Let us recall that right now there are no fewer than seven Australian banking inquiries underway or recently concluded:
- a New York court investigating BBSW rorting;
- same at ASIC;
- Parlimentary hearing into banking whatever;
- Ombudsman Small Business Loans Inquiry;
- an industry inquiry into banking remuneration;
- a new industry funded victims tribunal;
- APRA investigating “risk culture”.
All of them overlapping, none of them co-ordinated, most of them compromised or captured and none them appropriately scoped nor empowered to deliver actionable reform.
At the same time in the parliament we have the Opposition and minor parties charging towards a royal commission or equivalent and some government ministers close to crossing the floor.
The banks themselves are busy poaching whatever public talent they can find with the, ahem, sufficiently flexible mores to take their case on. This included the recent defection of the Commonwealth Ombudsman to ANZ and on Friday the appointment of former QLD premier Anna Bligh to head the national banking lobby. Australia’s last journo standing and passionate supporter of a banking royal commission, Adele Ferguson, was kind over the weekend:
The appointment of former Queensland premier Anna Bligh as the new head of the powerful bank lobby group the Australian Bankers Association (ABA) is a masterstroke by the banks.
Instead of hand-picking a troglodyte, an ex-judge or someone with a strong banking pedigree, they have instead gone for a high profile, powerful, non-banker with strong political links – particularly in the Labor Party – and above all credibility.
Taking the job means she has taken the stance that a royal commission into the banks isn’t necessary and she will do what she can to take it off the agenda.
That means trying to convince the federal Labor Party and some key crossbenchers that the current myriad inquiries are enough.
…She is dynamic and passionate and will deliver the messages a lot better than the four bosses of the banks.
Where she will need to be careful though is not to swallow the hype of her masters.
If she is to be taken seriously she needs to genuinely question some of the reforms that her job will require her to defend. If they end up being a whitewash designed to make headlines with little substance, she will damage her credibility.
Ms Bligh’s job description is “to swallow the hype of her masters” then ram it down everyone else’s throats. She is doing this while keeping a fat public pension that is generously designed in part to prevent this kind of regulatory capture. Ms Bligh says she likes working “inside the tent” but whose?
The AFR says the banks are ready to accept a royal commission but only so it can be neutered:
Pressure is mounting on the government to hold a banking royal commission with senior banking figures conceding a royal commission may now be the least worst option and the Greens one vote away from securing support for a commission of inquiry.
At the same time, relations between the government and the banking sector plummeted on Friday when former Queensland Labor premier Anna Bligh was announced as the new chief executive of the Australian Bankers’ Association.
Banking sources said it was a good move because Labor was leading the attack on banks and now it would have to take on one of its own icons.
One might surmise that Ms Bligh has taken the job on this basis but she already came out against it.
The increasingly sticky mire crosses party lines well and truly, with revenge on the Coalition’s mind via The Australian:
Malcolm Turnbull has rejected a call from some of his Liberal Party backbenchers to drop the big four banks from his $48.7 billion company tax cut policy.
Coalition MPs have called for the big banks to be cut out of the government’s plan to reduce the company tax rate after the surprise appointment of former Labor premier Anna Bligh as their chief lobbyist.
It is believed informal discussions at senior levels of government had already taken place this year about the possibility of excising the big four banks from the Enterprise Tax Plan.
There was a compelling argument, a senior government source said, that the big four domestic retail banks were not as exposed to the same competitive disadvantage as other businesses under the current high tax regime.
…The Liberal MP for the South Australian seat of Barker, Tony Pasin, said yesterday his Coalition colleagues were furious. “It would seem that the ABA has decided to evaporate whatever goodwill remained within the Coalition partyroom,” Mr Pasin told The Weekend Australian.
“Since this announcement a number of colleagues have contacted me and asked why we should be including the big four banks in the Enterprise Tax Plan.”
After all, how they treat with the Coalition is what matters not the national interest!
There is not one event, statement or action above that has integrity as a policy process, governance system nor exhibits simple human decency. It is a deepening and darkening swamp of which everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed.
