Our Policies

The availability and affordability of life insurance advice is essential to ensuring Australians can make informed decisions about the life insurance products that best suit them.

CALI supports the elements of the Federal Government’s Delivering Better Financial Outcomes package announced in June and December 2023, which includes measures to support Australian consumers by:

• enabling life insurers to provide Australians with limited advice on their own products, ensuring they can provide answers for simple questions when people ask
• making it easier for superannuation trustees to provide advice to working people, including about life insurance held within their superannuation
• removing red tape and improving transparency around the commissions advisers receive on products.

Australian consumers can seek advice about life insurance from a range of sources but for many people, getting that advice is too expensive or too inaccessible. There are just 16,000 financial advisers to turn to across the country and just 1,000 who are helping people navigate life insurance products.

This has resulted in an unmet financial advice need for working Australians and a growing underinsurance problem that is leaving people unprotected when times get tough. Where a consumer does not wish to engage a financial adviser, they should be able to ask life insurers directly for simple advice about their products.

Currently, it is challenging for life insurers to respond adequately to enquiries. They are wary of providing advice that could be perceived as ‘personal’ and incur penalties for non-compliance to strict industry-wide regulatory obligations. As a result, life insurers are only able to provide generic product information and tell people to engage the services of a financial adviser instead.