Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will be supporting the Pacific Banking Guarantee Bill 2025. We'll be doing so as we do recognise that there is a need to ensure access to adequate banking and financial services in the Pacific, including for Australians visiting the Pacific and Australian businesses operating in the region but also for local folks in the Pacific region. But we do have some reservations about this bill, and I want to place on the record some of our concerns.

Firstly, we are concerned that the guarantees in this bill only apply to banks headquartered in Australia. This, of course, gives banks headquartered in Australia an unfair competitive advantage over local banks operating in Pacific countries. We've already got a major bank oligopoly in this country, and the last thing that Australia should be doing is seeking to export our oligopoly to other countries. The oligopoly in the banking sector in this country does not serve Australians well. It reflects an economy-wide concentration of market power that has been underway in this country for many decades. That's the first concern we've got.

Secondly, we're concerned that the bill doesn't cap the amount of money that can be made available under any guarantees. Treasury has provided an assurance that there is a low risk of a guarantee being utilised, but it remains the fact that it is simply not good practice for the public to have to bear the risk for a potentially unlimited liability in the private sector. The neoliberal brainworms have consumed this country for the last 50 years, and they are showing no signs of slowing down in terms of our policy development process.

Another concern we have is the lack of requirements in the legislation for transparency in relation to the terms and conditions of any guarantee made under this legislation. The term 'commercial-in-confidence' has been deliberately used to stymy the public's right to know in a range of circumstances and contexts over many decades in this country—and here we go again. Commercial-in-confidence is often claimed by corporations in a way that they are not required to justify, and in a way that is simply slavishly accepted by the major parties in this place, who are so cosy with those big corporations for two major reasons. Firstly, those big corporations donate so massively to the Labor Party and to the Liberal Party and to the National Party; and, secondly, many people, even those who currently sit in this place, know that they'll be able to roll out of a career in politics, into a post-politics career in the boardrooms of those very same corporations. It's the old, 'you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.' You scratch their back while you're in this place by accepting their commercial-in-confidence claims, and they will scratch your back once you get out by whacking you onto a couple of corporate boards.

A diverse variety of stakeholders have called for more information in relation to the guarantees to be released publicly, including Bank South Pacific, the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the Director of the ANU Development Policy Centre, Professor Stephen Howes. I asked the minister, in her summing up, if she could specifically address why the government has decided not to provide for a framework to allow for the provision of more information in relation to guarantees to be released publicly, particularly in light of the calls of people like the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. We're supposed to be good Pacific neighbours. I'll talk a little bit more about some of the things that we're doing to our Pacific island neighbours a bit later in my speech, but, given that we are basically sinking a lot of their countries by approving new coal and gas mines hand over fist, I would have thought the very least we could do was heed their calls for more transparency in relation to this legislation.

To be clear, the Greens are calling on Labor to legislate to ensure that the terms and conditions of each guarantee are made public, including the value of the guarantee; what the guarantee specifically covers; fees, if any, paid by the recipient; and whether the recipient meets or has met their obligations under the guarantee. That is a basic minimum transparency standard, and there is precisely no reason why legislation to frame those measures should not have been included in this bill. You can't blame the Greens and, for that matter, the wider Australian public for having reservations about the Albanese Labor government's relationship with big Australian banks. Labor has shown time and time again that they will do whatever it takes to support their corporate donors, including the big four banks, even when the interests of the big four banks run counter to the interests of the Australian people.

