Corporate regulator ASIC lets crooked bankers walk free, and the notional anti-corruption commission (NACC) ignores Robodebt. Paul Begley on our culture of leniency.
During September 2025, officers of the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) appeared before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services. The subject matter primarily focused on a penalty of $240 million imposed on the ANZ Bank for a series of contraventions, including market manipulation and unconscionable conduct, over a two-year period.
The offences related to multiple issues, from dubious handling of government bond sales to charging fees to deceased customers.
Tania Lawrence MP and Senator Barbara Pocock noted that the penalty was to be levelled against ANZ as an entity, and they pressed the ASIC officers about why offending individuals were not being identified and pursued. Ms Lawrence observed that ANZ had fired certain individuals who signed non-disclosure agreements on exiting.
The committee members wanted to know whether ASIC had sought to learn whether the terms of their NDAs might provide insight into who was accountable for some of the ANZ contraventions.
The Australian Financial Review’s Angira Bharadwa reported ($) that ANZ chair Paul O’Sullivan claimed the Commonwealth had not lost money as a result of the contraventions, a claim contradicted by ASIC chair Joe Longo, who indicated a loss in the order of $26 million had been incurred.
As the departing ASIC chair, Mr Longo made reference in various answers to problematic issues around intentionality when pursuing individuals for misconduct, and also suggested that the many thousands of employees, past and present, at a bank the size of ANZ made it very difficult to pin fault and intention on particular individuals, even where the contraventions relate to repeated contraventions supposedly rectified following the Banking Royal Commission of 2017-19, a point made by Ms Lawrence.
She also noted that some departing executives were walking away from the bank with massive bonuses. The big salaries they had earned were supposedly a reflection of the weight of responsibility they carried. The head of the retail division, for example, where customers had been defrauded since 2022, had retired with a $900,000 bonus, having earned an annual salary of $2.4m.
The Longo doctrine
Having been pressed on the issue of individual responsibility and accountability for some time, the ASIC chair finally reminded the committee members of a fundamental philosophical point they appeared to be missing:
In Australia we don’t lightly ban people from their employment, we don’t lightly send them to jail, we don’t lightly impose penalties on them or ruin their reputation.
It is not the Australian way, it seems, for offending executives to have to cancel their golf club memberships, move their children from exclusive private schools, or put their leisure boats on the market.
However, a gang of thugs who rob a store of petty cash get no such protection. Whether a gang member threatens staff, empties the till, or drives the getaway car, they each tend to spend time in a jail cell, as they should.
Yet corporate thuggery that silently robs vulnerable customers and defrauds the commonwealth of $26 million can be regarded by the regulator as requiring protections that
make the behaviour of white-collar iniquity largely unaccountable.
Committing contraventions of that order necessitates highly-paid individual executives and senior managers signing off on flawed decisions or failing to make costly compliance calls that are required by law to be made. Yet, they are not held accountable.
The notional anti-corruption commission
On 6 June 2004, the National Anti-Corruption Commission decided not to pursue six senior officials referred to the integrity regulator under seal by Royal Commissioner Catherine Holmes for potential criminal conduct over their part in the Robodebt scandal.
While the words were different, Longo’s observation on the reluctance of corporate regulators to penalise well-remunerated executives is consistent with the protections given to the six individuals referred by the Robodebt Royal Commission. Justice Holmes had protected the names of the alleged offenders by placing them under seal, and
NACC attempted to ensure that their reputations would not be sullied by their behaviour becoming the subject of an investigation,
even one conducted under government-approved secrecy.
The context of the potential criminality of the six referred individuals is that they allegedly participated in behaviour in their official positions that contributed to what Justice Brendan Murphy of the Federal Court described in June 2021 as a “shameful chapter in the administration of the commonwealth” and “a massive failure of public administration”.
The judge made those observations when he awarded Robodebt victims $1.8B to repay ‘debts’ illegally collected. The appalling behaviour of many officials who gave evidence to the royal commission affected nearly half a million Australian citizens so severely that many have still not recovered, and others took their own lives. The payments awarded by the court did not include reparations for pain and suffering, medical expenses, or loss of opportunity.
Yet more than four years after the royal commission hearings, which detailed the shameful behaviour of many well-remunerated officials, no single person has been made accountable for what eventuated during the extended period that Robodebt was implemented, despite numerous parties in power having been made aware that the scheme was unlawful.
All care and no responsibility
This malaise is not merely an Australian phenomenon. During the aftermath of the 2011 phone-hacking scandal in Britain, some senior police and news editors served jail time, and shame was expressed by the leading offenders, Rupert Murdoch and his top executive, Rebekah Brooks.
But those ultimately responsible escaped relatively unscathed and continue to engage in similar media practices with impunity at their outlets in the US, Britain and Australia.
Fox Corporation shareholders bore the brunt of the billion-dollar penalty incurred by Fox News over its flagrantly defamatory reporting about Dominion Voting Systems’ supposed involvement in the 2020 US election loss by Donald Trump. No individuals were called to account, other than middle-level managers who correctly called the result of the Arizona result early.
Similarly, no one was called to account over the outrageous media behaviour of News Corporation outlets during the Ashby-Slipper non-affair, which sank the Gillard Government.
One notable exception was eighteen years ago, when the chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Graeme Samuel, sought prison sentences for executives who engaged in cartel behaviour. The outcome in the 2007 case of collusion by executives from Visy and Amcor resulted in a $36 million criminal penalty levelled against Richard Pratt’s Visy, with the paper boss narrowly escaping time behind bars, despite Samuel’s best efforts on behalf of the ACCC.
For his part, Samuel lost many friends in high places for doing his job.
And that is perhaps the crux of the matter. When most regulators have formerly been players in the industries they are set to regulate, what else can we expect but a lenient attitude taken towards the misdeeds of corporate and government titans?
Paul Begley worked in public affairs roles for three decades, most recently as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.