Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
‘With confidence in the Australian banking sector fast eroding to an
irrevocable level, rebuilding trust with the public will not be easy for
Australia’s financial institutions.’
Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP
Hate
to break it to you Australia but this country has been totally fooled
by government and our financial regulators over the years. Any
government minister, or member of one of the regulators, who claimed
that all was sweet as pie in the lucky country’s banking system prior to
the Hayne royal commission should take a long hard look at the impact
millions of Australian households may feel as the sector remakes its
business model – with potentially devastating consequences for the
economy. As some of us have long been arguing, the people responsible for regulating the financial industry have failed,
going all the way through Asic, Apra and members of government. And it
is this regulatory capture – a term to describe when watchdogs are
effectively controlled by the industry they are supposed to be
monitoring – that was the reason the royal commission into the banks
took so long to be established. This is because highly paid regulatory
insiders knew that a lot of dodgy stuff was going on but failed to say
anything. And they tried to the end to prevent all the misconduct from
coming out into the public domain.
Had more members of the mainstream media too taken the warnings by
those whistleblowers who were banging the drum – and, more importantly,
victims of these financial crimes – instead of glorifying a red-hot
property market, we may not have had to wait for Team Hayne to do the
job.
Questions must be asked if the media was also broadly captured by
Australia’s banking powerhouse. If this is the case, many business and
investigative journalists, alongside their editors, will have to hold on
to their conscience that they likely not only missed the scoops of a
lifetime but ignored a long list of financial crime victims who
approached the media but were never responded to. Asic, Apra, the
financial ombudsmen and the government failed Australia’s victims of
financial crimes. And, more often than not, so did the media.
It was refreshing to see Barnaby Joyce admit that it was a mistake to
not back a royal commission. Like him or not, his action and change in
his point of view deserves respect. Furthermore, to see the odd
journalist holding the industry and its regulators to account too is
brave. Redemption and rebuilding trust for journalists and politicians
may not be so easy but it is possible.
The Palaszczuk government could push land-clearing laws through the Queensland parliament next week.
Photograph: Auscape/UIG via Getty Images
The Queensland government may push land-clearing laws through
parliament as early as next week, after a committee report recommended
few changes to its proposed vegetation management act.
The report, tabled late on Monday night, noted concerns from the
Liberal National party opposition that the process was rushed and that
consultation with people in regional areas had been inadequate.
The government could now move to pass the land-clearing laws before
Beef Week in Rockhampton, a key forum for pastoralists, many of whom
oppose the measures. Beef Week begins on 6 May.
Clearing laws have long been controversial in Queensland, which is
responsible for more land clearing than the rest of the country
combined. A new report from the Climate Council calculates that bushland more than seven times the size of Brisbane was cleared between 2012 and 2016.
More than 1m hectares of woody vegetation was cleared in Queensland
between 2012-13 and 2015-16 and the state accounted for between 50% and
65% of the total loss of native forests across Australia over the past
four decades, the report found.
Vegetation management regulations were brought in by the Beattie
government but then effectively scrapped in 2013 when the LNP came to
power.
The Palaszczuk government attempted to restore many of the
Beattie-era measures in 2016 but its bill was defeated in the minority
parliament. It is expected to use its second-term majority to quickly
pass the bill.
The state development, natural resources and agricultural industry
committee recommended measures including the establishment of Indigenous
country use areas to help support development and job creation,
particularly on Cape York.
The committee also suggested development applications for clearing should be cheaper and easier for landowners to obtain.
The committee made eight recommendations but none significantly alters the bill as it was proposed.
Some
environmental groups had raised concerns about loopholes that could
allow the continued clearing of high-value vegetation where landowners
had already “locked in” their vegetation maps.
The Queensland Conservation Council welcomed the report.
“This bill represents an important milestone in Queensland’s
land-clearing legislative approach”, the council’s head, Tim Seelig,
said on Tuesday.
“It will see the ending of broadscale remnant clearing for spurious
agricultural reasons, it will see the reprotection of high conservation
value regenerating woodlands under a modified definition, and it will
see a curtailing of remnant thinning.
