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

I'm very happy to stand and talk on this motion today. The first thing I wanted to highlight to the Labor Party was how long they took to support the call for a royal commission. It's often not discussed, and it's certainly not in the media frame around royal commissions at the moment, but I think it's important considering we're debating how long it took the Liberals to support a royal commission, and it absolutely did take them too long. The previous Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has recently gone on the record as saying that he wished he'd done it earlier. Well, the call for a royal commission was first made in 2013 by a Senate inquiry which Labor was a key part of. I know from my work in that Senate inquiry that it took me and the Greens nearly two years to get Labor on board. So, if you want to talk about delays to getting outcomes for consumers and taking on the financial services industry for misconduct, it's taken all of us in this chamber way too long to get to this point where we are today.

I think it's really important to point out that this has been a nearly five-year journey by a large number of good people to get it to where it is. I would've actually liked to have heard Senator Williams's contribution today, because I think Senator Williams played a key role in calling for this royal commission in the first place. Certainly, the recommendations, which were supported by Senator Williams and by former senator Mark Bishop, who was a chair of that committee, and call for a royal commission would have just remained by the side of the road—a pit stop in time—had it not been for the Greens, who built the wagon, campaigned and moved it down the road through numerous Senate inquiries. In fact, I remember both Labor and the Liberals voting against a Greens motion in this Senate to call a royal commission into the financial services industry. There was no point of difference between you guys. But let me say that I am still very appreciative that Labor did decide to join the Greens in our call for a royal commission in 2016.

Today, in the remaining few minutes that I have, I'd like to discuss what I've been talking about, which is the 'royal omission'—something that wasn't looked at in the royal commission into banking and financial services. Commissioner Hayne, in his very first public hearing, made it very clear that he felt that the rotten heart of the financial services industry was simply greed—a profit-at-all-costs mentality, a culture that puts profits before people. He told the CEOs in that first briefing to go away and see if they could find the balance and where that balance lay between their pursuit of profits and their ethical duty to customers and other stakeholders.

There are inherent conflicts of interest in the financial services industry, which became very clear throughout a number of witness hearings. I want to talk about the toxic culture and the inherent conflict of interest that is in this place—in politics—that is very much part of the misconduct story in the financial services industry and very much part of why it took five years for Labor and the Liberals to support a royal commission. You've got mountains of money washing around in this place; you've got both Labor and Liberals taking donations from the financial services companies—millions of dollars in donations over the time period that the royal commission looked into. When we saw systemic misconduct and potential fraudulent and criminal conduct, both the big parties were taking donations. No wonder it took so long for this royal commission to happen; no wonder it took so long to get outcomes.

If we don't fix that culture of greed—that toxic culture at the heart of our democracy—how are we going to possibly fix the problems in the financial services industry? It really saddened me to hear Labor say last week that they were going to continue to take donations from the big banks and the financial services companies. If we're going to get on with the job, we need to understand and respect that lobbyists and donations, pay for play, have caused a big part of a problem that we dealt with in the royal commission and that we deal with in legislation in here. So I would like to see Labor give that money back and the Liberals give that money back. Why don't you put it into a fund for victims of financial crime? I'd like to see CEO bonuses put into a fund for victims of financial crime. We've got to travel a lot further down this road if we're going to fix the problems in the financial services— (Time expired)