Today in Parliament, Abigail delivered an adjournment speech that welcomed the Reserve Bank's interest rate cut but highlighted that it offers only a brief reprieve for struggling households, urging stronger action against corporate profit gouging and calling for the establishment of a public bank in NSW to ensure fair financial services for the people.

Abigail said:

Yesterday the Reserve Bank of Australia—no doubt feeling super fresh from its three-month holiday away from the stress of making decisions that have a fundamental, and often devastating, impact on millions of households across Australia—finally began to correct its ill‑conceived rampage of rapid interest rate increases by dropping the official cash rate by 0.25 per cent. It is welcome news for the millions of people who have been forced even further into a cost-of-living crisis as punishment for inflation they have not caused. They have been told to stop having haircuts and getting their teeth fixed, while big, greedy corporations get away scot-free, gouging record profits off the artificially inflated prices of groceries and other essential goods and services. It will mean a small reprieve for many, a slight uptick in the weekly finances to relieve some of the daily stress. But it is nothing compared to the increases in the cost of living that people have borne over the past two years.

It is a historical fact that interest rate rises hit harder and faster than interest rate decreases, and it will require many more cuts and take many more months before households can breathe easy. Even then, the official cash rate does not sit in isolation; it is just one small piece of why everything is more expensive these days. That brings me back to profit gouging and the way that large corporations have been allowed to frolic in competition‑free zones with no serious regulation and no publicly provided goods and services to keep them in check. There is possibly no more egregious an example of a sector in dire need of a competitive public operator than Australia's banking system.

For decades now, Australia's big banks have been raking in billions in profit. Despite the royal commission into banking revealing shocking levels of theft, malpractice and unethical behaviour, the concentrated power of the big banks has effectively immunised them from any meaningful punishment. Time after time, they have refused to pass on interest rate cuts and have imposed extraordinarily unfair fees onto consumers as they have exploited their unrivalled market positions to pay CEOs and executives multimillion-dollar salaries while celebrating continuous billion-dollar profits. All the while, Australia's household debt to income ratio has quadrupled, the cost of buying a first home has grown at two to three times the rate of wages growth over the past decade, and more and more people are in housing stress, just one unforeseen life event away from being turfed out of their homes.

Now, more than ever, Australia needs to bring back options for public banking. It can start with a public bank for New South Wales, owned by the people for the people. It would be a bank that is accountable for its decisions to the public through this Parliament; a bank that would serve as the depository for local government and government agency funding, saving money by cutting out intermediaries and private shareholders, eliminating fees and financing projects at lower interest rates; a bank that would partner with and support not-for-profit banks in New South Wales; a bank that would be able to lend during times of stress and crisis, helping to sustain a healthy local economy; and a bank that would relieve pressure on those going through hard times, that would both purchase defaulting mortgages from not-for-profit banks to offer more generous terms during times of crisis as well as offer to buy properties from home owners as public housing stock, ensuring that residents can continue to live in their homes.

The fundamental tension in our current economic system is that while we claim to be a democratic society, democracy is constantly being constrained to the realm of electoral politics. In the economic sphere, there is no democracy. The neoliberal ideologues and corporate elites say that the market is the great equaliser, that the wisdom of crowds expresses the wishes of the people and that one can just vote with one's feet. In essence, what they are saying is that if you do not like it, leave. The capitalist economic system creates fascist dictatorships within every corporation, where the populace has no say and where the only law is that of power, wealth and influence. It does not have to be that way. By democratising basic financial services and investment decisions made with our money, we can ensure that our collective wealth is used to benefit us today as well as building the future we want to see tomorrow.

As humans, we recognise the humanity in one another. We constantly seek to lift one another up, share in our successes and support each other when we fall down. The big banks feel no such fondness for us. Their spreadsheets and formulas dehumanise us into net present value and discount rates, into margins and risk profiles. They become masters of our fate, prioritising profit over people, speculation over stability and the enrichment of a tiny elite over the wellbeing of our communities. A publicly owned bank would not fix all of the ills and injustices of our brutal economic system, but it would provide some small sanctuary in the sea of inhuman capitalist excess. Through its accountability to us, the people, not to shareholders and faceless men, it would not just be a financial institution; it would be a tool for social and economic transformation. It would be a first step in the long path towards creating a common treasury for all.

Read the full transcript in Hansard here.

19 February 2025