Australia’s big banks stink to high heaven. Their mega-profits and sky-high CEO salaries have been funded by every kind of corrupt practice – ripping off the elderly and vulnerable, forcing people out of their homes, foreclosing on farms and small businesses, and denying the dying vital life insurance payouts to provide for those they leave behind. Every bank has been up to its neck in this cesspit of filthy behaviour.

And as the banks rack up record profits, their fees go up and up and service goes down and down – staffing is slashed to the bone and branches are closed.

But none of this is enough to deter former Queensland Labor premier Anna Bligh from taking up cudgels on their behalf as the new boss of the Australian Bankers Association (ABA). Bligh has been put up by the banks in a last-ditch effort to fend off a royal commission into their despicable behaviour.

After destroying the ALP state government, following an unprecedented and extremely unpopular $15 billion privatisation of state assets, Bligh quit politics. But she found herself back on her feet again in 2014 when she was appointed CEO of the YWCA in NSW and, more to the point, a director at one of Australia’s most hated companies, Medibank Private. With her obvious taste for life in the corporate world, Bligh’s elevation to head the ABA, on a no doubt generous salary, came naturally.

If you knew nothing about Bligh, you might suppose that she had been a long time hatchet-woman for the Labor right, someone for whom an embrace of capitalism came naturally, someone whose main ambition in life had always been to mix it with the nabobs of high finance.

But, no, strange as it may seem, Bligh was once a darling of the party’s left. As a student at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s, Bligh was in the thick of the campaign against the Joh Bjelke-Petersen government and was radicalised in her teenage years by the sight of Queensland’s vicious cops bashing students.

Bligh was a fighter for women’s rights in a period when the National Party government believed that barefoot and pregnant was women’s proper station in life. Many opinions in the senior ranks of the ALP were not much different. Following her graduation, Bligh worked for a range of community organisations and trade unions, her first job being in a shelter for battered women.

But, in a story that’s been told many times before, the road to political advancement within the ALP involved a succession of compromises and rotten deals. Elected to represent South Brisbane in 1995, Bligh won her first ministry in the Beattie government in 1998. In the following years, she appeared to suffer no ideological qualms serving in a cabinet dominated by the right, which pursued openly pro-capitalist policies, including selling off state assets.

Perhaps she assuaged her conscience by telling herself, yes, it’s bad, but just imagine how much worse it would be if the other lot did it. Who knows, but with every step she sank deeper into the mire. By 2005, she was rewarded for her loyalty with the position of deputy premier and treasurer. Two years later, she was anointed premier by Peter Beattie when he stood down. In 2009, Bligh won the state election as premier in her own right.

By now, however, any radical pretensions had long been shrugged off. Within seven weeks of the election, Bligh announced the state’s largest ever privatisation program and rammed it through in the face of popular opposition. Only dodgy manoeuvring by her supporters in the party’s left allowed her to get it through the party conference. Few shed any tears when Labor was thrashed at the 2012 election; it lost 44 seats to end up with just seven.

Bligh is now back in the public spotlight in a position that only confirms her complete betrayal of the principles she once espoused. But her story is not just one of moral turpitude. It is the predictable outcome for all those who wish to change the ALP from within. The betrayal may not on every occasion be quite as shocking as Bligh’s, but the trajectory is just the same: those who try to convert the ALP to the cause of social justice become part of the problem they once vowed to overcome.