George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The banking royal commission has exposed a lot of bad behaviour, but, given the chance to dig deep, it would find that ulterior motives drove deliberately dodgy behaviour by the banks. In 2009, McKinsey and Company published a bad-bank strategy template which detailed the rationale, benefits and processes for banks to dump unwanted business loans. The Commonwealth Bank clearly adopted this strategy with a very senior CBA executive stating:

The Bankwest story is very much an intentional one. We have deliberately got out of low credit quality lending in this space and on an annualised basis in fact our reduction in the target, low credit quality space is well over 20%.

Bankwest loans were dumped, even though borrowers never missed a payment, simply because the CBA wanted to change its risk profile. Further investigations will reveal evidence the bank followed the bad-bank strategy, overriding grade systems to push down risk ratings, reducing property values to trigger non-monetary defaults, falsifications of documents and forgery. I support the small business ombudsman, Kate Carnell, in her call to extend the commission's time to investigate small business loans. It would be a tragically lost opportunity if the full extent of the deliberate dodgy practices were not exposed. I call on the government to grant the royal commission more time to investigate issues around small business lending so we can fix this problem. Small businesses were victims of the banks because of deliberate dodgy practices.