How governments move into Mafia – or Trump – territory |
Australia’s crisis of trust is being deepened by opaque lobbying, revolving-door appointments, weak accountability and an insider culture that gives powerful interests privileged access to government.
The guardians of the public accounts, particularly in the public service, have never manifested much intense interest in white collar crime of the type manifested by old colleagues or people with whom they have constant interchanges. Treasury bureaucrats for example, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Royal Commission into the banks, insisting all along that nothing bad would be found, and that any systemic issues had already been resolved by its wise stewardship.
They persuaded successive ministers of the essential honesty and stability of the system, and the risk that any asking rude questions might accidentally cause it to totter. They persuaded ministers and prime ministers of their conviction that chaps with backgrounds very similar to their own would not stoop to do anything that was dishonest.
That was an opinion echoed back to the public by all the great and good of industry and high finance at the lobby dinners, donor functions and private meetings and over the confidential phone calls by which the wisdom of the chaps informs Treasurers, prime ministers and reserve banks and prudential regulators of the mood and the temperature of the national economy.
One invisible hand washing the other, assisted by a healthy interchange of post-retirement appointments, even for ministers.
Ministers and public officials resisted the pressure for any sort of open inquiry. Those demanding it most loudly were just the sorts of outsiders now expressing their opinions about the quality, quantity, efficiency and honesty of government in the Pauline Hanson One Nation push. Many were National Party back benchers. Their populist calls became irresistible; their simplistic populism and beliefs in financial conspiracies had to be addressed.
A retired high court judge, Ken Hayne, thought to be both harmless and sound was commissioned, and the government’s spinners joined with the lobbying and public relations apparatuses of banks, insurance companies, and financial advisers to announce that there was nothing much to make a fuss about.
From spite, the government hoped it could retrieve condemnation of industry superannuation funds, with boards containing union representatives, to the benefit of worthy financial advisers, whose investments were, usually, not within cooee of industry funds.
As the Hayne and PWC inquiries showed, our biggest crooks are as likely to be bankers, consultants or auditors
No one was more surprised than the Treasury and the prudential regulators when it emerged that Australia’s banking system was run by gangs to whom honesty, fair dealing and regard for the public interest were entirely foreign concepts.
Banks were rorting customers, even, it turned out, dead ones. They were rorting the regulators, even by fraudulently manipulating public statistics. They were abusing honour systems by being without honour. They were so driven by profit and the bottom line that many cared little for what was right. They were shown to be greedy. Rapacious. Without a moral bottom, or the slightest concern for their apparent reputations as public spirited citizens.
It was obvious what the ultimate report was going to say. But it was a measure of the shamelessness of then Treasurer, Josh Frydenburg, that he thought he might be able to confect some public relations coup from the presentation.
Hayne wouldn’t play. He thought what he had found to be a disgrace on most of Australia’s private institutions, and many of our public ones. He thought many of the top bankers, at board and executive levels to be contemptible human beings. If some were slightly less to be condemned, not a single manager deserved praise. He denounced a toxic culture of greed and law-breaking which put profit ahead of community........