That is that APRA, the body which has shown a demonstrably appalling inability to keep the financial behemoths on the straight and narrow over recent decades, is now set to be given additional powers, tasks and responsibilities.

If the organisation wasn't capable of doing the job it was already tasked with then what is the point of asking it to do even more?

While it is true that Graeme Samuel, the former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and his fellow inquisitors, Diane Smith-Gardiner and Grant Spencer, have recommended significant changes to the way APRA goes about its work, is this going to be enough?

Surely, given the scathing criticisms of APRA's failure to act in a decisive and timely manner made by the Hayne royal commission, there must be an argument for cleaning it out, root and branch, and starting over.

This is particularly so given that the most oft-repeated criticism of the authority, stated loud and clear in Mr Samuel's "capability review" and articulated again on Wednesday by another former ACCC boss, Alan Fels, is the cosy relationships it forged with the banking, superannuation and insurance industries it was supposed to regulate.

The bottom line is that if APRA had been doing its job properly for the last 20 years there would have been no need for a protracted, expensive and, for the finance sector, humiliating banking Royal Commission in the first place.

None of the big four banks, which were doubtless delighted by APRA's willingness to roll over and play dead, allowing them to get away with the unforgivable in exchange for confidential "enforceable undertakings", were actually well served by this "path of least resistance".

Instead of just holding firm while a boil was lanced, they have had to endure something very close to an act of evisceration without an anaesthetic.

While the exposure of the levying of fees and charges on the dead, the fees for no service, the arbitrary foreclosure of loans that drove some farmers and business people to the point of taking their own lives and a sublime indifference to any ethical imperatives that may have infringed on profits was bad enough, the revelation that the industry watchdog stood by and let it all happen was even worse.

Mr Samuel was just as blunt as Justice Hayne when it came to speaking his mind in the report.

"APRA appears to have developed a culture that is unwilling to challenge itself, slow to respond and tentative in addressing issues that do not entail traditional financial risks," the review found.

"In combination with APRA's organisational structure, these factors limit its ability to deliver on the breadth of its mandate and adapt to new challenges."

One can only assume that Mr Samuel, and the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who commissioned the report, are hopeful the implementation of the raft of recommendations that have been made will be sufficient to make the authority change its ways and start cracking the whip.

Given the implementation of these recommendations is going to be overseen by the same Coalition government which repeatedly voted against the banking royal commission everybody else in the country could see a crying need for, there are significant grounds for scepticism.