Descent into Greed
First, in almost every case, the conduct in issue was driven not only by the relevant entity’s pursuit of profit but also by individuals’ pursuit of gain, whether in the form of remuneration for the individual or profit for the individual’s business. Providing a service to customers was relegated to second place. Sales became all important. Those who dealt with customers became sellers. And this confusion of roles extended well beyond front line service staff. Advisers became sellers and sellers became advisers. (Hayne, 2019)
The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance Industry concluded in February 2019 with the publication of its Final Report (Hayne, 2019). The findings of the Royal Commission were scathing about the practices in the Australian banking industry: continuing to charge customers after their death; denying customers insurance payouts; hoodwinking the public into paying for services that did not exist and taking up mortgages they would not be able to afford, and so on, and so on (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-04/banking-royal-commission-report-at-a-glance/10777188).
While none of the major banks escaped condemnation, the Commission regarded the National Australia Bank (appropriately abbreviated as ‘NAB’) as an outlier. This bank’s leadership persisted in downplaying and denying the seriousness of NAB’s transgressions right through the inquiry (Bartholomeusz, 2019). The normalisation of deceit in this organisation in particular had rendered employees at all levels immune to the damage and distress they caused service users, including account holders, mortgagees and insurees. The size of the scandal was of such magnitude that it was reported on internationally (cf. the reports compiled in the June 2019 issue of The New Yorker: The New Yorker, 2019).
NAB’s most recent website is populated by two moderately happy, semi-smiling customers, advertising information about ‘community partners’ and ‘people who make a better Australia’ (https://www.nab.com.au/). Here, the media portrayal serves to background (if not bury) the more sinister dimensions of banking uncovered in the Royal Commission Inquiry. The contrast between the media portrayal and the inquiry findings could not be more stark. Their relation is not merely one of contradiction, perhaps, but also one of cancellation: smiles and domestic happiness are made to dominate over disconcerting legal facts. (A closer look at the NAB website page reveals a pervasive dull grey and authoritarian font on the left-hand side of the image1 with the kitchen scene squashed into the right-hand side of the picture, an awkward distance between the man and the woman, dour black and grey jumpers and a tense and trite symbolisation of ‘togetherness’. It’s not all good, yet.)
Organisations will portray their operations and aims as ethical and professional, and as upholding these standards for everyone who works in them and with them. Only in some circumstances will organisations subject conflicts of interest and the affective dynamics that drive them to scrutiny and confront them using the standards and principles inscribed into their codes and policies. Oversight bodies tend to err on the side of condoning rather than confronting questionable and transgressive practices (The New Yorker, 2019). Thus, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), a government body called into being to monitor banking and finance industries, was found to have condoned unacceptable banking and insurance practices and to have ignored a large number of consumer complaints over several years (Hayne, 2019).
The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking Industry was pushed through parliament against the will of the (then Turnbull-liberal) government in power, thanks to the opposition party teaming up with independent members of parliament. The Commission’s findings have stunned even those who were convinced that there was a need for an inquiry into banking practices.
Child Sexual Abuse
In 2017, two years before the Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance Industry, Australia conducted the Royal Inquiry into Institutions’ Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The focus of this inquiry was on sexual abuse acts committed by institutions’ (staff) members, on protection given to these people by other people employed by the institution, and on the general culture within these institutions towards accountability for illegal behaviour: “The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children in institutional contexts that had been emerging in Australia for many years” (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). The reference to ‘many years’ may remind the reader that this inquiry followed on from the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (‘Bringing them home’) which outlined allegations of institutional sexual abuse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (Wilson, 1997), a 2004 inquiry whose report was titled Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians who experienced institutional or out-of-home care as children, and a 2005 inquiry whose report was titled Protecting vulnerable children: A national challenge.
Collectively, these reports make clear that child abuse in Australia was and perhaps still is institutionalised. It took decades and decades for the nation to confront this systemic destruction of children and take on the pervasive mutual protection by and of perpetrators high up in these (often prominent) institutions. The latest and most widely reported conviction to come out of these inquiries was that of Cardinal George Pell in 2018 for acts committed several years earlier. At the time of his conviction, Pell was officially employed at the Vatican. The Vatican.
The 2017 report’s Executive Summary starts with a section titled “A National Tragedy”:
Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions. We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most trusted institutions. The sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend for educational, recreational, sporting, religious or cultural activities. Some institutions have had multiple abusers who sexually abused multiple children. It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed. (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017)
These reports, put together, detail individuals’ and their organisations’ moral disengagement, or what Bandura and colleagues refer to as dehumanisation (Bandura, Caprara, & Zsolnai, 2000). This moral disengagement and dehumanisation took place, and possibly still takes place, in organisations that we regard as emblematic of society’s highest norms and standards: churches, schools, sports clubs. This conclusion upends our commonsense understanding of the sources of crime, injustice and dysfunction as emerging from (organised groups of) rather brutish individuals, from their personality deficits and upbringing deficiencies, lower-class accents, and generally deviant behaviours. This is a ‘commonsense’ that is consistently endorsed by much of contemporary cinema (Spina, 2017): it is individuals (however well-organised) deviating from the social norm who are responsible for far-reaching wrongdoing and ruthless exploitation of others. But the scale of institutionalised dehumanisation reported in Australia puts paid to such stereotyped portrayals.
True, citizens’ faith in political and commercial institutions has a long and chequered history (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). Yet the notion that civic institutions may be engaged in systemic wrongdoing, exploitation and destruction of people challenges all but the most jaundiced. And if institutionalised dehumanisation is rampant in banking, schooling, religions and sports, what is the chance that it also permeates institutions that have not yet been hauled through the wringer of a public enquiry?
Digital Surveillance
Shoshanna Zuboff in her latest book The age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) describes the exploitation of ordinary citizens by big data companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These companies exploit what Zuboff calls people’s ‘behavioural surplus’: the human features and conducts made available to these companies for analysis and algorithmic computation through people’s use of phones, search engines, social media and related technologies (Zuboff, 2019). Zuboff likens this digitised data surveillance and extraction ...