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Jessica Darnbrough and Steven Cross
Despite audible applause at the MFAA conference after the extension of the diploma deadline, FBAA president Peter White has launched a stinging attack on the decision.
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President of the FBAA, Peter White, said he believed that it is wrong to force industry members to undertake a course that is not required by law, clamp it on a deadline and threaten their membership with terminated if they don’t comply.
Speaking at the MFAA conference in Adelaide yesterday, the MFAA's chief executive Phil Naylor said the diploma deadline would be extended to 1 January 2013.
“Brokers need to enrol in a diploma course by 30th June, but they do not have to complete it til the end of the year,” he told The Adviser.
“Various RTOs were telling us that they had a log jam of brokers that had enrolled in the course, but had not completed it. They told us that these brokers would run out of time," Mr Naylor said.
Mr Naylor said while a lot of brokers were unhappy about having to complete a diploma so soon after NCCP was introduced, the diploma would ultimately benefit the industry as a whole.
“The diploma makes the industry just that little bit more professional, which is a great thing in the long run.”
But the FBAA remains stauchly opposed to the MFAA's requirements for brokers to complete the diploma and Peter White belives the extension will do little to rectify the situation.
“They’ve [MFAA] said ‘you must, you must, you must’ to drive this home, and then at the twelfth hour they’ve said ‘ok, we’ll give you not just another month, but six months!’”
According to the MFAA, almost 70 per cent of brokers have completed, or are in the process of completing the diploma, yet Mr White was sceptical of the figures.
“If 70 per cent of brokers had done it by now, you’d expect the other 30 per cent to have it done in the next few months, maybe three months max. Not seven.”
And after the announcement of the government funded grant to brokers who haven’t completed the diploma, Mr White claimed brokers who had already paid full-price "have been cheated".
"All these people putting out blood sweat and tears and paying full freight, now not only is there another six months to complete it, there’s also a grant," he said.
“Of course they were going to extend it because there is no way it was ever going to happen, unless they were going to axe a huge chunk of their membership.”
