Strictly Business owner Tony Vidler highlighted the anomaly in a recent blog where he said there is a sense that "somehow financial advisers have just swapped places with the prostitution business."

By this he was referring not to prostitutes providing financial advice (or advisers providing prostitution services) but to the fact that street prostitution is now a legal and regulated activity, with prostitutes by and large able to ply their trade openly on the street.

"However, we have a new piece of proposed law (the Financial Markets Conduct Bill) which says soliciting for financial products is something which should be stopped.  It's an interesting contrast don't you think?" Vidler said.

He said there's a problem with the FMCB's targeting of "unsolicited offers" of financial products (which doesn't include insurance): "In 22 years I could count on my hands the number of consumers who have apparently woken up one day and decided that was the ideal time to contact me and put in place a financial solution - unsolicited."

Vidler said that in the financial servives business many products are intangible and therefore most people are unaware of the benefits of particular courses of action.

"Advisers talk to people, and in a sense "hawk their wares". Just like most other businesses. Plumbers do it, and painters do it, and prostitutes too.

"Why would it be that it is not acceptable for financial advisers to talk to people and offer their expertise, or products, or particular solutions?"

He described the proposed law as "farcical", saying professional advisers are "universally in favour of laws and regulation to protect consumers from the unscrupulous. We have those laws already in fact.

"Suggesting that the country requires a further piece of law-mongering that will undermine the public participation in the use of financial services and financial products, and relegate an entire industry to a position where it has less ability to market itself than prostitutes have, is simply irresponsible."