Dear Department of the Treasury,

I request a copy of the draft Regional Banking Taskforce report as it stood at the change of government in May 2022.

I understand you would not normally release draft copies of reports but as this taskforce spanned two governments I believe it is in the public interest to release the document.

Yours faithfully,

Dale Webster

Dear FOI,

I request an internal review of the decision not to release the draft copy of the Regional Banking Taskforce Report on the following grounds.
Section 47E - Certain Operations of Agencies
It is the normal, stated protocol not to release draft reports. This is accepted so the agency does not have to cite a reason for refusing a standard request, so your statement that granting of this FOI would hamper detail in future reports is moot.
The application for this document is an exceptional circumstance that will rarely arise again. It concerns a Coalition report that should have been tabled by a previous government but for reasons unknown this did not happen. Instead it was released almost a year after the consultation period for the inquiry ended by another political party that had won government, Labor.

Public Interest Test
The status of the report at the change of government is in the public interest because it contains a recommendation that offers a solution for legal problems for both the banks and APRA.
If recommendation 7 was included before the change of government it means that banks, who were under pressure to remove sites that they had withdrawn teller services from and were instead making customers use ATMS at from their branch lists because they no longer met the legal definition under the Financial Services (Collection of Data) Act 2001, had abused their position on a government taskforce to put in a recommendation that they would legally benefit from;
Or,
Recommendation 7 was inserted after the change of government by the new Treasury in response to the pressure it and APRA were under to make the ‘big four’ banks obey the law and stop reporting sites that did not meet the legal definition of a bank branch as “branches”. (An offence that attracts large fines that banks have never been prosecuted on despite misreporting for years.)
Recommendation seven, which calls for a review of how APRA data is collected and reported, makes the problem go away.
The report was released in questionable circumstances at 4.52pm on a Friday evening before a long weekend by Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones.
Mr Jones refused to do any media interviews on the report but when Treasury was questioned about its failure to apply laws under the Financial Services (Collection of Data) Act 2001 consistently (banks sites that had been mentioned in parliament had been downgraded in APRA’s latest data release, while others that were not but had identical formats were left as submitted by the banks) Treasury made a questionable legal interpretation of the law that was inconsistent with its own previous actions/statements and pointed to recommendation seven.
The recommendation appeared to have been tacked on to the others (on a separate page) and was inconsistent with the terms of reference of the taskforce.
I have been in contact with the office of attorney general Mark Dreyfus to report that:
- The failure to disclose the correction of hundreds of errors that go back decades means APRA has colluded with the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank to cover up the misreporting.
- APRA has taken no action against the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank (or any of the other banks) for misreporting of service channels, which carries significant penalties under the Financial Service (Collection of data) Act 2001.
- Former APRA chaiman Wayne Byres appears to have misled Senator Malcolm Roberts and, by extension, parliament, about his knowledge of the long-standing errors in the APRA database.
- APRA – in its latest data publication released on October 19 2022 – has applied the legislation inconsistently, for the most part letting larger banks off the hook but cracking down on smaller and foreign institutions.
The response from the Attorney was that until a time when a Federal ICAC is established, responsibility for the matter lay with the Treasury Department.
I therefore submit that the refusal by Treasury to provide the copy of this document is obstructionist and an attempt to evade scrutiny.

Yours sincerely,

Dale Webster