COMMITTEES

Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (18:11): I thank Senator Bragg for providing us with this opportunity this evening to discuss matters associated with the banks in Australia. I want to start by making the obvious point here that, while millions of Australians are really struggling to pay their bills—including their grocery bills, their electricity bills, the costs to educate their children, the costs to go to the doctor or the dentist, or the costs to fill up their cars with a tank of fuel—Australian banks, particularly the big four banks, are absolutely making off like bandits.

Remember, colleagues, the Commonwealth Bank recently announced its 2026 financial year profit, an eye-watering $11 billion in profit. That's from just one of the big four banks, the Commonwealth Bank. Collectively the big four banks made somewhere in the region of $30 billion in the last financial year.

These are eye-watering figures when you consider that every dollar of those profits came out of the pockets of Australians or were underpinned by banking services provided in Australia. Who can forget the banking royal commission? Who can forget that, when the Greens put up demands, motions, amendments and in fact legislation to properly scrutinise the rotten culture in Australian banks, the two major parties in this place—the parties of government, the Labor Party and the coalition—time after time voted against establishing a royal commission into the way Australia's banks were operating.

I want to pay credit to former senator Wacka Williams, who broke ranks with the Nationals. As many people have pointed out, over recent decades when the Greens and the Nationals get together, things can happen in this parliament— Senator Green: Or not happen! Senator McKIM: Things did happen, Senator Green, in this parliament.

The Nationals got on board, and then finally the Liberals got on board. Labor saw the writing on the wall, and the then prime minister, Mr Turnbull, supported the creation of a royal commission into the banks. Boy oh boy, what a royal commission that was!

It exposed an absolutely stinking, rotten culture in Australia's banks. Commissioner Kenneth Hayne, in the section of his interim report which dealt with how we ended up in this place, said it was 'greed—the pursuit of short term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty'. I could not have put it any better myself.

The banks—when we say 'banks', of course, what we are talking about here is the senior executives in our big banking corporations—pursued greed and pursued profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty. In other words, they were crooked, they were dishonest and they lost sight of the requirement on our so-called captains of industry to behave ethically and to behave honestly.

Instead, driven by greed, driven by a relentless desire to expand the size of their remuneration packages, they behaved dishonestly. It was ordinary Australians who paid the price for that through the dollars that the banks were skimming off the top of the mortgage repayments and other banking services provided to ordinary Australians. Of course, out of the banking royal commission came a number of recommendations, including some to improve executive accountability.

These were known as the Financial Accountability Regime recommendations. Who can forget the infamous time when the Greens had made an agreement with former minister Mr Jones to amend the Financial Accountability Regime to put in place million-dollar fines for dodgy bankers—that is, fines levied personally on bank executives when they failed to fulfil their obligations under the Financial Accountability Regime package.

I looked Mr Jones in the eye and shook hands with him on this agreement. It took less than 24 hours to be overturned because, of course, former Labor premier of Queensland Anna Bligh, who was then head of the Australian Banking Association, made some calls to Dr Chalmers's office or into Mr Albanese's office—I actually don't know who she called, but rest assured it was pretty high up inside the Labor Party—and within 48 hours Labor completely backflipped and reneged on that deal.

What a brazen demonstration of power that was. The banks didn't care who knew that they were pulling Labor's strings; they just needed Labor's strings to be pulled, and pulled they were. The puppetmasters pulled the strings, and the Australian Labor Party puppet danced to their tune.

The deal was off. The million-dollar fines for dodgy bankers are still not enshrined in legislation to this very day, and that is a shame. In fact, it is a disgrace because unless you have these fines in place, there is nothing to focus the minds of the people who get paid many, many millions of dollars a year to run the big banks in this country on the need to behave ethically and honestly.

Remember, they were found not to have behaved honestly by Commissioner Ken Hayne in his interim report. Why am I going through relatively ancient history like this? Well, I'll tell you why: because Senator Bragg has put up a motion calling for another inquiry into the banks.

Obviously, this is a very narrowly scoped motion compared to the scope of the royal commission, and I offer that as no criticism of Senator Bragg. He's identified an issue here, and he's made a quite reasonable request of this Senate: that the matter of the banks' treatment of offset accounts ought to be further scrutinised. That is not an unreasonable request by Senator Bragg.

The point here, colleagues, is that we've heard these stories before. We've repeatedly heard these stories. The behaviour of Australia's banks—and, I might add, the failure of some of our corporate regulators—was so bad and of such a high level that this chamber, and in fact both chambers of this parliament, decided that they should face the most serious of inquisitions—that is, a royal commission.

It doesn't get any more serious than that. There was a royal commission where the banks were hauled over the coals and their executives were publicly humiliated, as they should have been. The royal commission found that bank executives had acted motivated by greed and by the pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of basic standards of honesty.

Now, do we need another royal commission into the banking sector? Well, that is an open question. But what I can say is that it's not just the banks' treatment of offset accounts that has offended Australians.

Who can forget the serial and repeated breaches of the anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism framework that at least one Australian bank engaged in? Who can forget that? Who can forget their failures to realise that many of their so-called customers were actually deceased and still paying bank fees even though they were dead?

The litany of failures from Australia's big banks continues to grow, and Senator Bragg is quite reasonably requesting that this chamber have a look at quite a narrowly scoped element of that. When you've got a corporation—just the one corporation, the Commonwealth Bank—making over $10 billion in profits just in the last financial year alone, and yet banks cannot maintain basic standards of probity and accountability and responsibly exercise those very basic standards, then you have a problem that needs to be considered by this chamber.

While millions of Australians are struggling to make ends meet, while wages are failing to keep pace with the cost of living, while the housing bubble—even though house prices have come off recently, which is a good thing—still means that for millions of Australians—in particular millions of young Australians—the great Australian dream of owning their own home continues to recede into the distance, and while you still have a banking sector that appears not to have learned the lessons that it should have learned from being hauled over the coals by the Hayne royal commission, then you have a scenario where the eyes of this Senate should be open and the ears of this Senate should be alert to what is going on.

I will say to you something very, very obvious. If you go out onto the street and you ask an ordinary Australian—whether it's someone waiting to pick up their kid after school, whether it's someone down at the local bowls club, whether it's someone you might be yarning to over the back fence or whether it's someone you might be having a beer with down at your local watering hole—what they think about the big banking corporations, I'll tell you what you're going to get.

You're going to get an earful and rightly so, because these big corporations are absolutely taking the proverbial. The big banks are making off like bandits, and they are doing it by screwing over ordinary Australians. They are making obscene eye-watering profits while the people that they are price gouging are struggling to meet their mortgage repayments or are watching the Australian dream of owning their own home fade ever further into the distance.

The big banks need to be held to account, and, if the government won't do it, it is the job of this Senate to do it. It is time that we stop bowing down before big corporate price gouging in this country, and it is time that we absolutely had the back of ordinary Australian people, who are sick of being price gouged by big banking corporations.