Expect letters. If you’ve had a financial planner steer you into a product in the past few years, that person is about to write to you. He or she will have to, even if they haven’t been in touch. He or she has been taking your money.

The first letter (due on the birthday of you accepting their advice) will do more than simply tell you how much the planner has been taking from your accounts. It’ll also ask if you want the withdrawals to continue. If you don’t you merely need to do nothing. The withdrawals will stop. If you do want your accounts continually drained you’ll have to send back a form. It’s called “opting-in”.

That’s what financial planners and the organisations that employ them have been engaged in a last-ditch battle to stop. Living off ignorance and amnesia, they’ve been desperate to ensure their long-forgotten clients don’t remember what’s being taken from their accounts and can’t easily stop it.

The Coalition has been backing them rather than us under the guise of stopping red tape. So keen has it been to do their bidding rather than ours that it waited until the parliament wasn’t sitting to introduce a regulation that would smother the requirement. The requirement had been due to become mandatory on July 1.

Then, when parliament resumed last week it delayed tabling the regulation. What’s not tabled can’t be disallowed. On Thursday it refused a formal request from the Senate to table it forthwith. Labor ended up tabling the government’s regulation itself and on Monday gave notice of a motion to disallow it.

