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

It's a great privilege to speak for the opposition on this matter of public importance this afternoon. It's good to have that opportunity, because it allows me to respond to what I found to be some whacky and bizarre rewritings of history from the Prime Minister and the Treasurer opposite me during question time. Is the Prime Minister actually expecting Australians to now thank him for calling a royal commission? This is a royal commission that he voted against 26 times. What we know from media reports is that the Prime Minister was the last bastion, protecting the big banks in cabinet, against calling a royal commission. He spent the last years of his life as Treasurer of this country trying hand over fist to give the big banks a $17 billion tax cut, and now he's constructed a parliamentary sitting calendar that means we can't do anything about the royal commission recommendations for eight months. Here we are, in question time, and we've got senior members of the Liberal Party, who did everything in their power to protect the big banks, telling us that now they deserve a golf clap because they were the ones who called a royal commission. That was after—you'll remember, Deputy Speaker Hogan—the banks asked the government to call a royal commission.

There is a great deal more to say about the politics of this issue, but I want to open my remarks today by spending a couple of minutes talking about a group of people who have not got a lot of air time in this discussion about how to make banking more fair in Australia; that is, the victims of bank misconduct. Without these victims, there would never have been a royal commission in this country. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to people who were wronged terribly by the banks and to whistleblowers who observed appalling conduct within the banks and had the bravery to come forward. Some of these victims have had to go through terrible emotional turmoil as they've had to relive some of the most difficult times of their lives. We're talking about emotional turmoil, financial distress and, sometimes, family breakdown—even mental illnesses that have plagued them for the rest of their lives. I believe Australia owes a great debt of gratitude to those people. Ten thousand of them made submissions to the royal commission. They did so with great passion.

I think we actually have a group of bank victims here with us today; there they are in the gallery. It'd be great for members of parliament to acknowledge those people there. Many of them have been fighting the big banks on disputes that have literally gone for decades. For some of the people who are up in the gallery right now, even though they were wronged by the banks, the banks have taken them to court and ended up bleeding them dry while they've sat through litigation after litigation. I have to say: we need to do a little bit more to hold the banks to account for the things that they've done. I want to particularly thank Michael, Selwyn, Craig, Bill, Rita, Caroline and Tony and the others who are gathered in the chamber today for their ongoing advocacy on behalf of all victims of bank misconduct.

If I can say one thing more about this group that's gathered here: they represent a very active community of people right around the country who have been pushing for a long time for bank reform. One of the things I'm really struck by when I sit down with these victims is that they often acknowledge it's not possible to rewrite history, to go back to the beginning of their case and to fix all of the bad things that happened to them. Their concern is about the future and thinking about other people who might need help too. Every time we have a bank victim round table, people talk to me about other people who have got it worse than them. I'm really touched by the attitude that they have.

It's stories like Rainer's that really drove home to me how important it is that we tackle misconduct and reform the culture in our banks. I want to tell you about this gentleman, who lives in my hometown of Melbourne. This is a fellow whose wife was diagnosed with cancer just after the birth of their second child. He went through genuine hell dealing with the Commonwealth Bank due to inadequate hardship policies. It included having to go back to work during the last months of his wife's life—there was no financial benefit in that for the bank, but that was what he was forced to do. It included the bank continuously calling his dying wife to talk to her about debts that she supposedly owed the bank. Other victims I've met with, like Paul and Liz Furneaux and Giulia Mandarino, have lost everything in their disputes with the banks. Some of them have lost homes. They still feel the physical and mental impacts of what has happened.

I do want to pay tribute to those victims and say that we haven't forgotten about them. There is more that needs to be done to assist them and their cases, and we are so genuinely committed to this task of making sure that we do have a fairer banking situation in this country. That was a big impetus for why Labor fought so long and so hard for a royal commission. Deputy Speaker Hogan, you would have seen that for almost 600 days we pushed in this chamber for those on the other side of the chamber to see what we saw—that is, that we had a banking system that was treating some Australians appallingly. They were doing it in a way that was sometimes breaking the law and there seemed to be no accountability.

What we saw on the other side of the chamber was incredibly disappointing, and it continues to disappoint me today. As a politician, I don't like to dwell on the past and I don't like to stand in this chamber and point the finger and yell at the other side about all the things that they've done wrong, but it does bother me and it does make me worry about the willingness of those on the other side of the chamber to actually have the grit to do what is in the royal commission's recommendations. I just don't trust them to do it—that's the genuine truth.

They have a terrible record when it comes to cracking down on bank misconduct. When Labor was in government, you might know that we introduced the Future of Financial Advice reforms. Indeed, the royal commission went to some lengths to talk about how incredibly important those laws, those Labor reforms, were. The centrepiece of the Future of Financial Advice reforms was the introduction of a best-interest test for financial advisers. What the parliament was saying for the first time was that financial advisers have to act in the best interests of their clients. Well, it sounds pretty obvious now, doesn't it? But what we found is that those on the other side didn't want it. They didn't want it when it was first introduced by Labor, and when they first came to government they tried to get rid of the best-interest test. How is it that they can possibly be plausibly trusted to implement the royal commission's recommendations when that's their track record? But, of course, that's just the very beginning of their fight to protect the big banks and other people in the financial services industry. This government, the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government didn't support the reforms. They fought all the way to stop them being implemented.

Labor came out quite a long time ago in April 2016 saying that we thought it was time to have a royal commission into our banking sector. What did we see from the other side? We saw a Prime Minister and his Liberals huffing and puffing and, frankly, embarrassing themselves in a rush to declare what a bad idea this was. We had the Prime Minister call this a 'populist whinge' and a 'reckless distraction'. It is very important that we in this chamber and the Australian people never forget those words, because the truth is that, even though after 26 times of voting against a royal commission they were finally pushed into calling one, their attitude tells us everything we need to know about the willingness of the people opposite us to hold the banks to account. Every day that the government delayed, more Australians were being charged fees for no service, more Australians were being sold useless junk insurance and more Australians were being ripped off by the banks. In that whole time, that whole 600 days that we were calling for a royal commission and all of those Australians were being ripped off by financial service providers, what was the government doing? They were using every political opportunity they had to argue to give the banks a $17 billion tax cut. That is, the taxes that everyone at home watching pays, the taxes that I pay, were going to be taken and given to the big banks as a tax cut. That was their response to all of the community outrage about what the big banks were doing, and now we're being called into this chamber and lectured from the other side about things to do with the banking royal commission. It beggars belief. We just can't trust them on it.

I want to cover a quick couple of matters, because I focused quite a bit on what happened before the royal commission reported, but now we have a royal commission report. The smart thing for a political party to do is to say, 'Yes, we're really in this fight and we're going to accept the recommendations and we're going to move forward.' But what we've had from the government is the exact opposite. We've had them use every little sneaky trick there is, even straight out of the blocks, to say: 'No, we're not going to do this; we're going to do it a little bit differently. We're going to do it this way and that way.' It just shows again that they can't be trusted.

With my remaining few seconds I want to mention one more thing: the part-time parliament. We had the opportunity to implement a lot of the recommendations in this report, but, of course, not all of them, because some of them do require a lengthy consultation process and some sober thinking time, but some of them are completely straightforward. In fact, the government claimed we can't implement any of them and then in the same breath told us that they are implementing some of them in the Senate. It's intellectually incoherent. It's completely ridiculous. What we say to those on the other side is: if you really think that we should believe that you've changed your mind, call an extra fortnight of sittings of this parliament so we can come here, do our jobs and pass the necessary reforms so those bank victims sitting up in the gallery aren't back here in a few years time complaining that nothing much has changed.

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