Met with a wall of dishonesty

I’VE got such mixed emotions about the banking royal commission. On one hand, I am just loving it. For a finance nerd like me, it’s better than any reality TV, soap opera or gangster show I could imagine.

But, on the other hand, it is also one of the saddest, most depressing events I have witnessed.

Of course, nothing is a surprise. I’ve been banging on about these rip-offs and scams for years.

And it is very satisfying to see the industry forced to put it into words. Forced to speak the unspeakable, the shameful and the denied. Forced to admit to the world that these dirty deeds are real. And forced to acknowledge the strategies, the plotting and planning, and how they tinkered and tailored them over the years so the profits continued to flow.

But even I am shocked at the blatant dishonesty in our finance sector. As cynical as I have been over the decades, as often as I have harped on about the damage the banks have done to households and businesses, even I am rocked by the extreme depths to which the industry has now sunk.

What’s clear is that the evidence and information we have seen so far at this inquiry, despite the onus to be truthful and genuine, is that our finance companies and banks are still not taking responsibility.

They are still not being honest with the commission or the public or their customers.

At best they are giving evidence of negligence. The Britney Spears strategy: Oops, I did it again!

Oops, sorry, I made a mistake. Oops, sorry, didn’t realise that was happening. Oops, sorry, a paperwork stuff-up. Oops, sorry, didn’t check. Oops, sorry, we should have known.

And if you believe that, you’d believe anything.

We are witnessing a confederacy of dishonesty, an orchestrated litany of avoidance.

This strategy has been carefully crafted to give evidence of endless confessions of mistakes, mistakes that just happen to make the banks billions of dollars. Mistakes that just happen to rip off their customers.

Mistakes that they were prepared to hide and deny to the extreme point of running their customers into the ground when they attempted to expose them or challenge them.

The biggest problem I have with the royal commission is not the dirty deeds or the heartbreak behind the impact on households.

The biggest problem is seeing this common strategy in action.

Not only is this strategy dishonest but it also strongly reinforces the fact that the banks and finance companies are still not taking responsibility.

The boards, the directors, executives and management are still cooking up ways to hide what they have done (and what they are still doing).

They are desperate to minimise their prior and ongoing knowledge.

They are desperate to ensure there is no evidence to show us these “mistakes” are not mistakes.

They have all knowingly been involved in deliberate and dishonest practices to scam people.

And this ongoing denial, this fake “oops” strategy, only serves to prove that they are not reformed and never intend to be.