“It will extend reef riparian area protections and terminate current area management plans.”
Seelig said the conservation council was disappointed the committee
had not sought to close “gaps” they had asked to be closed. He said more
still needed to be done to ensure koala habitat was out of bounds to
all development.
“We recognise the bill will not stop all clearing of native woodlands
in Queensland. It will not fully address Queensland’s land-clearing
crisis,” Seelig said. “Nevertheless, it is a significant step forward
that will make a big difference, and we welcome and support it.”
Climate scientist Prof Will Steffen said the bill would significantly improve protection.
“Proposed amendments to Queensland’s Vegetation Management Act (1999)
would, if passed, lead to a tripling of protected forest areas in the
Sunshine State, from an estimated 500,000 hectares to 1.8 million
hectares, while simultaneously cutting greenhouse gas pollution levels,”
he said.
AgForce, the main lobby group for the pastoral industry, said farmers
were angry and had “hit the end of their rope” after the committee
recommended the laws be passed.
The AgForce president, Grant Maudsley, said the laws were “the worst of both worlds”.
“The changes will make it harder for farmers to grow food and fibre,
shut down agricultural development opportunities and lead to worse not
better environmental outcomes,” he said.
“Farmers love and care for their land and the vast majority know how to manage it responsibly.
“Farmers have had enough. It doesn’t have to be like this. There is
no need to ram these flawed laws through as quickly as possible. We’re
all in this together, we all eat food and we all care for the
environment.”
LNP members of the committee submitted a dissenting report opposing
the new laws. They said there was a lack of consultation with industry
groups.
“The significance of this proposed legislation on the agricultural
industry was deserving of a much more wholesome engagement, and many
submitters expressed their anger and disappointment at this constrained
timeframe, both online and at the public hearings across the state,” the
dissenting report said.
They said expanded powers of entry for government departmental staff gave them powers beyond those of the police.
The LNP members of the committee also said mapping of vegetation and
the statewide landcover and trees study on which the legislation was
based did not account for regrowth.
“To not base this legislation on science fails to tell the whole story around vegetation in Queensland,” they said.
Sometimes it's not a bad idea to have a lie-in on
Sunday morning. Financial Services Minister Kelly O'Dwyer might wish
she'd done so at the weekend.
Ms O'Dwyer should not have gone out — or been put out — on the ABC's Insiders
program with the lines she had on the banking royal commission. The
interview was agony to watch, and counter-productive for the government,
as she steadfastly refused to admit the Coalition had been wrong in not
agreeing earlier to the inquiry, which has produced such devastating
disclosures.
So often the government seems to take the public for
fools. Scott Morrison's attempts to turn everything to a discussion of
Bill Shorten are ludicrous.
Ms O'Dwyer's effort to avoid any confession of error just drew more attention to the bad call.
Remember
Ms O'Dwyer is well-versed in the financial services area. Look at her
CV. She was a senior advisor to then treasurer Peter Costello. Later she
worked at the National Australia Bank. She has seen the banking system
from inside as well as from her ministerial and advisory roles.
And yet, because of the government's "admit nothing" strategy, she visibly struggled at every turn in Sunday's interview.
Asked
about her 2016 claim that "for the Labor party to propose a royal
commission into banks is reckless and ill-conceived", she could only
fall back to the weak defence that "you can obsess and Labor can obsess
about these issues. I'm actually obsessed about fixing the problems".
In other words, the government can be political when convenient but if brought to book, that's just others "obsessing".
Labor's
idea of a royal commission had been "a stunt", she said, but then
"there is no question we got it right in establishing the royal
commission". The difference is that the government did it soberly and
deliberately, according to Ms O'Dwyer. Grudgingly and belatedly would be
a better description.
The alternative strategy would have been for the government to say:
"Yes,
in retrospect we did not move quickly enough. We were concerned about
shaking confidence in the banking system. We did not appreciate how
systemic the problems were. We thought we were doing enough but we
weren't".
