Labor’s announcement that it would establish a royal commission into banking and the financial services industry if elected this year has provoked outraged oinking from the piggery known as Martin Place – Australia’s financial centre.

The hypocrisy is appalling. From business executives, judges and politicians, we never cease to hear accusations of widespread lawlessness in the unions on the basis of a few cases of crookery or, even more egregiously, the CFMEU just doing its job of looking out for the safety of workers.

Justice Dyson Heydon, the Liberal stooge who headed up the royal commission into trade unions, wrote in his final report that the cases of crooked behaviour were “widespread” and “deep seated” and only “the small tip of an enormous iceberg”.

Workplace relations minister Michaelia Cash chimed in after the report’s release: “The misconduct exhibits great variety, it is widespread, it is deep seated. Quite frankly, it does not get much more serious than the report which we have tabled today”. But it gets a lot more serious in banking.

Lawlessness

We can identify tens of thousands of victims of misdeeds and outright criminality by the banks. But our friends in their $3,000 suits are quite happy to let this scandalous behaviour continue unchecked.

Listen to Commonwealth Bank CEO Ian Narev: “It would be wrong for people to pick on isolated incidents within institutions such as the CBA and jump to the conclusion there is a systemic problem”.

Some of these incidents, as opposition leader Bill Shorten noted, include, “retirees who have had their retirement savings gutted. Families that have been rorted out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Small business owners who have lost everything. Life insurance policy holders denied justice”.These are far from isolated. As Sydney University economist Evan Jones told the 2013 Senate inquiry into the performance of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission:

“The carnage wrought by major banks on small business and the family farm sectors in this country has been widespread and persistent. Thriving or sustainable businesses, product of risk-taking initiative, have been destroyed or stolen. Family homes have been stolen. Couples, once independent, have become dependent on the parsimonious goodwill of social services. Family relationships have been destroyed or imperilled. The mental and/or physical health of the victims has suffered, sometimes resulting in premature death.”

In fact, CBA boss Narev doesn’t have to look far to find the “isolated incidents” he is so keen to brush aside. He could, for example, look at systematic misconduct at the Commonwealth Bank’s financial planning division, which ruined many elderly clients. The chief culprit was not just protected by senior management amid claims of malpractice by a whistleblower, but actually promoted. After all, he was raking in a fortune for the bank.

Or Narev could turn his attention to Comminsure, which denied legitimate life insurance claims to terminally ill patients and pressured doctors to change their assessments of patients to save money. Or to a senior Commonwealth Bank executive receiving kickbacks from IT companies for granting contracts.

If the CommBank boss wanted further confirmation, he could look at Westpac Bank and ANZ Bank, which rigged interest rates to gouge more money from customers not just once but on 44 occasions in the case of ANZ, according to ASIC. ASIC described ANZ’s actions as “unconscionable conduct and market manipulation”. Or Narev might ponder the situation at Macquarie Bank, which was found by ASIC to have mishandled client money over a decade.

Then there was ANZ, found to have misled 1.3 million customers using its One Path financial services business.

There is abundant evidence of a systemic problem in the banks that warrants investigation. No wonder, then, that the bastards whinge about the threat of an investigation, crying that any exposure of their crookedness will only “harm Australia’s reputation” or be “a distraction”.

No wonder the CEO of ANZ, Shayne Elliott, says that any royal commission would need to be “really tightly scoped and managed”. Of course: so tightly scoped and managed that it exposed nothing and disturbed nothing.

No wonder that Bankers Association chief Steve Munchenberg has refused to rule out a bank-funded public campaign against the ALP if it continues to push for an investigation.

Toothless tiger

Treasurer Scott Morrison says say that we don’t need a royal commission to catch out crooked bankers because ASIC is already on the job.

That would be the same ASIC whose budget has been cut by $120 million in recent years, resulting in an immediate slackening in the pace of its investigations – 42 percent fewer “high intensity surveillances”, 60 percent fewer instances of potentially misleading or deceptive promotional material withdrawn and 35 percent fewer civil litigations begun, in just its first year on a reduced budget.

The whole banking and financial system is based on organised, well-paid and perfectly tailored crime. The banks, far from creating value through diligence and hard work, only cream off money from the wealth extracted from the working class in the system as a whole; they are parasites.

But the problem hasn’t arisen only in the last year or two. ASIC has always been woefully underfunded and understaffed. When facing banks that have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on legal defence, stretching out potentially over years, ASIC is equipped with the legal equivalent of a pea-shooter.

And even if ASIC does get an individual into court or launches a case against a bank, the likelihood of any serious penalty is low. As Fairfax’s Michael West put it:“There was demonstrable fraud and forgery in the Commonwealth Bank financial advice scandal but no convictions, no jail time, let alone prosecutions, other than an advisory ban or two. The banks don’t prosecute their ‘rogues’. Big bankers don’t go to jail.”

If the banks are fined, they pay no more than a few million bucks here or there. The potential penalties are petty cash compared to what banks face overseas. In the seven years following the global financial crisis, 20 of the world’s biggest banks paid out more than US$235 billion in fines and compensation. Little wonder that ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft labelled Australia a “paradise” for white collar criminals.

The only time any of the crooks who infest the banking system ever see the inside of a cell is when they’re ripping off other bosses – like the case of NAB staff member Lukas Kamay, who received a seven-year sentence last year for insider trading.

The system is rigged

But it’s not just a question of ASIC lacking resources. ASIC is embedded in the network of institutionalised lawlessness that prevails in the boardrooms and governments of this country. This is the main reason it has proven so spectacularly useless. As Evan Jones put it in his submission to the Senate inquiry:

“ASIC’s relentless and comprehensive inactivity in the domain of bank malpractice against small and medium sized enterprises, for which it has clear legislated responsibility, provides a green light to the banks to continue corrupt practices. De facto, ASIC is a party to criminality perpetrated by several of Australia’s most significant and profitable corporations.”

This has always been the case, but the deregulation agenda of the 1980s removed whatever meagre restrictions had been in place on the insatiable greed of the banks. Deregulation lifted the walls that once existed between lending banks, investment banks, financial advisers, life insurance companies and pension funds. With the restrictions lifted, the big four gobbled up everything else in sight.

The result is a cartel consisting of what are among the biggest banks in the world. Australia’s big four are certainly among the most profitable banks, and last year alone recorded $30 billion in profits. The torrents of money flowing into their coffers were helped along by a $300 billion government guarantee that enables them to access funding cheaply and to gamble with our money.

Australia’s banks are now behemoths straddling every aspect of our lives. Take superannuation, for example. The major private super funds, all owned by the banks, clip billions of dollars every year from managing people’s superannuation accounts, to which we are obliged to contribute 10 percent of our salaries every year. This is an endless stream of wealth. The banks’ only complaint is that they can’t get access to the industry super funds – and the government is doing its best to change that.

So it’s good that Labor will set up a royal commission if it takes office this year. But don’t expect too much from it. It may shine some light onto some particularly shocking cases of lawlessness. But it won’t tackle the corruption that is embedded in the very system. Labor believes a royal commission is necessary to “restore confidence” in Australian bankers. But we don’t need to have our confidence restored; we need the finance industry to be brought to heel.