Chris Ketter (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a pleasure to follow Senator Williams in this contribution. I acknowledge his longstanding interest and advocacy in this area, but, I must say, I can't share his confidence in the new authority that's been set up as a result of this bill. Whilst I hope that it does work for consumers, there are some signs here that we are going to see some difficulties.

I rise to make a contribution on the debate on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Putting Consumers First—Establishment of the Australian Financial Complaints Authority) Bill 2017. I want to put on the record, at the outset, my disappointment about the real reason we are debating this bill today. It's because the Prime Minister, for so long, resisted Labor's call for a royal commission into the banks. After 601 days of pressure from the Australian community and from Labor, the government has finally accepted the reality that there needs to be a banking royal commission. The Prime Minister has been dragged, kicking and screaming, to that conclusion at the behest of the banks. He has even described it as a 'regrettable' outcome. If the Prime Minister had listened to us earlier, we might now be discussing the findings of a royal commission, which could have been running for the last couple of years. We could have been looking at the findings today instead of debating another part of the piecemeal approach, which has been used as a foil against a royal commission, which is his attempt to look at consumer protection in the financial sector.

It's not just the Prime Minister's legislation agenda that is in pieces, as we close out 2017. We can see from the events of last week, in the wake of the LNP's dismal performance in the Queensland state election, that this coalition is deeply divided. As Senator Canavan keeps pointing out, they keep separate party rooms and have separate meetings. Now we hear the Queensland Nationals want to run a separate campaign in the Sunshine State. They do not want the Prime Minister anywhere near them. I see that the federal member for Flynn is on board with that strategy. The Gladstone The Observer reported, on 29 November, Mr O'Dowd as saying:

I can see us becoming irrelevant if we keep heading down the path we're headed.

It seems he also agrees with Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald that the Prime Minister isn't representing regional Queenslanders, saying:

We're becoming, in the eyes of the public, more city-orientated than rural and regional.

So there is something that they agree on, but the divisions run deep—so deep that the news headlines last week proclaimed an LNP divorce. Again I refer to the federal member—