Everyone knows the government's hand was
forced in the end by rebel Nationals. Conceding it had been wrong would
have been humiliating. But by doing so the government would have gone
some way to clearing its own decks. That might have given it a fighting
chance of being seen as part of the solution rather than having the
attention so sharply focused on its abysmal failure.
Mr Morrison
in an interview in AFR Weekend also tried a convoluted avoidance game,
as he sought to reconcile being surprised by the royal commission's
revelations with earlier arguing it wouldn't find issues government
didn't know:
"When I say they were known to
government, they were known to government agencies. There is a
difference between individual ministers being aware of particular things
and the regulatory agencies being aware of them."
Mr Morrison likened his position to that of a police minister not knowing every criminal investigation underway:
"I
am not aware of every court case and every decision and every practice
of every bank in the country any more than anyone else is — indeed than
the executives in the banks and they run the things," he said.
But
the issue was not one of knowing "every practice of every bank". It was
a case of being aware of broad malfeasance — and there was plenty of
evidence of that, through parliamentary inquiries and what was being
said by victims, financial journalists and government backbenchers such
as senator John Williams.
Shifting blame erodes trust
When
politicians are unwilling to take responsibility, that just adds to the
distrust and anger voters feel towards them. It's a sign they are
treating the people with disrespect, so is it any wonder they don't get
respect in return?
This bald-faced refusal to acknowledge their
own inconvenient history in part comes from the politicians' belief that
if you just burnish the "spin", you can get away with saying anything.
The
idea is that you brainstorm some "lines", repeat them shamelessly, and
hope they will be accepted — regardless of their disconnect from
reality.
It might work for an occasional glitch when
life generally is going well for a government and the public are in a
good mood. These days, neither condition is present.
Meanwhile,
as the government implausibly denies being out-manoeuvred over the
commission, Mr Shorten is pushing ahead again in the banking debate.
He
has released a letter to Turnbull in which he says: "Given the shocking
evidence that has been revealed so far, it is time the government gave
serious consideration to a compensation scheme for the victims of proven
wrongdoing. It's unacceptable for people to suffer because of the
misconduct of others, with no dependable access to justice."
It will be a popular pitch out in the electorate, just as Labor's call for a royal commission was. POSTSCRIPT
The government has received some good news in Monday's Newspoll
in The Australian, with Labor now leading only by a narrow 51-49 per
cent in two-party terms. This compares with a 52-48 per cent ALP lead in
the poll a fortnight ago, when the Turnbull government passed the 30th
consecutive loss landmark. The current poll is the Coalition's best
two-party preferred result since September 2016. Michelle
Grattan is a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra and chief
political correspondent at The Conversation, where this piece first appeared.
Josh Frydenberg is doing his best on the national energy guarantee – within the constraints he faces.
Photograph: Luis Ascui/AAP
For
folks who aren’t hardcore climate and energy policy tragics, it might
be hard to stay on top of the various twists and turns in the debate
about the national energy guarantee. This is a good weekend to take
stock.
If you were watching events on Friday, you’ll know the federal energy minister Josh Frydenberg
has persuaded the states and territories to keep going with the Neg,
but just hold that thought. To understand all the dimensions of this
debate properly, and I think there’s value in laying it all out – we’ll
need a brief recap, then we’ll need to look over the horizon to chart
where it’s all going.
The Neg is supposed to deal with two problems. The policy’s reliability and emissions framework
is aimed at ensuring the lights stay on at something like an affordable
price for energy users, and emissions decrease in the electricity
sector so we have some vague hope of meeting our international climate
commitments.
The Neg is entirely a creature of its circumstances. The government
isn’t in a position to argue for a carbon price or an emissions trading
scheme, or for a continuation of the renewable energy target after 2020
as a rebadged clean energy target – which was an idea put forward by the chief scientist Alan Finkel.
Because of the great, persistent, internal unreason that
descends within the Coalition whenever the words carbon abatement are
uttered, the government has locked itself out of conventional policy
approaches, so it had to conjure up something entirely new, and when you
are a government trapped in that universe, the policy will reflect the
compromises you’ve had to make to get there.
