Margin Call: ANZ boss Shayne Elliott turns in stellar banking royal commission performance

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott leaves the banking royal commision in Melbourne. Picture: AAP

ANZ boss Shayne Elliott is the David Bowie of Big Four banking: continually reinventing himself, forever channelling the zeitgeist.

Today, at Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission in Melbourne, the banker gave the performance of his career.

Dressed in a sombre black suit, there was none of NAB boss Andrew Thorburn’s flashiness or NAB chairman Ken Henry’s superciliousness.

The 54-year-old Elliott was calm, respectful and — above all — contrite, just as his advisers and chairman David Gonski had wanted.

“It’s wrong,” Elliott told counsel assisting Rowena Orr numerous times of a host of imperfect behaviour in the bank’s recent history.

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“I totally understand your perspective,” Elliott was only too happy to concede to Orr.

It was hard to believe this self-flagellating figure was the same banker who once ran ANZ’s infamously fast-and-loose institutional bank back in the Mike Smith-era.

Rod Culleton enjoying Shayne Elliott’s performance at the banking royal commission. Picture: Supplied

The same banker who, as ANZ’s CFO, sat on the board of Malaysia’s scandalous AmBank.

The same banker currently fighting a criminal cartel case launched by Rod Sims’s ACCC over ANZ’s August 2015 capital raising.

Even self-described West Australian “senator-in-exile” Rod Culleton — a strident ANZ critic, who was seated ominously in the federal court’s front row to watch Elliott’s big day — recognised his foe’s performance.

“He’s a better actor than Geoffrey Rush,” Culleton told us. “He’d make a brilliant politician.”

Gonski and his board should be even more impressed.