Banking is an essential public service, but in Australia it has become entirely privatised. Today in Parliament, Abigail gave an adjournment speech advocating for a Public Bank of NSW that will reinvest profits directly back into the community, meaning we can fund community projects with positive social and environmental outcomes, support small businesses across our community and help people who are unable to afford mortgage repayments or rent.
Abigail said:
What if banking were for people, not profits? Banking is an essential public service, but in Australia it has become entirely privatised. In a time when interest rates are skyrocketing, groceries are becoming increasingly unaffordable and mortgage stress is spreading across the State, we need to democratise the economic system. When we stop to think about it for even a moment, why should we accept the idea that billionaires and bankers should get richer and richer—literally printing money for lending people other people's money—while an interest rate increase on our mortgage or car loan means that we are considering skipping meals or that our kids do not get new school shoes? Why, when we need a home loan, a savings account or credit to start a small business, does every single dollar have to flow through the pockets of four mega banks that just last year made $32 billion in profit? That is not innovation. That is not a free market working beautifully. That is an extraction machine.
It takes money out of our communities, out of our suburbs and out of our families, and funnels it into executive bonuses, share buybacks and offshore bank accounts—and we are told that we are the lucky ones. But it does not have to be that way. We could have a bank owned by the people of New South Wales, not listed on the stock exchange. It could be beholden to the people, not profit margins. 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, while also building the future that we want to see tomorrow. A public bank would reinvest profits directly back into the community, meaning that we could fund community projects with positive social and environmental outcomes, support small businesses across our community and help people who are unable to afford mortgage repayments or rent.
This is what that would mean for our lives. A public bank does not need to extract profit from every transaction. That means lower fees. It means fairer interest rates on our savings and fairer interest rates on our loans. That means small businesses in our towns can get a loan to skill up and scale up. It means our money stays working for longer in our community. The housing crisis is not an accident; it is the inevitable result of a financial system that treats homes as assets for speculation, not places to live. Corporate banks are incentivised to create conditions for a housing affordability crisis by offering more favourable loan terms to investors, who scoop up all the available homes, condemning everyday working people around this country to a life subject to the whims of a landlord. A public bank can design loans that get people into homes, not pad loan books. A public bank can finance public housing, building social security and public wealth. Banking is an essential public service, but for some reason we have left it in the hands of billionaires and bankers in sharp suits and too much hair gel, with not enough compassion.
People say that running a bank is too complex for the State and that is why we had to leave it to the private sector. That is garbage. I have worked with bankers. I know how smart most of them are. Most of them are in boardrooms more because of their school ties than their school marks. We run hospitals and schools, and they are far more complex organisations than banks. The smart bankers know that running a regular bank is simple, and that is why they spend their time concocting increasingly convoluted and abstracted financial schemes, stacking bet on bet, on bluff on bluster, chasing profit off profit while producing nothing and contributing nothing of substance to our society, while sneering down from their corner offices at the people who make this country work. Eventually these schemes fall apart and then we have events like the global financial crisis. Those organisations lose everyone else's money. Real people are devastated, their lives are destroyed and their homes are repossessed. Those bankers just walk away, with no penalties, no jail time and no acknowledgement of the destruction they have wrought.
We deserve so much better than this financial system. I believe that banking is a public necessity and a public good, like water, education and health care. I believe that no family should lose its home so that a bank's CEO can buy their twelfth investment property. I believe that the people of this State deserve a financial institution that works for them, not against them. The money is already ours. The question is whether we get to direct it. By bringing the public good back into this public necessity, we put financial power back in the hands of the people, and with it we can build a future on our own terms.
Read more about our Public Bank campaign here.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
19 March 2026