Shadow Portfolio — 23 March 2026

Mr McCormack, the Member for Riverina, delivered the coalition's second reading contribution on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Genetic Testing Protections in Life Insurance and Other Measures) Bill 2025, supporting the legislation while mounting a sustained critique of government delay across all three of its schedules [TA-260323-house-068fade26cde:s036].

The sharpest line of attack concerns the bill's centrepiece: banning the use of genetic test results by life insurers. Mr McCormack traced the reform's long arc — the coalition backed an industry moratorium in 2019 on the expectation that legislation would follow promptly, and by the 2022 election there was broad consensus across industry, clinicians, and parliament that statutory protections were overdue.

The former assistant treasurer announced in September 2024 that Labor would legislate, raising expectations among patients and the medical community. No bill arrived before the 2025 election. Mr McCormack's argument is that this gap has had real human consequences: Australians who needed genetic testing may have delayed it specifically because insurance discrimination remained lawful [TA-260323-house-068fade26cde:s036].

Schedule 2 — relief for foreign financial services providers — draws a second line of attack. Mr McCormack characterised this as a coalition reform introduced in 2022 that the government sat on for four years despite unanimous industry support, prolonging regulatory uncertainty for international firms and unnecessarily undermining Australia's standing as a financial services destination [TA-260323-house-068fade26cde:s036].

The one note of substantive concern the coalition registers with the bill itself — rather than its lateness — is Schedule 3, which introduces standing appropriations for multilateral development banks without a defined upper limit. Mr McCormack flagged this as an open-ended fiscal commitment and drew an explicit comparison to the uncapped growth of NDIS expenditure, a comparison that signals the coalition's intent to press the government on appropriations design more broadly.

The coalition's position is unambiguous: it will support the bill. The underlying reforms command genuine bipartisan and stakeholder consensus, and Mr McCormack framed the coalition's support around both improved health outcomes and Australia's international obligations. The strategic purpose of the contribution is equally clear — to place on the parliamentary record that every element of the bill could and should have arrived years earlier, and to hold the government accountable for the costs of that delay to individuals, industry, and Australia's international reputation.