Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

Or review their performance—exactly. So what we are saying here is that enough is enough. We've got a royal commission on our hands. It is, frankly, fantastic to see this royal commission blowing a breeze through some of the cultural practices and some of the completely suboptimal protections that are being provided to 25 million Australians who rely in one way or another on the services of these institutions. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what the royal commissioner has to say about some things we can do better in this industry. It is my fervent hope that we see more coming through this parliament to arrest what is an extremely serious problem, a very big problem, facing our country, than the sort of thing that is before the House at the moment.

I say again that we are happy to support this bill. It's going to make a small difference to competition in this sector in terms of the ability that it will give APRA to provide time-limited licences. I think there is one fin-tech that's gone through this process with APRA already—one. Moving the ownership restrictions from 15 to 20 per cent is great, sure. We're happy to agree to it. But is this really the best that we can do? We've got a set of institutions here that are experiencing some extraordinary difficulties in their culture and I just think we need to do a little bit better than making some minor tweaks to who can provide financial services in this country. It's quite clear that we are going to need bigger tweaks to make the sort of difference that Labor, on this side of the House, envisages.

What we envisage, just to make it clear, is a financial services sector that people can feel they can trust, where they can make an agreement with a bank and not only will the bank abide by the letter of the agreement but it will be acting in good faith. That's been the issue with a lot of the banks. There are probably a number of people in this chamber who met with some of the bank victims who recently came to Canberra. One of the issues with the way the royal commission has been run is we haven't been able to hear a lot of stories from people. This is because it has been given only a year by those on the other side of the House to look at banking superannuation insurance. We could have probably had three two-year royal commissions on those issues because they are just so serious and substantial. We had a superannuation round in the last couple of weeks and we didn't hear from many victims. That's because of the constraints the royal commissioner is operating under. He is doing a very fine job and I very much respect the work that he is doing. But we did have some victims come to Canberra, and it was extraordinary talking to them. It really was. I'd urge members of parliament to talk to victims in their community because there are so many people who we all represent who have a story. It's through talking to people that you realise that it's often not about the letter of the law in these issues. It's about people who make agreements with the banks and the banks, for one reason or another—they probably have an answer to it—don't always act in the best faith. That's what we have really got to get to the heart of.

So Labor will support the bill before the House. We are pleased to see some microsteps in the direction of providing better competition in financial services. But I think over the coming year, as the royal commission wraps up its work and Labor is able to provide a fulsome response that our heart is really in, we will see something much bigger and better than this.

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