Even after three weeks, the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry has come to resemble the earlier Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
We have seen the same initial resistance to a public enquiry, the same insistence that revelations of sexual or financial abuse reflected a few bad apples and not a bad culture, the same endorsement when the royal commission was called, and the same shaming as the public questioning of hapless senior officials followed damning evidence of abuse and of the failure to address it.
We have also seen evidence of the same incompetent management, whose very incompetence perpetuated abuse, diffused responsibility for it, and deepened the harm done by it. There was the same failure to maintain adequate systems of reporting; the same quiet moving on or transferring officers guilty of financial or sexual abuse; the same unwillingness to find out about the extent of abuse and the same slowness to offer redress.
We have seen evidence, too, of the same reluctance of senior management to know about the abuse; the same priority given to preserving the reputation of financial or church institutions; the same muted complaints of unfairness and of ignoring the contribution to society of the respective institutions; the same assistance in cover-up by regulating officers, whether in government departments, police or ASIC, effectively leaving the institutions a free hand to ignore the abuse.
We have seen the same reluctance to admit to a culture in which abuse, sexual or financial, flourishes; the same public scepticism whether the institutions will ever reform themselves; and perhaps the same lull in conversation and the same inquisitorial gaze when one admits to being either a Catholic priest or a senior bank executive.
No doubt these claimed similarities could be expanded on or questioned in detail. But to observers who share a personal and public-spirited interest in the decent functioning and trustworthiness both of financial institutions and of churches, they surely raise larger questions beyond structures of governance, remuneration, legal penalties and compensation. They invite reflection on why two apparently different forms of institution should behave in such similar ways.
An unsophisticated observer might respond that churches, banks, financial institutions and big corporations — which so far have avoided Royal Commissions — are all in fact religious organisations. Behind the metrics, the microeconomic analyses and the organisational complexity of financial institutions, as well as of churches,