitalism and keep our democratic right to disagree
At what point did 26% become more than 30?
I guess the really disappointing thing about this is only 222 ( 26%) my apologise ? Out of 3000 LICG members were interested enough to vote Maybe the issue was not everyone’s favourite idea but there are still pressing issues to be addressed before this legislation takes place I can only trust the “interest” factor becomes a bit more urgent when claw backs commission and the so called ” benefits” to the consumer are discussed
Ken the answer is that the others are not members of the AFA and therefore not eligible to vote.
That’s sad too Does not show a lot of faith in the AFA either if your not prepared to join them but prepared to let them make decisions on your behalf.
Fair comment Ken BUT perhaps not to put to fine a point on it membership numbers are a reflection of the performance of the AFA and FPA in the past. Perhaps it was also incumbent on the Government to ensure that the parties consulted in respect to proposed legislative change are in fact the parties impacted by the changes and not organisations where 75% of the membership base are not effected at all or some only marginally.
By the way what happened to every body putting there full name to their comments ??
You’re always going to have a democratic right to disagree, Ken. But those numbers are pretty emphatic. The reality is that when you have a hundred advisers in a room, you’re going to have 100 different opinions.
If the board tries to ‘ensure all members concerns are addressed’ the AFA will never take a position on anything.
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