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7th August 2019
The Hon Mathias Cormann MP
Minister for Finance
The Sterling Newlife Debacle
Dear Sir
I have no doubt you have been briefed on the Sterling debacle, so I will not go into details here, however I would like to put forward a number of points
Australians are very generous people, we are very quick to help other countries in time of disasters. We also give generously to other countries in the form of monetary aid, examples of this is Indonesia $300 million per year, Palestinians $43million a year (despite the fact they want to kill us). In fact Australia will spend over $4 billion dollars this year on overseas aid.
I do not object to this as we are a wealthy country, however I do object to your helping others to the detriment of our own people
One group of people who need assistance are the Sterling Newlife retirees, of which my wife and I are among their number. After much due diligence we invested in a life time lease in June of 2018. One of the things I did was to go into the ASIC website to see if there were any warnings and found none.
I have since discovered that ASIC had been investigating Sterling at least since 2015, they were also warned by the WA Dept of Consumer Affairs, and they still did nothing to protect people.
If ASIC had done the job they were paid to do, had put warnings on their web site and closed Sterling down, none of this would have happened. Because ASIC were derelict in carrying out their duty causing millions of dollars in losses to retirees, the only fair thing for them to do is pay compensation to help right the wrong
Mr Cormann this is not charity, it does not matter whether you are a company or a government dept, if loss is caused by negligence, compensation should be paid.
We need a Royal Commission into ASIC and APRA.
Yours truly
