Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to put remarks on the record with regard to the questions that were asked of Senator Brandis and Senator Cormann at question time today. One thing that is absolutely clear is that the confidence and trust that Australians had in banking institutions, and particularly the financial services sector, has been increasingly shaken throughout the course of this year, and over the last period of years, with the revelations day after day of scandals that have seen tens of thousands of Australians being ripped off.

As the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services in the last parliament and as its deputy chair in this parliament I have had a front-row seat to the sort of tragedies that Senator Dastyari put on the record here this afternoon—the Trio scandal, the Storm Financial scandal, the Timbercorp scandal, and the CommInsure scandal that the Australian people have just been alerted to through the very good investigative journalism of Adele Ferguson. The Panama Papers are revealing an integration of banks into a system where money is moving around the world in corrupt ways, preventing transparency and the opportunity for fair taxation across the whole global economy.

Right now in Australia we understand that retirees have had their retirement savings absolutely gutted. I want to go to evidence that I received in an early day of doorknocking on the Central Coast in the seat of Robertson, which is relying on Labor to stand up for ordinary people who need banks to do the right thing and to be transparent. I recall knocking on a gentleman's door on a Saturday morning. He had worked all his life and he said to me, 'The only thing I wanted to do was have enough money to be able to take my family out for dinner on the odd Saturday night and to look after myself and my wife in our retirement.' He lost everything. He was about to put his house on the market. He lost everything because he was caught up in the Trio scandal.

This sort of behaviour by the banks—their culture and their set of key performance indicators—has distorted ethical behaviour and made it palatable within the banking sector, and within the financial services that are sitting within the banking sector, for people to do the wrong thing. Ethical standards have to be articulated and they have to be maintained. Families have been rorted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the most recent inquiry, which the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services should be reporting on in the very near future, we have been investigating constructive default in the area of small businesses and small business loans. ASIC before the Senate committee, in this building, in a committee room not too far away from here, one evening were talking to us about the challenge they face in trying to bring to bear some power and some control over the standards of contracts that exist. Small businesses were signing up to contracts that were essentially declared to be unconscionable contracts, so excessively weighted in favour of the banks and against the interests of the small business owner that they prevent small business owners from ever getting redress from the banks when they are manhandled and abruptly and inequitably treated.

We know that the Prime Minister made some remarks that were called 'chastising remarks' to the banking sector in the recent celebrations of Westpac, but chastising remarks are not enough. To say, 'There have been too many troubling incidents over recent times for them simply to be dismissed,' is just not enough. That is why Labor is calling for a royal commission into our banking sector to make it a safer, more equitable, more transparent place in which Australians can be sure that the money that they have worked very hard to gather and that they want to invest in businesses is going to be handled properly in our banking system rather than seeing the extraordinary abuse of power that we currently see in too many sections of our banks.

We have seen eight of the Liberal and National parliamentarians defying the Prime Minister and making it clear that they also support a royal commission: Senator John Williams, who is on the committee with me, and Mr Warren Entsch, just to name two. There are others around the country: eight parliamentarians from their own ranks who are willing to stand up and say it is time for a royal commission—not a fake royal commission but a genuine royal commission into banking in this country. (Time expired)