Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Tuesday, 13 February 2018

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

The fix is in! Labor colluding with Liberals on APRA bail-in powers

Call Labor and cross-bench senators today!

Labor is maintaining its neoliberal subservience to banking interests, which began with Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. It is colluding with the Liberal-National government to ram through the bill giving crisis resolution powers to bank regulator APRA to bail in people’s savings to prop up too-big-to-fail banks.

Yesterday, after a brief non-debate in the House of Representatives, the bill passed without even a vote.

Call Labor and cross-bench senators today to demand they block this bill in the Senate. They have been assured by Treasury and the regulators that the bill won’t bail in deposits, but their reassurances are meaningless. It is the language in the bill that counts, and the language explicitly allows savings invested in hybrid securities to be bailed in, and implicitly opens a back door for APRA to bail in deposits in the future.

Here’s the CEC’s description of the bill from our new change.org petition:

Stop ‘bail-in’ law that steals Australians’ savings

We the undersigned call on Parliament to reject the Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Crisis Resolution Powers and Other Measures) Bill 2017. The bill gives the bank regulator APRA sweeping powers to prop up failing banks by confiscating the savings that Australians hold in those banks, which is known as “bail-in”. At stake is the investment savings of hundreds of thousands of retirees, and the ordinary deposits of all Australians, including individuals, businesses, charities and organisations. This unjust, destructive legislation must be scrapped and replaced with the policy called Glass-Steagall, which separates banks with deposits from financial speculation, to protect both savings and banks.

Deliver that message to ALP and cross-bench senators, today, before the senate debate starts tomorrow.

For the phone numbers of the senators in your state, click here.

Click here for a free copy of the latest issue of the CEC’s Australian Alert Service magazine, which reports on the warnings and indicators of a new financial crisis, and the CEC’s fight to implement the Glass-Steagall solution.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.