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—