Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed that, in his allocated time, the Minister for Small Business could only find a few minutes to talk about small business and the need for a banking royal commission to look after the small business victims. Small businesses are so much at the mercy of the big banks, the big financial institutions. They have challenges around access to capital, the interest rates they pay, the time in which their issues are processed and the terms of credit. They have so little ability to influence the big financial providers that they are welcoming a royal commission. Well, they're welcoming what they hope will be a royal commission that gets to the bottom of the issues. There is not a reasonable business relationship, and this royal commission needs to make sure it gives a whole lot of small businesses a chance to have their cases heard—actually, a chance for justice. But I am sceptical about whether any victims of the banking and finance sector are going to really get the hearing they deserve.

We talk about the Prime Minister. We say he has no spine and no values, that he backflips. This is a classic example of that. But, you've got to give it to him, until last week he had really stuck by the whole 'we're not going to have a banking royal commission' line. He did well. He almost held out till Christmas. Christmas is just around the corner. It is one thing to throw away your values on high-speed broadband and climate change—to throw them out the window—but on the banks we thought he would stay.

What did it take for the Prime Minister to get to a point where he was willing to back-pedal again? Perhaps it was the thousands of victims of financial fraud—the individuals, small businesses and families who have lost everything, whether in the collapse of Timbercorp or whether they were ruined by Storm Financial. Perhaps the Prime Minister had an epiphany when financial service whistleblowers brought to light some of the terrible practices that led to those scandals. No, that wasn't it. It wasn't even the extreme right of his own party that brought him across the line this time. What did it was when the big four banks decided that it was time for a royal commission and they gave the Prime Minister permission to announce one. What a joke! This is a royal commission where the terms of reference were not developed with the victims in mind—victims who have suffered shocking financial losses thanks to financial products and practices that were designed to get them behind the eight ball, not put them in front of their financial futures.

The government should be consulting with the victims groups, who have been working with the people who have lost the most. When I think about the victims and what this will achieve for victims I think one of my closest friends, Alison, who lives in the Northern Territory. She's in her 50s but she lost the bulk of her superannuation thanks to an unscrupulous financial planner. This is a woman who had worked in the financial sector. She knew what she was doing. But that doesn't help when someone is setting out to be unscrupulous. The questions are many. How can it have been allowed to happen? Where were the laws that were designed to protect and then offer recourse? Well, they don't exist. And when someone like Alison hears the words of the Prime Minister, that he has 'regrettably' decided to announce a royal commission, it gives absolutely no confidence that this has anything do with her loss or her pain.

In the Blue Mountains, in my electorate of Macquarie, we want to see the insurance sector hauled over the coals for what they do to people who lose their houses to bushfires. How is it that they can be sanctioned to continually underinsure properties? How is it that of the 200 houses that were lost, the bulk of them faced underinsurance—unintentional underinsurance—and those who suffered most were those who had been most loyal to their insurance company? How is that right and fair?

I want to say something briefly about the people who work at the banks and the big finance organisations. The Finance Sector Union, which represents these people, wants this royal commission to address the toxic culture of banks and financial institutions. There are good people working in these organisations, but the culture that they are forced to work in, the 'would you like fries with that' mentality to upsell products, is the sort of thing this banking royal commission needs to get to the bottom of, but I doubt it will. (Time expired)

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