Let's take one example from the last parliamentary term. The Greens came to an agreement with the then assistant treasurer, Mr Jones, to impose million-dollar fines on dodgy bankers who failed to uphold their obligations around probity within the banking sector. As soon as the bank executives got wind of what was going on, the calls started coming in, right up to and including the Prime Minister's office, from no less than the head of the Australian Banking Association, Anna Bligh. By the way, Ms Bligh is a former Queensland Labor premier—a living, breathing example of the rolling door that I was just talking about, the revolving door, whereby senior, major party officials, MPs and, in the case of Ms Bligh, a premier in this country roll more or less straight out of the parliament and straight out of the Premier's suite in Queensland into a job like heading up the Australian Banking Association. What happened? Labor backflipped and reneged on their agreement with the Greens. That was a naked display of power. The Australian Banking Association didn't care who saw them pulling the Labor Party strings, and the Labor Party, the shameless Labor Party, didn't care who saw them acquiescing to those tugs on their strings from the Australian Banking Association. It was a naked display of power, and it revealed who actually run this joint: vested corporate interests.

Late last term we also saw the former assistant treasurer introduce the Scams Prevention Framework Bill, supposedly to combat scams. But, of course, after heavy lobbying from—guess who?—the major banks in this country, the final result was a bill that let those very same big banking corporations off the hook and did next to nothing to stop people from being scammed. To make the scams framework even slightly more useful, the new assistant treasurer, Mr Mulino, needs to designate different sectors of the economy, including banks, telcos and social media platforms, and develop codes and rules for each sector. To date, we've heard radio silence from the Assistant Treasurer, and I politely suggest to him that he get active in this space.

The major banks in this country operate in a sweet, sweet oligopoly. Their massive market power and their huge sway over the old political parties in this place give them free rein to squeeze their customers for every last dollar, and as a result they are some of the most profitable banks in the world. They rake in billions in profits every year, they award their executives multimillion dollar salary and bonus packages, and the long-suffering Australian consumer loses out. It's a story we've heard time after time after time.

We're in the midst of the profit reporting season at the moment. CommBank are the first of the big four banks to report their profit for the last financial year—over $10 billion of profit. That's CommBank's highest profit in over a decade, and their executives are going to get handsomely rewarded for that profit. That profit is, in significant part, recorded off the back of an escalating housing crisis in this country.

Remember, when COVID first hit, the Reserve Bank panicked, printed about $400 billion and handed it over to the banks on extremely favourable terms. Because the RBA did not direct the flow of that credit, which they have the power to do under the Banking Act—and that power remains, I might add, thanks to the Greens, in the face of Labor's attempt to get rid of that power in the last term—so the banks, of course, turned around and lent it into their highest margin products, home loans. And what happened? We saw yet another housing price bubble, pricing even more young Australians out of the housing market.

The RBA has admitted on the record, and I've got to give Mr Lowe credit here—the former governor of the RBA has admitted on the record that they printed too much money. By the way, CommBank is the same bank that, just weeks ago, refused to refund low-income customers after ASIC found the bank pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars by charging low-income customers excessive account fees. The reason the major banks operate with utter disregard for ethics is that they know they're protected from adverse consequences by the political oligopoly in this place—the Labor, Liberal and National parties.

I now want to briefly talk about climate change. It is of course expensive and financially risky to establish banking infrastructure in the Pacific. The risk is only increasing as the region is battered by more frequent and severe extreme weather events that are driven by the climate crisis. In the Pacific region, cyclones, flooding, storm surges and sea-level rises are making life more precarious for business communities and, in the context of this legislation, the economy of the Pacific. But let's be clear. These extreme weather events are not natural. They are delivered by human-induced climate change, and what is the Labor Party's response to this—including right up to the level of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Wong? Their response is that we should be good neighbours to the Pacific region. What is the Labor Party doing? They are continuing to log our native forests, emitting massive amounts of carbon. They are continuing to permit unrestrained land clearing, particularly in Queensland, which releases massive amounts of carbon. And they are continuing to approve new coal and gas projects hand over fist.

The Labor Party is culpable for the extreme weather events that are destabilising the economy and societies, and that are putting lives at risk in the Pacific region. If Labor wants to be a good neighbour to the Pacific, the most important thing they could do and the way they could demonstrate that to the greatest degree possible is to stop approving new coal and gas projects, stop publicly funding the burning of fossil fuels and stop publicly funding the logging of our precious native forests. (Time expired)