So the Neg isn’t perfect. Not even close.
Frydenberg is also being shadowed at every turn by Tony Abbott.
Abbott, more than any other person, has created the energy mess
Australia finds itself in. You’d think his previous miscalculations
might trigger a bout of quiet introspection, or even remorse, but no
such luck. Our former prime minister is nothing if not relentless,
always up for another round of virtue signalling, followed by vandalism.
Important that COAG today put reducing price ahead of reducing emissions. The NEG will be good policy if and only if it really does deliver long term certainty; and if HELE coal fired power stations can enter the system without price penalty or restriction
Fortunately, at least in this early point in the proceedings, there
is a mild structural check on rampant Abbottism because there are a
whole bunch of players – businesses, energy companies, consumers – who
are now so worn down by the consequences of 10 years of brain-dead
sloganeering and hyper-partisan claptrap that they now just want this
problem fixed.
Aided by a broad coalition calling for action, Frydenberg has worked
assiduously, doing his best within the constraints he faces, determined to deliver the fix.
The states and territories, who are partners in this joint venture
because any one of them has the power to torpedo the policy because of
the way the national electricity market is structured, are trying to manage their serious doubts about the commonwealth plan and remain at the table long enough to see if a deal can be done.
So that’s act one of this process. That ended Friday.
During act two, which will play out between now and August, states
and territories will be given more detail about the scheme, and once
they have that detail, they will know whether there is a deal to do, or
whether there isn’t.
Assuming the commonwealth and the states can come to terms, assuming
the scheme is not torpedoed at a meeting of the Coag energy council in
August (and right now I assume nothing), then we’ll move into act three,
which is the Canberra end of proceedings.
Frydenberg will have to come back to the Coalition party room
to secure sign off on legislation enacting the national emissions
reduction target for electricity, and determine a trajectory for how
fast that emissions reduction happens.
The government will also have to make a decision and get internal
sign off about whether energy companies will be able to buy offsets to
reduce their emissions, and the treatment of activities that are
emissions intensive and trade exposed.
These questions will be resolved while there is a rising public
clamour about what happens with emissions reduction in the rest of the
Australian economy – a new front that Frydenberg really doesn’t want to
open given his plan for electricity is not yet settled, and the
colleagues are already skittish.
So in Coalition terms, Frydenberg faces a challenge comparable to
climbing Mount Everest without oxygen, and that’s in normal conditions.
That’s assuming the government doesn’t blow itself up between now and
the end of the year, which on current indications, looks entirely
possible.
But persisting with the idea that Frydenberg can put this deal
together through a sheer act of will, that he can scale Everest minus
his oxygen tank, that’s not the end of it either.
He still has to get legislation through the parliament. To get it
through he’ll have to ensure any internal dissidents intent on “look at
me” mischief making don’t do anything spectacularly unhelpful, like
crossing the floor.
Then Labor will need to be persuaded to sign up. I think if
Frydenberg can push through the various obstacles, the states and the
colleagues, federal Labor is more likely to sign on than not, with
clearly articulated caveats and conditions.
While that’s not yet a certainty, given at least some of Labor’s
calculation will depend on the political contest they think they are in
at the time the decision has to be made, the alternative is the ALP
starting this whole process over from scratch in the event they win the
next federal election.
I suspect that thought alone would give some in Labor nightmares, as
would the thought of starting from scratch when their only viable
dancing partner in the parliament is the Greens – a party in the midst of something of an identity crisis, a phenomenon that works against a spirit of compromise.
As a price of entry, the Greens would want at a minimum a much higher
emissions reduction target, a plan for shutting down coal fired power
and structural adjustment assistance for workers, more subsidies for
renewables, and significant government intervention in the electricity
market including more generation to future-proof the grid once the
transport fleet starts rolling over at pace to electric cars.
To cut a long story short, we could be back at Groundhog Day, where
Labor attempts post-election to implement a climate and energy policy
that the Greens insist needs to be made more ambitious, which then
prompts opposition leader Peter Dutton to demand repeal.
