Any breach of the law is serious

NAB should realise you can’t look after other people’s money if you’re in the habit of continued “minor” breaches of the law.

‘No criminal acts.” NAB CEO Andrew Thorburn.

The royal commission has created a dangerous set of relativities which, somehow, rank breaches of the Corporations act as not being as serious as, say, a criminal prosecution.

One might have thought that if you were running a bank, breaching the Corporations Act would be considered a heinous state of affairs.

Yet the NAB’s Andrew “batteryman” Thorburn told The Australian’s Richard Gluyas yesterday: “(What’s happened) sounds ­really serious, but it’s not about fraud. It concerns potential breaches of the Corporations Act.”

The context of what was said was comparing the week-long page one headlines about potential NAB criminal breaches, which Thorburn was worried was creating the impression that NAB staff were a pack of crooks.

So he explained they weren’t. The misdemeanours in question, he said, were just technical issues like delays in getting breach reports to the corporate plod.

If this inquiry has taught the banks anything it is that any breach of the law is serious and good governance suggests it’s about time the banks realised that fact.

You can’t seriously run a business looking after other people’s money if you are in the habit of continued “minor” breaches of the law — it’s just not a good look.

The battery man surely understands that, but the present context has provoked this slip.