Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Economics, I present the following three reports: Review of Australia's four major banks 2023-2024,Review of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission annual reports 2021, 2022 and 2023 and Review of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission annual reports 2021, 2022 and 2023 together with the minutes of proceedings. I ask leave of the House to make a short statement in connection with these reports.

Leave granted.

Today I wish to speak briefly to these three reports—firstly, the report into the big four banks and the public hearings of the CEOs of those banks. This is a part of the Standing Committee on Economics' functions, which I believe has become an important element of accountability for the financial services sector, given the uniquely important role that banks play. This term, I think the public hearings of the CEOs played a particularly important role, given the nature of the challenges that this parliament was overseeing—the inflation challenge that our economy faced and the role that banks played in intersecting their actions with the role that monetary policy played in fighting inflation.

The committee held public hearings with each of the four major banks on 12 and 13 July 2023 and 29 and 30 August 2024. The committee acknowledges the significant cost-of-living pressures still confronting many Australians. These pressures have not been felt evenly across the economy. For example—and this was one of the issues explored with the banks—new first-home buyers and renters, often younger Australians, have been particularly severely hit by inflation, cost-of-living pressures and higher mortgage repayments. That's why it's so important that there be continued help for first-home buyers and continued help for housing affordability measures.

The committee explored a range of policy issues, including scams. The committee acknowledged that the banks have undertaken a range of measures, including investments in IT, and that this formed a part of broader actions taken by the government to reduce scams and that scam activity and scam losses have in fact started to fall. Having said that, scams remain a significant challenge for people in our community, particularly vulnerable people, and further actions will be needed. That's why further accountability on this front in future parliaments will be important.

The committee acknowledges efforts by the banks to support customers in hardship. It is concerned, however, by findings of ASIC's May 2024 report, Hardship, hard to get help, suggesting that more than a third of Australians applying for hardship support have dropped out of excessively onerous application processes at least once and that 40 per cent fall into arrears immediately after hardship support ends. The committee agrees with ASIC's assessment that this is not good enough. While ASIC's report looked at 10 banks, the four major banks should be held to particularly high standards due to their large market shares and direct impact on the lived experience of so many Australians. In overall terms, I reiterate that these public hearings were productive and that they dove tailed well with other reports of this committee—for example, the report into competition and economic dynamism.

The committee also undertook public hearings of the ACCC. Through these public hearings, we looked at a wide range of public-policy hearings, including fuel taxation, consumer data privacy and supermarket pricing. Indeed the breadth of issues that we dealt with in these hearings is a testament to the wide range of the ACCC's responsibilities. The report also addresses a wide range of competition issues, including mergers and acquisitions, reforms, gas markets, petrol taxes, greenwashing, the energy transition, aviation, reforms to improve competition in slot management at airports, and Australia's highly concentrated supermarket issues. Many of these issues had been addressed in our competition and economic dynamism report, which the ACCC greatly assisted the committee with. Indeed on a number of fronts, including mergers and acquisitions reforms, the regulatory grid, and noncompete clauses, we welcomed the fact that the government has subsequently taken action. I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the assistant minister, who's in the chamber, for his longstanding advocacy of a number of these policy areas.

The report also covers major consumer protection issues, including scams, data breaches, consumer data privacy, unfair contract terms, consumer protections for travellers, alleged misleading pricing claims by the major supermarkets, card-payment surcharging practices and the impact of breaches of consumer law on vulnerable consumers. I reiterate that I think these public hearings have proved to be a very valuable accountability mechanism, given the central role that the ACCC plays in enforcing competition and consumer protection.

Finally, I'd like to make some very brief comments in relation to our oversight of ASIC's annual reports. The committee acknowledges the challenges that ASIC faces in triaging thousands of complaints and tip-offs annually. ASIC has a very broad remit. However, the committee also noted—and this was unanimously noted—that it expects ASIC to continue efforts to better communicate with the many Australians who reach out for help.

The committee also stated in its report that ASIC's actions under new intervention powers, granted after the Hayne royal commission, are important, including step-in powers to block poorly targeted financial products. We stated that the committee was pleased to see early signs of success from ASIC's use of these new powers, and we encourage ASIC to continue using these new tools judiciously to prevent and take action against wrongdoing.

The report also addresses ASIC's recent work on other issues, including corporate cybersecurity obligations, greenwashing and also the ASX's troubled CHESS settlement upgrade. I note, again, that the public hearings in relation to ASIC covered a wide range of other reports and, again, I believe it proved to be a very important accountability mechanism.

I will just take this opportunity, now that we are very close to the end of this term, to thank all witnesses who provided written submissions or appeared at public hearings for our committee over the course of this term. There were, indeed, many. We undertook public hearings in relation to the annual reports of, as I noted, the big four banks but also many public sector organisations, and we held two very substantial inquiries: one into competition and economic dynamism and one into flood insurance. I also thank individuals and organisations who participated in private briefings, and I particularly thank prominent economists who took considerable time to provide the committee with very detailed briefings. I think it is fair to say that the entire committee found those to be incredibly valuable.

