Page 4650 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 15 December 1993
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form of bizarre sexual activity that the bank dreams up. It can hold that on the file and you cannot check it. It is bad enough that they need to collect some of this intrusive information, but it is a basic privacy principle that, if information on a citizen is held, the citizen has the right to check it.
I had Mr Alan Cullen, who is well known as the director of the Australian Bankers Association, sitting in my office about three weeks ago. I took him through this and he said, "Well, of course, we give people that information". I said, "Mr Cullen, if you are saying that you will give it to them, why not put it in the code of practice? What are you scared of? By giving yourself a power to collect this broad range of information and giving the consumer only a limited right to check the information, you are further fostering the contempt and suspicion that the public now has of the banking system". I said to the Australian Bankers Association, as I said to the Australian Consumers Association, that the banks have lost a lot of the confidence they once had, as Mr Westende pointed out and as Mr Stevenson has pointed out many times.
There are really two ways for the banks to get that public confidence back. One is to spend a lot of money on a lot of flashy television advertising campaigns to lift the corporate image of the banks, and if you watch commercial television it rather looks as though they are going down that path. The other is to adopt some proactive pro-consumer fair trading practices and get out there and show the consumers - I may say consumers, and Mr Westende may say small business people or small citizens, but it is the same thing - and the public that the banks are serious about fair trading and serious about reasonable consumer and trade practices.
Mr Westende: They are getting better.
MR CONNOLLY: They are getting marginally better, Mr Westende, but it disturbed me greatly that the ABA code of practice is such a weak document and that, on such extraordinary propositions, the Bankers Association think they have a right to collect intrusive information about a client's political beliefs, ethnic or racial origins, or sexual preferences or practices, but they deny the citizen the right to check that information. That is not the way forward to restore confidence in the banking sector.
MR LAMONT (3.53): I do not wish to elaborate too much further on the matters raised by Mr Stevenson or those covered by the Minister, but I do want to draw the Assembly's attention to the considerable problems that dealing with complaints in the banking industry provides for clients of the industry. The banking ombudsman is often portrayed as being the appropriate method for clients of banks to redress concerns they have about banking practice. In a case that I am currently investigating it is fairly obvious that the power of the banking ombudsman to inquire into and investigate the principal issues associated with a lot of complaints of clients is just not there. They just simply do not have the power to require banks to provide information and/or answer, in terms sought by the client, questions put by the client. To the extent that Mr Stevenson's MPI today again places that issue to the fore, it is appropriate that it be discussed as a matter of public importance.
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