Westpac child sex scandal should see heads roll
If Westpac really didn’t know what some of their customers were up to, it was incompetent. And if it did know, or had reasonable suspicions, it was shameful that no action was taken, writes Peta Credlin.
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Westpac must really think we are idiots.
It’s hard to conclude otherwise, after the business-as-usual way the board has handled revelations it facilitated the exploitation of children, alongside 22,999,988 other breaches of anti-money laundering laws. Just as Prince Andrew is likely to face a life ban from royal duties because of a total failure to grasp the magnitude of his moral failure, Westpac has probably already passed the point-of-no-return when it comes to just-not-getting what they’ve done wrong after the bank admitted to series of transactions where it facilitated the abuse of children, most living overseas, by paying customers.
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Many years ago, when I was chief of staff to the communications minister, we boosted the number of police officers in the online child exploitation unit at the Australian Federal Police and increased their funding by tens of millions. Not long after, I was sent a large package of the most depraved photographs containing images of child sexual abuse including infants. What I saw has never left me, even today. Inside was a note ‘you will never catch me’ and immediately, with bile in my throat, I walked the entire package of filth upstairs to the Justice Minister’s office and into the hands of the AFP.
Today, the problem has only grown worse with the capacity of internet to take the abuse of children ‘to market’ with willing buyers able to choose a child to order and receive the abuse live-streamed into their suburban home, in street like yours. Making this all happen, are sophisticated international crime networks and banks who move the money around from buyer, to seller.
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Enter Westpac.
On Friday, when the bank board met, I expected a press release that offered a complete and genuine apology. But that’s not what we got.
Instead, the way the bank said sorry on Friday was more of an excuse than an act of contrition, replete with the usual spin-doctor’s verbiage meant to make it sound sincere but having the opposite effect. “We have already made significant improvements,” said the bank’s statement (in 24 hours?); they’re “establishing a multi-layered review” (whatever that means); and “accelerating our ongoing program of improvements”.
What a load of corporate doublespeak!
Even without the laws requiring banks to monitor customers’ patterns of behaviour and to report suspected crimes, surely a bank – as a matter of simple prudence and ordinary human decency – would question any customer about a large number of transactions with businesses in notorious centres of child exploitation and seek to satisfy itself that these were all above board.
If Westpac really didn’t know what some of their customers were up to, it was incompetent not to; and if it did know, or even had reasonable suspicions, it was shameful that no action was taken. Banks almost routinely make contact with customers to query suspicious transactions, and what could be more suspicious than numerous transactions with child pornographers and human traffickers?
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It obviously hasn’t sunk in yet just what Westpac has been conniving at. Because facilitating paedophiles to procure the rape of children offshore, via transactions through the bank, is not far short of financing the slave trade in Wilberforce’s time. If the magnitude of their error had even begun to dawn on the Westpac board, there’s no way that such an excruciatingly banal statement would have been issued. I think the proper way for a company to deal with such a mess is for the CEO to resign along with the chairman.
If the banks have learned anything from the Haynes Royal Commission, it was surely never again to treat the public with contempt. Yet here is Australia’s oldest bank treating the financing of child exploitation almost as if it were on a par with the failure to submit reports on time. It’s both hard to believe and almost what we’ve come to expect.
All banks have a tendency to talk down to the public while parading their own virtue but Westpac has taken this sort of arrogance to extremes. This, after all, is the bank that announced that it wouldn’t lend money to Adani for a coal mine (before Adani had even asked for it) but failed to adhere the law and processes meant to stop the facilitation of child sex crimes. Adani wasn’t morally good enough to be a Westpac customer even though all it wanted to do was to produce electricity for poor people in India and employ thousands of Australians here; yet somehow, purveyors of depravity against children got through Westpac’s checks and balances?
Few would have a shred of sympathy for a CEO who lost his salary of several million dollars and year and a chairman who lost his directors’ fees of several hundred thousand a year; but if they were to announce their resignations forthwith it might at least be possible to accord them a degree of respect.
All of us, after all, make mistakes; sometimes big ones. Right now, they’re failing the ultimate test of character which is owning up to mistakes and accepting the consequences.