By Dale Webster

THE Senate inquiry into regional bank closures, which delivered its final report in May this year, was an important investigation by anyone’s standards.

It ran for more than a year, involved senators from all major parties, received more than 600 submissions and held 13 public hearings across Australia.

Chief executives of the major banks were twice hauled to Canberra to face questions from a committee that, by the end of the process, had become experts on the impacts of the withdrawal of banking services on not only regional communities, but all Australians.

Their final eight recommendations were the sum of this process – a respectful reflection of what the senators had seen and heard over the 15 months they had dedicated their time to understanding the issue properly.

Then along came Jim.

Jim thinks he knows best and instead of releasing the government response to the final report as expected in the 90 days following its tabling, Jim has quietly been back-dooring his colleagues and rolling out his own plans that he thinks – with no experience looking at this issue – are better than the work of the senate committee.

Jim Chalmers, the Federal Treasurer, JC for short; taking bits and pieces from the report and going all lone wolf.

It’s a very narcissistic way of governing.

You might ask, ‘what’s the problem? At least he’s working on it’.

There are a lot of problems with the way he is behaving.

Take the three secret projects he has been working on behind the scenes: a postal bank, a levy on banks if they don’t retain a regional branch footprint and now he’s gone out alone on cash payments.

While all ideas have a lot of merit and there are crossovers with the senate inquiry recommendations, the recommendations themselves were more complex and, in the case of cash use, went further than what Jim has proposed.

The committee recognised the need for competition from a new government bank but it only flagged the post bank as a model, instead calling for an expert panel to be established to consider and cost the various options.

Our Jim has thrown that out the window and, according to a report in The Australian, is doing deals behind the scenes on a postal bank already.

The regional banking levy was suggested by the committee as a way of funding a community bank option, but Jim has nicked the idea for his own scheme.

While Jim is busily undermining the work of the senate inquiry, the final report remains in limbo.

As long as this remains the case, the recommendations that will really help Australians – yes, all Australians not just those living in regional areas will benefit from this work – sit gathering dust and are at risk of disappearing into history.

Perhaps this is the government’s strategy because the recommendations that will truly make a difference scare the bejesus out of them:

A new government bank that could possibly resemble the old Commonwealth; and
Stripping self-regulation from the banking industry through a government-managed code of conduct with oversight of any regional closures.

No one knows what Jim’s idea of a postal bank would look like and if it will be truly independent of private interests (that’s one of the things the expert panel was expected to look at) but if Jim can get this idea that has been looked at by Labor before up in any form, it might be a big enough distraction to enable him to avoid having to address the issue of self-regulation.

As the Monty Python boys once said, “run away, run away!”

For the many people who have spent years working on this issue, culminating in the senate inquiry being called in 2023, the failure to respond officially to the final report and subsequent behavior of the federal treasurer, is highly disrespectful.

Disrespectful to the senators, to every single person who took the time to make a submission and attend hearings, the staff who pulled the whole process together, to Labor’s own senator, Linda White, who they lost along the way.

Most importantly, it is disrespectful to regional Australians.

Jim Chalmers needs to recognise the democratic processes of government and stop white-anting the findings of this inquiry.

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UPDATE: Senator Gerard Rennick yesterday lodged a notice of motion calling for the Treasurer to table the government response to the Senate inquiry into regional bank closures by November 25.

Senator Rennick first raised the government’s failure to respond to the report in the expected 90-day period after it was tabled on October 9 and in a letter of response on October 29, Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones stated “there are no documents in scope of that order”.

In other words, it appears that after six months, the Albanese Government still hasn’t bothered to put pen to paper to acknowledge the important work that went into this inquiry.

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Dale Webster received a grant from the Public Fund for Journalism to investigate regional bank closures and for this work was named Freelance Journalist of the Year in 2022 by the Walkley Foundation. Her data was the trigger for the 2023-24 Senate inquiry looking at the issue and her reporting and research was referenced 17 times in the final report.

This article was originally published in The Regional.