Next month marks the first anniversary of the promotion of Tony D’Aloisio to the chairmanship of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and his presentation of a mission statement, loftily entitled “ASIC’s priorities for the next 12 months”, to the Senate standing committee on economics.

Before taking the ASIC chair for a four-year term, D’Aloisio was CEO of the Australian Stock Exchange. In other words, from managing the casino he became the gaming room’s top regulator.

He told senators:

Our vision is that through our efforts and the efforts of our broad range of stakeholders, we will not only maintain but improve business integrity in Australia and, when benchmarked against global best practice, Australia’s position will be at the top.

This sweeping claim was accompanied by a personal commitment to “benchmarking”. It was his managerial style, he said, to develop “scorecards to measure and report on outcomes achieved.”

You be the judge. With your scorecards ready and your pens poised, here are some of the guarantees he gave the good senators in Canberra in May 2007:

  • For retail investors – in particular “baby boomer” retirees and the generations following them – to develop initiatives to assist them to better manage and protect their investments and wealth.
  • We are also seeing more sophisticated products aimed at retail investors such as derivatives, warrants, contracts for difference (CFDs), margin loans and hybrids. These developments have led us to reassess how we can work to better assist this retail sector.
  • For all investors, to continue to maintain and improve confidence and integrity in Australia’s capital markets with new investigative and other techniques in the area of insider trading and market manipulation.
  • ASIC’s approach and priorities in the next 12 months are to build on ASIC’s success to date with a new set of priorities on operational effectiveness, improving results in areas of market manipulation and insider trading, assisting retail investors, facilitating capital flows and reducing red tape.

Then along came Allco, MFS, ABC Learning, Centro, Opes Prime, Tricom, Lift and the scandalous lending policies of the major banks, notably ANZ, to blur D’Aloisio’s vision thing.

So here’s an opportunity for Crikey subscribers to give the ASIC chairman a score of 1 to 10 on his success at the helm of the business regulator and give brief (but printable) reasons for your score.

Send your completed scorecards  to boss@crikey.com.au