George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

What is wrong with a royal commission is that it is entirely unnecessary. One has a royal commission—and this government has established royal commissions, most recently a royal commission into the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and related issues in the Northern Territory—to identify and get to grips with and make recommendations relating to systemic abuse, just as we saw, for example, the systemic abuse within certain trade unions revealed by the Heydon royal commission. A number of complaints about the banking system do not constitute systemic abuse, but what they do show is that there is an appropriate mechanism to be devised in order to address those complaints, and that is precisely what the government has done. Your proposal, Senator Ketter—and I might say it is charitable even to call it a proposal, because, for all of the months that Mr Shorten and Senator Dastyari campaigned on this issue, not once did they so much as favour us with proposed terms of reference; not once. So it is a thought bubble and a slogan but not a proposal. What is wrong with that proposal is that not only are the complaints better addressed by a more responsive and appropriate mechanism but, as well, if you were to have a royal commission into the banking system, how many years do you think it would take before a single person obtained a single piece of redress out of that process? That is why it is not the right mechanism.