I will conclude by thanking our secretariat members. It's a very, very hardworking secretariat that has produced significant amounts of very high-quality analysis. I thank Lachlan, who was the committee secretary for the initial part of the term. I thank Jeff, who was committee secretary for the latter part of the term and had to deal with some very substantial work in relation to our flood insurance inquiry and also with emails and calls at all hours from myself, the deputy chair and others. He did that with exemplary grace. I acknowledge, with some sadness, Sam, who was a longstanding inquiry secretary for this committee. Sam is sadly no longer with us and is still much missed by her colleagues and also by committee members. I thank Tessa, who travelled across metropolitan and regional Australia with the committee and dealt with highly demanding committee members in all of those exploits. I thank Nicolette. I don't like singling out individuals, but Nicolette deserves special mention—and I hope not to offend others—due to her very hard work and for being the bastion of continuity in a difficult year. She really stepped into the breach to ensure the delivery of our economic dynamism report, the flood report and also our big four bank report. I acknowledge Jazmine, Danton and Nicole. We also had a number of temporary staff and secondees. Our graduates Laura, who made a significant contribution to the ACCC and ASIC reports as well as to the flood report, and Owen. Thank you to Vivien; to Holly, who was a parliamentary assistant; to Anabelle, who was loaned from another team; and to Dee, who was a Treasury secondee for our flood report.

Finally, I acknowledge my other committee members. The deputy chair is here in the chamber, and he was somebody who worked very hard on this committee, I want to note, with an extremely collegiate air. He was always looking for evidence based solutions and always looking for solutions and policy recommendations that would stand the test of time, and I think that both the conduct of our public hearings and the way in which we managed to land our two big policy reports and all the recommendations benefited greatly from his leadership and the fact that he was willing to compromise on so many occasions and try to get unanimous outcomes. But, of course, I'd also like to thank all of the other eight members of the committee and also the four additional members who came on board for the flood insurance inquiry. That was a 14-member effort which produced a very substantial report, and I think the recommendations of that report will stand the test of time and lead to ongoing change. All of the members of the committee participated in many days of public hearings—I think there were almost 30 days of public hearings last year alone—two major inquiries and travel right around Australia.

I commend these three reports, and I thank all the people that I just mentioned.

Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Much of my statement will be very much aligned with and in support of the member for Fraser's contribution. I'll start by thanking the secretariat. The member for Fraser was quite right to point out the difficulties we went through, both in production and personally. So, Jeff, I'm very grateful to you and your team. Thank you for working so well with my staff, who I also want to thank for their work in making sure that these reports were attended to in the best way we could. I thank the committee members who are here and previous committee members as well. I will, given his warm comments, thank the chair. It's a pity that a group of schoolkids just walked out of here and probably didn't get to see—

An honourable member: They're still here!

They're still here? Good! There are some still here to see this. Question time draws all the attention in this place and the fighting. What's not shown is the amount of working together that goes on in committees. I entered into this role with the view that, where there were opportunities for us to get ahead on matters that we agreed to, I should focus my attention on those and support the chair as much as I could. Throughout these reports, I think that came through very well. This is a very important committee for the government, for the parliament and, I think, for Australia.

One of the outcomes that I was most grateful to see achieved—it was through another set of reports—was the establishment of the regulatory grid. I commend the government for listening to what came through our committee, and I'm very proud that that is a result of the work of this committee. It shows what can happen when we find areas that we both agree on and work together to get that done. I commend the chair for that. That is an outcome that he can carry onwards. I know, having spoken to many members of the banking industry, that they see it as a great step forward. To the chair: that's something you get to carry on from this term and your role. So congratulations on that.

Directly to these reports: for this term of government, the focus was always going to be entirely on the decision-making of the RBA. I think it drew so much of our attention. Our review of what was happening in insurance, particularly in relation to flood insurance, drew so much of our time and attention. It is my belief that the next term of government, whatever shape that may take and however quickly it may form a shape, will focus more on the regulators. I think that is going to be where the next Standing Committee on Economics sends its attention.

There are a couple of areas that I think are brought out in these reports that I'll raise now because I think they should get further consideration. The first one is following through on how we establish a banking industry in Australia that has the level of competition that we want, the strength that we want and the ability to ensure that access to capital remains there. Whilst that is outside the scope of these reports, it does remind all of us watching the actions of APRA when talking about capital and liquidity requirements how quickly a regulator can step ahead of the public mood. That's something that this committee needs to keep at the forefront.

The second—and the chair raised this one—is the issue of greenwashing. I'll bring in debanking. The AFR recently ran a very confronting article showing the hoops that have been put in place for legitimate businesses working on legitimate projects in Australia that have already passed through approval levels at state, council and federal levels, yet the banks were making it extremely hard for a gas operation to get finance. I think we need to draw attention to that, and I think we need to accept that some of those hurdles are actually a response to positions that regulators hold. So these reports will form part of that future conversation.

Once again, I want to thank the chair. I want to thank the secretariat. It might hurt both of us, Member for Fraser, to reveal to the parliament that we regularly lunched together and discussed these things. I'm not sure how that plays out for you in your electorate, Member for Fraser; it may hurt you. I'm not sure how these things work. But we wanted to get some things agreed on, and I think that was a good step that we took. I appreciate the way that we worked together.

I commend these reports.

Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I move this motion, following on from the deputy chair, I will thank my staff also so that's on the record. I move:

That the house take note of the report Review of Australia's four major banks 2023-2024.

Debate adjourned.