Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Just yesterday, the ABC reported that AMP had been caught out charging a dead person. The reason they got caught out was the executor of the deceased estate happened to be Ms Naomi Halpern, who some people in the Senate may well remember from the Timbercorp inquiry. She was a very prominent victim of financial crime in this country. By complete coincidence, after her best friend passed away and she was managing his deceased estate, she noticed that, after six months and after having contacted AMP to let them know the details of his passing, they were still charging fees to the deceased estate. AMP have claimed that they have quickly remedied this and apologised and said that it was an oversight. It does make you wonder whether, if someone had not had the gumption to follow up and prosecute this, that kind of practice would have continued—or how widespread it still is.

This voluntary banking code of conduct is designed purely to increase community trust and confidence in the banking sector following a disastrous decade in Australia—a decade of parliamentary inquiries and a decade of royal commissions. In November last year, I moved to disallow the previous version of this regulation. While I acknowledge that this is an improvement on the previous regulations that came before the Senate, I want to highlight to anybody who might be listening to this debate that, normally, regulatory instruments make changes to the laws of the land. That is what they do. We can do it through legislation or we can do it through regulation. But this regulation is different. This is a regulation that does not regulate. This is a law that has no effect in law. This is a code of practice that has no practical effect. This is the twilight zone of regulatory instruments. It is perhaps why Senator Malcolm Roberts has been attracted to this debate today! Do not ask me why but, when I watch re-runs of The Twilight Zone on 9Gem, channel 92, you do come to mind, Senator Roberts. I have to work on my thinking around that!

This is an unenforceable code. Let me remind the Senate what Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne had to say about the banking code of practice in his interim report. He said:

Contravention of … a provision of the … Code may be a breach of contract but otherwise it is not, and will not be, a contravention of law. The Code stands as a set of promises made by the banks enforceable only at the behest of an aggrieved customer. …

The Code is not subject to … the Competition and Consumer Act …

I listened with interest to Senator Duniam's contribution and I will look, with interest, at any changes to that next year. But, as it stands now, the code stands in sharp contrast to generally similar industry codes of practice. In other words, because the financial sector is not regulated under the Competition and Consumer Act, this code is therefore unenforceable by the regulator. Yet ASIC have given this their stamp of approval. I find that very odd, considering ASIC are essentially giving the banks a leg up in terms of their image and their PR campaign.

We agree with Labor on the point that this is an improvement on no code of conduct, but we want to make a very clear statement today: codes of conduct should be mandatory, they should be properly regulated and they should be enforceable in law. We've fought really hard in this chamber, and I'm very proud of the work we've all done in here to hold the big banks and financial services to account. We are hopefully seeing a golden era of legislation and new financial services regulations coming before the Senate in this parliament. I very much look forward to that in the coming years. I urge the Senate to support One Nation's disallowance today and to bring this back as an enforceable mandatory code of conduct.