CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr CONAGHAN (Cowper) (10:16): I rise today to formally present Lion Property Group parliamentary e-petition No. EN10182, which has been considered by the petitions committee and found to be in order. The principal petitioner is Sonja Boric, a passionate advocate for victims of the Lion Property Group Ponzi scheme collapse, which left thousands of mum-and-dad investors out in the cold, to the tune of $122.5 million.

These innocent Australians, through no fault of their own, have been robbed of their life savings, their financial security and their retirement safety net. ASIC had been alerted to concerns about Lion's conduct for years prior to the collapse, without taking protective action, despite a later Supreme Court finding it was an unlicensed managed investment scheme.

Following the collapse, claimants sought compensation under the Commonwealth's Scheme for Compensation for Detriment caused by Defective Administration, CDDA, on the basis that ASIC's handling of the matter amounted to defective administration. To date, their requests have been denied. Sonja's petition has gathered the signatures of 2,057 individuals, which I believe truly shows the scale of the issue.

I first spoke to Sonja as part of my former role as the shadow minister for financial services, and, while I no longer hold that office, I'm here to follow through on the conversations that were started at the time. For more than 11 years, Australians alleging defective administration by ASIC have been denied access to the Commonwealth's CDDA framework. ASIC is currently the only entity not formally included in the CDDA framework.

I believe this is an opportunity for us as a parliament to do what is right for these victims and others like them. To be clear, this petition is not asking parliament to determine individual compensation. It simply asks that the House be made aware that the Commonwealth compensation scheme publicly represented as available to citizens harmed by defective administration has in practice been unavailable to anyone raising it against ASIC for over a decade, and parliament has been made aware of this through a Senate inquiry.

On behalf of the 2,057 Australians represented here in this petition, I request that the government take the necessary steps to resolve the pathway for Australians alleging defective administration by ASIC, to ensure that they have the same access to assessment, determination and review processes as claimants concerning other Commonwealth entities. I present the petition to the House.

The petition read as follows— For more than 11 years, Australians alleging defective administration by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) have been denied access to the Commonwealth's Compensation for Detriment caused by Defective Administration (CDDA) framework on the same basis as claims concerning other Commonwealth entities. Despite 1000's of written requests to Treasury, ASIC, Ministers and Parliament, no publicly identified legislative instrument or statutory provision has been produced that expressly excludes ASIC-related claims from the scheme.

The result is that affected Australians are denied access to a process designed to determine whether defective administration occurred and whether compensation should be considered. This raises serious concerns regarding transparency, accountability, equal treatment and access to review. We therefore ask the House to We therefore ask the House to e therefore ask the House of Representatives to investigate the ongoing exclusion of ASIC-related claims from the CDDA framework, require the Government to identify the legal authority relied upon for that position, require the Secretary of the Treasury to publicly account for the matter, and ensure Australians alleging defective administration by ASIC have the same access to assessment, determination and review processes as claimants concerning other Commonwealth entities. from 2,057 citizens (Petition No.

EN10182) Petition received.