For anyone who has lived through the colossal public policy failure
of the past decade, the thought of enduring that zero sum cycle again
will be enough to trigger a cold sweat.
However this story ultimately ends, this much is clear: it’s going to be a mind-focusing few months.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed during a
second day of sparring with US politicians over privacy concerns that he
was among the 87 million users whose data was improperly shared.
Key points:
Mark Zuckerberg faces US House Energy and Commerce Committee
He defends Facebook's privacy practices, saying users have control over their own data
Mr Zuckerberg says Facebook does collect information on people not signed up
The admission that even the tech-savvy Facebook founder
was unable to protect his own data underscored the problem Facebook has
in persuading sceptical politicians that users can easily safeguard
their own information.
"Every time that someone chooses to share something on Facebook … there is a control," he said.
"Right there. Not buried in the settings somewhere but right there."
Yet, when asked if his data had been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, he replied: "Yes." He gave no further details.
The 33-year-old internet magnate faced questions and
concerns from members of the US House of Representatives Energy and
Commerce Committee, who asked what Facebook was doing to give users more
flexibility to opt in to sharing their personal data with the company
or third parties.
"How can consumers have control over their data
when Facebook does not have control over the data?" asked Congressman
Frank Pallone of New Jersey at the beginning of the hearing.
Mr
Zuckerberg repeatedly defended the company's privacy practices, saying
that users have control over their own data and decide what to share.
The Facebook boss said he was not familiar with
so-called "shadow profiles", which media reports have described as
collections of data about users that they have no knowledge of or
control over.
He also said Facebook does not collect information from users' verbal conversations through mobile devices' microphones.
However,
in a series of questions on how people can remove data from Facebook,
Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook does "collect data on people who are not
signed up for Facebook for security purposes".
He had no response
when asked how a person who is not a Facebook member can remove
information without first signing up for the service.
'It is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation'
They posted their biggest daily gain in
nearly two years on Tuesday as Mr Zuckerberg managed to deter any
specific discussion about new regulations that might hamper Facebook's
ability to sell ads tailored to users' profiles.
"It is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," Mr Zuckerberg said, but steered away from any specifics.
Some
politicians grew frustrated at their limit of four minutes each to
press Mr Zuckerberg on specifics, and chastised the billionaire at times
for offering up rehearsed platitudes about valuing user privacy.
"I
can't let you filibuster right now," Republican Marsha Blackburn said
at one point. She cut Mr Zuckerberg off a number of times.
Democrat
Bobby Rush was in the process of asking Mr Zuckerberg when he learned
that Facebook allowed advertisers prevent to ads from being shown to
certain minority groups, a possible violation of civil rights laws. He
was cut off.
"I am indeed wary that you are only acting now out of
concern for your brand and are making changes that should have been
made long ago," Democrat Paul Tonko said. Reuters
On Twitter, Trump blamed ‘bad blood with Russia’ on the special
counsel investigation and described the atmosphere in the White House as
‘calm and calculated’
Donald Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday: ‘Mueller is most conflicted of
all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA & Comey letter).’ He
continued: ‘No Collusion, so they go crazy!’
Photograph: Pool/Getty Images
Judging by six sharply worded tweets starting at sunrise Wednesday, Donald Trump
is edging closer to taking irreversible action against a federal
investigation that earlier this week sent FBI agents raiding the office
of his longtime personal lawyer and trusted lieutenant, Michael Cohen.
By 9am, as well as threatening missile strikes in Syria, Trump had
blamed “bad blood with Russia” on the special counsel investigation led
by Robert Mueller, accused Mueller of a conflict of interest and characterized the atmosphere in the White House as “very calm and calculated”.
While scattershot in their targets, the tweets together communicated a
sense of heightened agitation that Trump has displayed for three days
now, ever since agents seized documents from Cohen including records of
six-figure payments made to two women who have claimed to have had
affairs with Trump before the 2016 election.
“Much of the bad blood with Russia is caused by the Fake & Corrupt Russia
Investigation, headed up by the all Democrat loyalists, or people that
worked for Obama,” Trump wrote in one tweet, which went on to criticize
Mueller and his superior, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who
are both in fact Republicans first appointed to federal posts by
Republican presidents.
