Libs cross floor to Shorten’s bank Royal Commission

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From Banking Day:

Shorten said the inquiry would examine issues such as:

  • how widespread instances of illegal and unethical behaviour are within Australia’s financial services industry;
  • how Australia’s financial services institutions treat their duty of care to their customers;
  • how the culture, ethical standards and business structures of Australian financial services institutions affect the behaviour of these institutions;
  • whether Australia’s regulators are really equipped to identify and prevent illegal and unethical behaviour;
  • comparable international experience with similar financial services industry misconduct and best practice responses to those incidents; and
  • other events that may come to light in the course of investigating the above.

Shorten headlined the planned Royal Commission as being one into “misconduct in the banking and financial services industry.”

The Australian Bankers Association objected to the rationale for any inquiry on Friday, with its CEO, Stephen Munchenberg, asserting that Labor’s policy would unsettle international investors.

Lol, but corruption doesn’t? Some Coalition MPs are supporting it:

Two Coalition MPs supporting the Labor opposition’s call for a royal commission into the banking industry went through bruising financial disputes with Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

And banking experts scoff at Labor senator Sam Dastyari’s claim that Westpac Banking Corp was responsible for “potentially the largest financial crime in Australian history”.

Nationals Senator John Williams’ family battled the nation’s largest lender in court for almost a decade after taking out a farm loan in Swiss francs that charged interest rates that soared above 25 per cent.

Queensland Liberal MP Warren Entsch was a director of Far North Queensland construction firm CEC Group that he said was “choked and killed” by the Commonwealth Bank when it collapsed in May 2011.

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It’s self-evident that an inquiry is needed given the strong of scandals. Let’s just hope it tackles RBA corruption at the same time (yeh right!).

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.