COMMITTEES

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (18:26): Do you know what? Sometimes the conversations in this place are so disconnected from reality. We have conversations about banking, and somebody will come in here and talk about the minutiae of a particular sector or a reform needed to a subgenre of mortgage.

A lot of complicated talk, often fed straight into the back of the head of the minister or shadow minister by the banking lobby, gets spewed out in here. It is so disconnected from the reality that the community members talk to me about in Western Australia and across the country. You know what they tell me about?

They tell me about how much they hate the big four, because people know that these banks have ripped them off for generations and are ripping them off to this very day. They know that on average the salaries of these fat cats are paid off the interest of the sweat of the brow of people paying their mortgages in some of the most difficult situations you can possibly imagine.

Over the life of a loan, a big bank will make $229,000 from an average mortgage. It's disgusting. These are Australians doing their best, trying to actually pay their bills, actually do the work of raising a family, contribute to community and build this country up.

Yet along comes the Commonwealth, along comes NAB, along comes ANZ, and they cut them off at the knees every damn time. And, oh, don't the high priests of neoliberalism come forth with their explanations as to why it is justifiable that a mother and a father, that a family, that grandparents doing it tough should go without food and should go without medical care in order to pay their monthly pound of flesh to this system.

It's disgusting, and it has built for the big four a pile of wealth that exceeds the ability of most people even to conceptualise. The Commonwealth Bank alone in the last year made a net profit of $11 billion. Let's put that into context.

If you earnt $1 a second, it would take you 11½ days to earn $1 million. If you earnt a dollar a second, it would take you over 31 years to earn $1 billion. These are scales of wealth almost beyond imagining.

I have to apologise to Senator Allman-Payne for the mutilation of her excellent analogy there, which was, in fact, meant to be quite different to what I just shared with the chamber. I put that on the record right now. But, in all seriousness, my family got into debt.

This is why I'm angry about this. My family built a home because my great-grandma was kind enough, at the end of her life, to leave a chunk of money to my mum. With that money we built a home.

My mum was able to do it without a mortgage because of that generosity. In the run-up to the global financial crisis—a lot of people don't remember this—the big banks here in Australia were just as guilty as the big banks elsewhere of really dangerous and coercive mortgage practices, such as lending to people who could not pay the money back. We got into debt.

My family got into debt. We did what so many families at the time were doing. We were told by our local bank: 'Your house is a pot.

Your house, itself, is a form of bank. Why not release the equity? It's so cheap.

You'll never notice the payments.' We thought that we'd finally be able to build a small business and that we'd finally be able to get a shot at being independent, after medical bill after medical bill and mental health crisis after mental health crisis knocked the wind out of my family again and again. Between the mortgage payments building up, then rebuilding up and the credit card debt coming in, what was sold to us as a lifeline ended up being a chain around our neck.

That chain sat there until I was elected. My nan and pop paid the mortgage for us as long as they could. Every single utility bill that we had was in a payment arrangement when I was elected.

Finally, when I got this job, I was able to pay the mortgage. Mum could never refinance because of her health conditions. Once you get into a situation where you have been in arrears for a certain amount of time, even when you've got out from under that structure, they'll never do a refinancing package for you.

We had a relatively tiny mortgage, but we were locked into this rate that just sucked everything we had. It went to ANZ. What did they do with it?

Did they finance a couple of coalmines or subsidise a few billionaires' holidays? They didn't care. Whatever they did with it, they didn't care.

If luck and fate hadn't meant that I ended up here, we would still be under that right now. These are the types of lending practices that were laid bare during the royal commission into Australia's banking sector. I pay tribute to Senator Whish-Wilson and others who brought about that much-needed investigation.

But can anybody honestly say that there has truly been accountability in this sector—that there has truly been adequate accountability for the lives destroyed by scandal after scandal? People in this country are furious. They are grabbing at any and every stone and stick they can find and hurling it with all their might at the mainstream establishment of politics.

The treatment they have experienced at the hands of the big banks is a big part of why, because, though they may have expected their bank, or the colloquial 'banker', to rip them off, they certainly didn't expect their elected representative to help that banker, to let that banker off the hook, to peddle that banker's nonsense lines in this place and to allow the whole process to start again.

Can anybody in this place truly blame a voter for not believing a single word that comes out of the mouth of a politician, the mouth of a minister, the mouth of an opposition leader, when we sit here right now and there are so many more penalties that may and do fall on the head of somebody that may take an illicit substance or may fail to pay a fine than there are those that would fall on the head of the CEO of a bank in this country?

It's a disgrace. In Western Australia, if you don't show up to your mutually obligated structure, served to you via Services Australia, if you don't meet those mutual obligations, you lose, or you risk losing, the money you need to live. What of the banking sector's mutual obligations to the Australian people—let alone any sort of human morality that might ask whether an industry that makes its living scraping and scrounging around to seize as much of the wealth of the people as it can and place it into private hands is something that should be allowed to exist in the way it does right now?

Some of the people, some of the parties, in here are proud of this. They will proudly speak of Australia's financial sector, of its competitiveness on the global stage—the wisdom of deregulation, of selling off the banks. They're proud of it.

It's their legacy. And yet the people live in the reality that was let rip under deregulation and neoliberalism as it tore through communities in Tasmania, as it tore through communities in Queensland, as it tore through communities in Western Australia. It tears through them still—all sacrificed on the altar of neoliberalism, all aspiration and hope smashed on the anvil of ideological commitment to people whose political ideology is nothing less than academically justified greed and selfishness, those human traits which our parents teach us, when we are knee-high to a grasshopper, are behaviours that we should steer clear of.

We teach the values of hope and love and sharing and mutual support to our kids, yet, in our corporate leaders, we celebrate and justify ruthlessness, greed, avarice of the most disgusting nature. We give them awards for it. We plop them up on Forbes—'Richest people of the year', 'Best corporations in Australia'.

Well, it's time for a change. It's time to stop the banks making bank on the backs of Australian people. It's time for banking to be boring again for those that run it—the simple, humdrum transaction and transfer of savings from one place to another, not to be traded on a global blackjack board and not to be passed around like chips in a casino, but basic financial services, such as boring mortgages with low rates.

We need to go back to a time when to introduce yourself as a banker was not notable at all because it simply meant enabling people to get hold of the money they have and spend it in the ways that they need to. We need to go back to community banking, we need to go back to public banking and, more than anything, we need to go back to—or, indeed, we need to create—moral banking driven by community, owned by community and in service of community.

We need to stamp out the greed and replace it with accountability. Question agreed to.