For most Australians who have been paying attention, the banking royal commission has been a months-long storm of unrelenting waves, dumping revelation after revelation of the depths to which the financial sector has been willing to stoop in its pursuit of profit.
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And in his three-volume, 1000-page interim report released Friday, royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne managed to sum the whole thing up quite nicely in his executive summary. In it, he asks and answers his own question - just what was driving the abhorrent behaviour of Australia’s banks?
"Too often the answer seems to be greed – the pursuit of short term profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty. How else is charging continuing advice fees to the dead to be explained," the report reads.
Charging fees to the dead was just one of the many shocking revelations uncovered by the royal commission - the very commission that the government had, until shortly before its announcement, actively opposed. Others included accounts of vulnerable people taken advantage of by unscrupulous lenders.
There were members of the indigenous community complaining of being harangued into accepting funeral insurance, debt-ridden families forced off their farms after accepting bad investment advice, a self-confessed gambling addict being offered extra credit after begging his bank to stop giving him money, and, particularly harrowing, a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome who was sold expensive life insurance policy after being cold-called by a sales agent.
Responding to the interim report, treasurer Josh Frydenburg said the behaviour of banks was unacceptable, and said regulators - namely the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority - needed to be “tougher”.
Commissioner Hayne went further and accused both regulators of having failed outright in their duty.
"The regulator, ASIC, rarely went to court to seek public denunciation of and punishment for misconduct. The prudential regulator, APRA, never went to court," the report says.
But Commissioner Hayne stopped short of making recommendations, when the banks had demonstrated so little regard for existing laws.
"Much more often than not, the conduct now condemned was contrary to law. Passing some new law to say, again, 'Do not do that', would add an extra layer of legal complexity to an already complex regulatory regime. What would that gain?" he writes.
But the sheer scale of the commission’s revelations demonstrates that the review should be broadened. If every new area of investigation has uncovered such a seething mass of lies and deceit on the part of the banks, simply lifting the rocks to shine a light at what lies beneath doesn’t go far enough.
There have been just 27 witnesses to date, out of more than 9300 submissions, and opposition financial services spokeswoman Claire O’Neil has already called for the the royal commission to be extended so that thousands more victims can tell their personal stories.
The commission has not taken in enough of regional Australia to be considered a comprehensive examination of the shortcomings of the banking sector.
It’s not hard to imagine just how the waves of devastating stories would continue to roll in country Australia. There is more work to do - the commission should be given more time to do it.
