The opportunity to establish a new agency in your career is relatively rare, but David Locke, CEO and Chief Ombudsman at the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), has done it twice.

In 2011, English-born Locke was seconded by the Charity Commission of England and Wales to help an implementation taskforce establish the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).

He had originally been brought out to Australia from the United Kingdom for a week by the not-for-profit (NFP) legal service Justice Connect to deliver presentations and talk to the then minister about creating a regulator for the not-for-profit sector.

As chief adviser to the taskforce, Locke was involved in consultations with the NFP sector, Commonwealth departments and agencies, states and territories, as well as advising on the legislation for the ACNC.

‘Setting up a new Commonwealth regulator in what was a contested political space was a complex task, but it was also very exciting,’ Locke recalls.

‘The Australian Government’s work was supported by the Charity Commission of England and Wales, as well as senior officials from both the Canadian and New Zealand charity regulators.’

Innovation and transformation

Locke stayed, taking the role of assistant commissioner, with responsibility for the ACNC’s advice and support functions, investigations, compliance and intelligence work.

‘We delivered the first national Register of Charities and in 2016, we won the Institute of Public Administration’s National Innovation Award for Best Digital Transformation across government,’ he says.

It was on the strength of this work, along with two decades of independent decision-making for regulatory bodies in the UK, that Locke was appointed to another new organisation — AFCA — which opened its doors while the Hayne Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry was under way.

‘Building a one-stop shop for complaints by combining the operations of the three predecessor schemes was also a challenging process,’ says Locke.

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