As a clearly panicked Scott Morrison announced on Friday a stream of eye-watering new penalties for serious misconduct by banks and financial services firms, it’s instructive to look back at his zealous efforts over two years to protect the banks from a royal commission currently uncovering just that sort of misbehaviour.
The Treasurer and his colleague, Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer, are falling over themselves to claim the new jail-time threats and bank-busting fines are just business as usual by responsible stewards of the national interest.
Treasurer Scott Morrison was the loudest opponent of a royal commission into the banks.
Why, they insisted, they’ve been working on the new regime of penalties since examining the findings of an ASIC enforcement task force inquiry established way back in November 2016.
The idea that it is mere coincidence that the new penalties - including fines up to $210 million or 10 per cent of a bank’s annual turn-over - are being announced right now is about as believable as the excruciating line in Muriel’s Wedding from the guilty and embarrassed husband: “Deirdre Chambers! What a coincidence!”
Morrison, of course, has endless reasons for embarrassment.

Like Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and most of his colleagues on the Treasury benches, he voted in Parliament 23 times between April 2016 and June last year to block a royal commission into the banks.
He made an art form of publicly scoffing at calls for such a power-packed inquiry.
“What a royal commission does is pump Bill Shorten’s tyres up but doesn’t give anybody anything, if at all, for years,” he pooh-poohed during a Sky News appearance on February 14 last year. “So, that is a political exercise for a political hack.”
Which, you’d suppose, might have made a more sensitive fellow wince when, eventually, he realised there was nowhere left to turn but to support just such a proposal himself.
Poor Morrison had been practising his dismissal of a royal commission for so long.
Way back in April 2016 he was hitting his stride on the subject in question time.
Any proposal for a royal commission was “nothing more than crass populism seeking to undermine confidence in the banking and financial system, which is key to jobs and growth in this country”, he hollered at the time.
Two days later he’d refined his message for an appearance on ABC's 7.30.
“I would describe it as a cynical exploitation of people’s genuine concerns and the politicisation of their pain by Bill Shorten,” he said.

By September that year he was in full song.
Shorten, Morrison charged, “has only had one interest in this issue since he started, and that is to pursue his own political gain and not to pursue the genuine interests of Dwayne and Jenny or any of the others who have had serious cases”.
Yes, and Morrison talked up a storm about “the great work of the parliamentary joint committee”.
That would be the parliamentary committee that finished its banking inquiry with a single day of public hearings, in which the Big Four bank chiefs answered questions from MPs for just three hours and gave scripted mea culpas for their institutions’ failings.
"I think as an industry we've lost touch with our customers. We've become too internally focused and lost sight," ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliot said at the time.

A half awake observer might have figured that if bank chiefs themselves were admitting they’d lost sight of their responsibilities, a royal commission could be required.
Coming on top of bank scandals unearthed by Fairfax Media, the ABC and the Nationals senator John “Wacka” Williams, the banks must been awfully relieved to know that the Treasurer, supported at every turn by the Prime Minister, was so supportive of their right to sail on without having to face a royal commissioner armed with powers to seek serious answers.

Scott Morrison changed his tune on the banking royal commission, and it's caused some observers to wonder what may have changed his mind.

Until now, of course.
Morrison has finally smelled the breeze, and, given the hair-raising evidence of lies and appalling behaviour uncovered so far, there is blood on it.
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Time for the announcement of a penalty regime that would not only make a banker quake, but one sensational enough to serve as a handy diversion of the public’s interest from all those months of denial.

Its time wrote on Apr 21^st, 2018 at 9:56am:


No, but he's 100% certain you are.....

The deadest of dead men walking these libtards