Australia's Coalition Government has drafted new laws to implement 22 recommendations and two additional commitments that it made to the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Royal Commission.

The Government responded to the Royal Commission report that Commissioner Hayne released on 4 February last year by promising to take action on all of Commissioner Hayne's recommendations and, in some places, by going further. Hayne directed 54 of his 76 recommendations to the Government, 12 to the regulators and 10 to the financial sector.

In addition to its 54 jobs, the Government is planning to do a further 18 to deal with problems that Hayne's report exposed.

It says that it has honoured 16 commitments, has legislation before parliament to implement another 8 and has substantially progressed a further 35 and has asked, or is asking, interested parties to comment on them. It thinks that it will have fulfilled more than 50 commitments - close to 90% of them - by the middle of the year and all of them by the end. This month's draft legislation is intended to implement the following.

• Recommendation 1.15 to 'enable' certain provisions of some financial services industry codes to be made ‘enforceable,’ with civil penalties possible.
• Recommendation 2.1 to deal with fee-related arrangements.
• Recommendation 2.2 to require every firm that is authorised to provide personal advice to a retail client to tell him in writing if it is not independent and why that is so.
• Recommendation 3.1 to prohibit superannuation trustees from having duties other than those arising from or in the course of the performance of their duties.
• Recommendation 3.2 to remove a superannuation trustee’s capacity to charge advice fees from MySuper products. (MySuper products are cheap, simple superannuation products for people who make no active choices about their superannuation.)
• Recommendation 3.3 to remove the capacity of a superannuation trustee to charge advice fees to a member of a scheme unless certain conditions are satisfied, including the new requirements outlined in relation to Recommendation 2.1.
• Recommendation 3.4 to prohibit the hawking of superannuation products.
• Recommendation 4.1 to prohibit the hawking of insurance products.
• Recommendation 4.3 to establish an industry-wide deferred sales model for the sale of add-on insurance products.
• Recommendations 4.4 to provide ASIC with the power to impose a cap on commissions for add-on insurance products and insurance-like products.
• Recommendation 4.5 to implement a duty to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation to an insurer for consumer insurance contracts.
• Recommendation 4.6 to add an extra condition for life insurers to show that they would not have signed a contract on any terms if they had known about the unintentional misrepresentation or non-disclosure.
• An additional promise in response to recommendation 4.2 to restrict the use of the term ‘insurer’ and ‘insurance’ if the product or service is not insurance, in circumstances where it is likely that someone might erroneously believe the product or service to be insurance.