Record profits at our expense? You can BANK on it!
Cutting services while making record profits, the banks keep winning in an economic environment built to benefit them.
The NAB just pulled in a quarterly profit of $2.15bn, partly due to service cuts and the interest rate hikes that are creating a new generation of poverty not seen in this country in living memory. They join the other big four banks in maintaining a profit trajectory that defies expectation. With the help of profits enhanced by interest rate increments tapped out by RBA Governor Philip Lowe, the winds of favour blow generously into the billowing sails of the collective banking sector.
The big four banks, bold and forgetfully omniscient from their royal commission days, reap record profits from the first home buyers who drop off the ledger every day as their assets are crushed under the unbearable weight of compounding overheads. As the profits roll in, the banking industry also announced a joint effort to close twenty-three per cent of regional bank branches.
As the increasingly nefarious RBA Governor dealt out another rate hike on stressed households, at the same time, well imbursed former political heavyweight and supreme Australian Banking Association (ABA) lobbyist Anna Bligh took a press tour to justify the controversial decision to close rural branches. Bligh dismissed the potential impacts the absence of physical regional branches could have on those living in these areas, instead proudly highlighting the evolving banking habits of Australians as the catalyst for the decision, while ignoring the healthy public assumption that that it could just be an unethical and thoughtless profit-motivated decision like the rest of them. Rural communities are in an uproar, and even the Nationals have chimed in to protest.
When asked about those in rural areas that may be unwilling or unable to get behind vapor-banking in the remote communities they live in, that communities may be concerned for the survivability of their rural township, the former Queensland Premier lightly reminded everyone it’s all about this thing called “change”. She spoke dismissively of the numerous real concerns around this decision, preferring to mention the marvellous technologies that have led customers to vote with their feet, instead of dwelling on the harsh reality facing rural Australians being left in the dust. There was change coming -- change for everything and everyone but the ethical positions and profit margins of the banking sector.
On the public-facing side of this human-made omnicrisis, the government had yet to meaningfully address the increasing economic turmoil and put heads together to enact true reform on a broken economy, so it hoped a scheme going through the house to build a small batch of low-income housing could suffice.
Amongst the interest rate rises, the inflation and the low wages, the soaring unchecked corporate profits -- desperate to take a cost of living win in a year that has negatively transformed the economic resting state of the nation, Minister for Housing Jason Clare took the fight back to the opponents of the bill, calling for backup to admonish the Greens from newly minted Member for Higgins and current 7x property owner, Dr Michelle Ananda-Rajah.
Calling out the Greens as “social influencers” for debating the housing scheme while dragging up the 2009 climate wars is not an exercise in sincerity, and didn’t look particularly good coming from multi-millionaire political landowners like Dr Ananda-Rajah. She spoke from a high horse on top of a soapbox about the immaturity of those who opposed it, pulling the “enemy of the good” angle that has become so popular amongst Labor senior mouthpieces responding to critique of their underwhelming policy decisions.
There are valid criticisms that the housing scheme will barely impact the waiting lists for public housing, concerns that it won’t address the structural issues baked into the crisis. There are also objective concerns that the projects will be awarded to profit driven build-to-rent investors, foreign capital holders and investment firms, that the program is inadequate and underdeveloped.
As the crisis deepens, the established landlord class, to which most of our cabinet politicians belong, have kindly asked their good tenants to cough up, as they close the negative gearing shutter blinds onto those surviving in the critically failing rental market. The people that rent the houses have been given inadequate tools to negotiate anything otherwise and languish in an environment that is working against them. An overcooked property market on rising interest, bubbles away in the portfolio holdings of slightly nervous wealthy landowners, but it boils over as the catalyst towards poverty and homelessness for millions of poor Australians.
The profit driven and unrepentant banks, fatter than ever since their royal commission grilling, are a key reason for the housing crisis that envelops the country. The government should protect its citizens from the immoral banking practices that have permeated the very fabric of our society, from institutions that tell us its “more than money”, while profiteering at-all-costs off the collective oblivion of millions.
It probably doesn’t help that the people who are meant to intimately understand these economic challenges--the press, the senior public servants, and the politicians--are on the highest paid wickets in the country, with substantial property holdings that exemplify the disparity of wealth growing in Australia. The ongoing Robodebt Royal Commission only confirms the lack of tactile exposure within the political class to understand the profound social challenges affecting most of us, and the commission has only reinforced the reality that despite their confected overtures, many highly paid people in Canberra don’t quite respect or empathise with the common story now heard on the lower echelons of this divided country.
Australians are tired of watching Royal Commissions and public hearings for banks, they are sick of seeing the compromised relationships between private and political classes, exhausted with an RBA Governor that favors briefing the banks before informing the public, and ropable at the internal scandals and abominable policies of the corporate sharks that sit on boards of companies, public tribunals and parliament treating profiteering as a zero-sum game. Australians voted to fix a broken economy, giving it a mandate to embrace reform, not for a government content with a rebranding and sticky-tape job under the title of ‘values-based capitalism’.
More than a dozen years ago, in response to the global finacial crisis of the noughties, Julia Gillard guaranteed Australians' bank savings. This allowed the banks to behave in a cavalier fashion. Then the Royal Commission pointed out more damage they were doing. But still they rode us like cowboys. Shouldn't the treasurer be looking at a super-profits tax on Australian banks?
The Albanese government has been a huge disappointment to anyone hoping for real and substantial change in the way our politics and society function. It wasn’t a campaign promise but it was inherent in the whole ALP election campaign that things would be different. They aren’t! Albanese will be harshly judged by future progressives.