The People vs the Banks by Michael Roddan

Author:Michael Roddan [Roddan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522875188
Google: ToANvgEACAAJ
Amazon: B07QKW6B1M
Publisher: Melbourne Unversity Press
Published: 2019-01-15T01:07:21.885000+00:00

10

THE BIG RORT

As AustralianSuper chief executive Ian Silk stepped off the stand at the royal commission, most onlookers were of one mind: there seemed to be little, if any, misconduct to be found in the industry fund sector. Kelly O’Dwyer was not on the same page.

I received a text from one of her staffers: ‘Hi mate, are you writing on Ian Silk in the RC today?’

‘Yep I’m in the RC at the moment. What’s up?’ I texted back.

The staffer went on to tell me that Silk was misleading the royal commission: there was no legislation targeting default superannuation. Any bill before parliament aiming at removing restrictions on enterprise bargaining agreements would apply equally to all funds, whether industry, retail, corporate or public sector. ‘There was no proposal & is no proposal on default. It’s very misleading,’ the staffer’s text said.

I said I’d received their message and just had one question: ‘Is Kelly going to say anything about National Australia Bank?’

The staffer responded: ‘Thinking on it, I’ll come back.’

I thought it was a pertinent question. Silk had sailed through his examination. He’d taken the stand on the Thursday afternoon of the first week of hearings on the superannuation sector and was finished and free to leave later that same afternoon. It had been a breeze.

By way of comparison, NAB wealth management executive Paul Carter took an oath on Monday morning the same week that Silk would later take the stand. It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that NAB’s superannuation chairman, Nicole Smith, facing questions on the same fees-for-no-service scandal, was allowed to step down from the stand. That was anything but a breeze. Over four gruelling days of examination into the issue, the bank obstructed the process every way it could. The inquiry into the issue then continued into the following week, when the royal commission made the surprise decision to drag NAB’s head of consumer banking, Andrew Hagger, to the court on Monday to face the music. His appearance would ultimately see the high-powered executive shown the door of the nation’s fourth-largest bank.

However, O’Dwyer was not as interested in NAB as she was in Silk. I had received no approach from the minister for financial services’ office in the four days of examination of NAB.

Both publicly and privately, O’Dwyer was at pains to stress she wasn’t ideologically attacking one side of the sector with legislation. This was true: the minister had been instrumental in bringing forward sensible policies looking to end fee gouging across industry and retail lines. Still, there were things that gave the industry funds reason to believe she personally disliked them.

In one private meeting between Silk and O’Dwyer’s office, the AustralianSuper boss sat down for what he believed would be a routine meeting only to be presented with a portfolio of documents. The documents were a number of newspaper articles in which Silk had been quoted, and roughly highlighted on them were the parts of his quotes where he disagreed with government legislation or policy. Silk was befuddled.

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