“Mueller is most conflicted of all (except Rosenstein who signed FISA
& Comey letter),” Trump continued. “No Collusion, so they go
crazy!”
“Fisa” refers to the foreign intelligence surveillance act, under
which the FBI conducted surveillance during the presidential campaign of
a Trump aide with Russia ties. The “Comey letter” refers to a May 2017
letter written by Rosenstein that recommended the firing of former FBI
director James Comey.
The Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia has produced indictments of or pleas from 19
individuals, including Trump’s former campaign chairman and first
national security adviser, as well as three companies based in Russia. The prosecutors have not brought any charges specifically related to collusion so far.
Speculation that Trump may be nearing action against Mueller was fueled by a New York Times report
on Tuesday night saying that Trump had demanded Mueller’s firing as
recently as December, only to be dissuaded by the White House counsel
and other legal advisers.
Perhaps more significantly, for Trump’s mood, the tweets also
followed the publication of the first excerpts from an ABC News
interview with James Comey in which the former FBI director reportedly
compared Trump to a “mob boss”.
Comey is preparing a media blitz in support of a book to be released
next week that he has framed as a showdown with Trump. A source present
at the ABC interview told Axios that Comey is “going to shock the president and his team”.
It is not clear that the president could fire Mueller
directly, despite a claim on Tuesday by White House press secretary
Sarah Sanders that Trump has that power.
The president could however assign the task to a justice department
official, although several possible candidates, perhaps including
Rosenstein, would be likely to resign instead of carrying out the
president’s order.
The prospect of firing Mueller was openly mooted on Fox News, which
the president watches avidly, in a Tuesday report musing on “what might
happen if the president decides to pull the plug” on the special
counsel.
“The man who became famous for saying ‘you’re fired’ is facing what
could be the most serious and consequential personnel decision of his
life tonight,” the report said.
Mueller is not a member of White House personnel, but rather a justice
department appointment under a 1999 law passed by Congress.
The lawyer who drafted that statute, Neal Katyal, now a professor at Georgetown University, wrote on Tuesday
on Twitter that Trump’s firing Mueller “would come at enormous cost,
not just to the Justice Department and the Rule of Law, but also to him
personally. It should be the end of the Trump presidency.”
Perhaps sensing the danger to their coalition, Republican leaders on
Capitol Hill have declined to echo Trump’s characterization of the
special counsel investigation as a partisan “witch hunt”.
“It’s still my view that Mueller should be allowed to finish his
job,” the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, told the Guardian on
Tuesday. “I think that’s the view of most people in Congress.”
As he navigates this sensitive territory, Trump has recently lost the
most experienced lawyer advising him on the matter, John Dowd, who
resigned from the president’s legal team last month over a disagreement
with the Trump about whether he should agree to be interviewed by
Mueller.
Trump reportedly favored speaking with Mueller, despite concerns
harbored by his counsel that he would make a statement known by
Mueller’s team to be false based on the large body of evidence they have
collected, which includes interviews, emails sent by the presidential
transition team and documents subpoenaed from the Trump Organization.
None of that collection has so exercised the president as much as the
raid on the office of Cohen, who for more than a decade has handled
particularly sensitive matters for Trump and his children, including
prospective real estate developments in Russia.
In addition to documents relating to payments made to women, the raid sought documents pertaining to an Access Hollywood tape that emerged in October 2016 in which Trump boasted he could “grab” women “by the pussy”, the New York Times reported.
There have been no previous reports of any Cohen role in the Access
Hollywood episode, and the nature of prosecutors’ interest in the affair
was unclear.
Trump described a personal fight against Mueller in a tweet that
might read differently if the president does in fact remove the special
counsel.
“No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back), so now they
do the Unthinkable, and RAID a lawyers office for information!” Trump
wrote. “BAD!”
ABC boss Michelle Guthrie speaks during Senate estimates on Wednesday.
Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Three bills before parliament to change the ABC charter and to
disclose the salaries of presenters are unnecessary and unjustified, Michelle Guthrie has told a parliamentary committee.
One bill will amend the ABC Act 1983 to add a “fair and balanced”
requirement to its charter, one will force the broadcaster to reveal the
more information about ABC salaries, and a third will add a recognition
of rural and regional Australia.
The ABC managing director said it was the ABC’s “very strong view”
that its salary disclosures were “completely consistent” with guidelines
set by the public service. “We believe that imposing additional
disclosure requirements on public broadcasters is unnecessary and
unjustified,” Guthrie told Senate estimates on Wednesday.
The ABC’s regional audiences are already well served by the
allocation of one-third of the budget and any changes to the ABC Act are
unnecessary, she said.
“It is very clear to us that we have [a requirement to be fair and
balanced] in our editorial policies and it is unnecessary,” Guthrie
said.
The Labor senator Kristina Keneally pursued a line of questioning
that the ABC was facing “more than the usual level of parliamentary
scrutiny” as a result of the Coalition’s backroom deals with One Nation
leader Pauline Hanson to ensure its media bill was passed last year.
The “fair and balanced” bill was payback by Hanson and part of her
vendetta against the ABC in retaliation for its investigative
journalism, Labor senators said.
Guthrie said she would “fully participate” in the upcoming inquiry
into whether the ABC was complying with competitive neutrality laws.
As some of us have long been arguing, the people responsible for regulating the financial industry have failed, going all the way through Asic, Apra and members of government. And it is this regulatory capture – a term to describe when watchdogs are effectively controlled by the industry they are supposed to be monitoring – that was the reason the royal commission into the banks took so long to be established. This is because highly paid regulatory insiders knew that a lot of dodgy stuff was going on but failed to say anything. And they tried to the end to prevent all the misconduct from coming out into the public domain.
Had more members of the mainstream media too taken the warnings by those whistleblowers who were banging the drum – and, more importantly, victims of these financial crimes – instead of glorifying a red-hot property market, we may not have had to wait for Team Hayne to do the job.
Questions must be asked if the media was also broadly captured by Australia’s banking powerhouse. If this is the case, many business and investigative journalists, alongside their editors, will have to hold on to their conscience that they likely not only missed the scoops of a lifetime but ignored a long list of financial crime victims who approached the media but were never responded to. Asic, Apra, the financial ombudsmen and the government failed Australia’s victims of financial crimes. And, more often than not, so did the media.
It was refreshing to see Barnaby Joyce admit that it was a mistake to not back a royal commission. Like him or not, his action and change in his point of view deserves respect. Furthermore, to see the odd journalist holding the industry and its regulators to account too is brave. Redemption and rebuilding trust for journalists and politicians may not be so easy but it is possible.
With an exposé of rampant misconduct within the financial services sector, identifying who among our regulators are accountable is the next course of action for the prime minister when he returns to Australia from his European trip. Because there is no doubt people expect those government-paid bureaucrats who prevented serious allegations of misconduct from hitting the airwaves to be sacked. And if the Turnbull government is to walk into the next election with any chance of victory (or dignity), the bad hires that sit on Turnbull’s frontbench who banged the drum against a royal commission must be held to account and replaced.
With confidence in the Australian banking sector fast eroding to an irrevocable level, rebuilding trust with the public will not be easy for Australia’s financial institutions. Furthermore, if banks now have to lend to borrowers within the laws, stop forging borrower documentation to increase borrowing capacities, not charge a fee for not providing a service, stop billing the deceased, tell the truth to the regulators and, more importantly, actually face penalties for misconduct instead of the regulators sweeping the misconduct under the rug, it will be very hard for the banking system to find ways to grow and not shrink. With banking such a large part of the economy – the big four alone make up nearly 25% of the value of the ASX200 – any problems in the sector will be magnified to become a very serious problem for the country as a whole.
The humble pie that the good people of Australia will likely have to bitterly eat due to the inactions of a few unfortunately may come at a high cost. Royal commissions are not pretty. But let’s hope we are a better country for it somewhere down the line.