Anna Bligh’s bank branch closure protocol is a swifty, not a solution - MEDIA RELEASE 27/06/2023

The Australian Citizens Party, which campaigned for the current Senate inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia, today slammed Anna Bligh and the Australian Banking Association’s new branch closure protocol. The ABA and the banks are pulling a swifty, trying to pass off their branch closure protocol as the solution to branch closures, when the only thing it even attempts to solve is their bad PR. First of all, the branch closure protocol is not new—the ABA has had a branch closure protocol for 20 years, following a recommendation of an earlier parliamentary inquiry. Did the previous version of the protocol stop banks from closing branches? Of course not—the banks adopt these instruments of self-regulation to pull the wool over the politicians’ eyes. The new version of the ABA’s protocol is the same. It doesn’t stop branch closures; it simply requires banks to ‘communicate’ the closures better. This was one of the pathetic recommendations of the Regional Banking Taskforce. Whenever ‘better communication’ is a recommendation from a government inquiry, it’s simply a politician’s cop-out. The Regional Banking Taskforce was the Coalition’s pre-election stunt to make it appear that they were addressing this crisis of mass bank closures, but they stacked the taskforce—8 of the 11 members represented banks. No wonder it gave the banks the green light to accelerate their branch closures! The current Senate inquiry is proving that Anna Bligh’s ABA was gaslighting the community about the reasons for branch closures, and that the banks are not justified in closing branches at all. Anna Bligh is all over Australia running the banks’ line that customers are ‘overwhelmingly jumping into the opportunity of digital banking’, BUT the Senate hearings and an examination of the ABA’s and banks’ statistics tell a very different story. The Finance Sector Union testified on behalf of bank staff at the hearing in Sale in Victoria in March that the banks are putting their staff under intense pressure to sign up all of their custom