Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn has been appearing before a parliamentary committee, grilled on the cost of living, credit card surcharges and scams.
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00:00We got the insight from the biggest bank boss in the country, take away the Reserve Bank.
00:07The Commonwealth Bank banks around 7 million people, so they have great insight into what
00:11is happening.
00:12They're obviously concerned about the cost of living and CEO Matt Common gave some detail
00:17about the level of stress that people are finding, particularly as mortgages hover at
00:22this very high interest rates, most affecting people between the ages of 35 and 44 who have
00:28the highest level of those mortgages and are most sensitive to price changes.
00:34Nothing particularly explosive today, but a really deep insight into some of the issues
00:40there.
00:41We're not seeing a huge jump in what is called arrears, which is people behind on their payments,
00:47but there is some complexity to that.
00:49It may be that the fact that we still have really high housing values and property prices
00:55being high.
00:56If people are stretched, they're probably selling out.
00:59So a lot of diverse range of questions from the politically diverse questioners on the
01:04committee on everything from funding gas to changes to the tax system, but some more insight
01:11from Australia's biggest bank boss.
01:14And the Greens yesterday, Dan, suggested a so-called Robin Hood tax to take more money
01:19from big corporations.
01:21What was Mr Common's response to that?
01:24I've been watching Matt Common in hearings like this for many years, and I have rarely
01:29seen him go off tap like this.
01:31He didn't raise his voice or break a sweat, but he expressed extreme frustration with
01:37what he called, and I'll use my notes here, an insidious populism of the idea that companies
01:43can just have money taken from them.
01:44He said it ignores the beneficial elements that businesses large and small make.
01:49We employ 50,000 people.
01:50We just paid out $7 billion in dividends.
01:53It's a policy based on the idea that there's some pool of assets that can be tapped and
01:57there's no consequences of that.
01:59And he took a little breath to focus and kept going, calling it a false dichotomy that there
02:04is something unjust and that profit has to be unjustifiably extracted and that there's
02:10a reason that this should not be so.
02:11He called it performative, designed to attract attention and said the idea lacked rigour
02:16and merit and relies on assumptions that are demonstrably false.
02:21This is, I know it sounds very measured, but by bank boss standards, a pretty rare and
02:26substantial intervention into politics, absolutely kicking the Greens idea for a 40% super profits
02:33tax on institutions like banks.
02:36Scams are a substantial problem for Australian bank customers, of course.
02:40What did he say about that?
02:41He talked about the scale of that.
02:44Just how many people are employed at the bank over 4,000, essentially specifically to reduce
02:49and prevent scams.
02:50He talked about some of the things they're trying to do to reduce and prevent those and
02:55really giving it to the social media companies, many of whom profit from advertisements that
03:01are clearly linked to scam investments, trying to take people's money.
03:06Some real frustration there, there's often talk of a UK model where in the UK, banks
03:11are forced to compensate most people who are involved in scams.
03:14We don't have that here because essentially it creates a bit of a moral hazard about what
03:19customers have to do, the steps they have to take to prevent being scammed at the same
03:23time as banks doing the same thing to prevent their customers being scammed.
03:27This is an ongoing issue, it is eroding trust in institutions and we got a real sense today
03:32of just the scale of the problem and how substantial it is and how much it's costing the banks
03:39as well as customers.