Royal Commissions are set up with hand picked Commissioners and the press is loaded with details of heinous crimes against the community; we saw this with the recent CFMEU Commission and a version of it into Labor’s handling of the Pink Bats initiative.

When the banking industry diddles its customers with dodgy advice that siphons money from its victims directly into the pockets of commission receiving executives or the pockets of shareholders there’s some tut-tutting and they are told to behave themselves.

When insurance companies suck people into attractive sounding policies and then use any trick they can lay their agile brains on to winkle out of paying claims they too are told to behave themselves or else … but or else what?

Demands for Royal Commissions into the finance industries are met with fobbing off cries from the big end: “too expensive” … “we already have a body in place that has even more power than a Royal Commission so we don’t need one”; “we have ASIC!”.

The question is then: what has this august body done? What is it doing? How come if it is so powerful the financial industry is still being rocked by scandal after scandal? How come the citizens are still being ripped off?

ASIC claims it has been undermined and compromised with budget cuts that have reduced its capacity to be an effective watchdog. In a deliberate move to reduce regulatory oversight of the financial sector the government cut its budget by $120m in 2015.

So while the current government is serious about union corruption it is currently not too serious about financial industry corruption, even though the cost to the community might be many times greater and more serious.

This, of course, fits exactly with what we experienced in 2008 when the international financial sector brought the global economy to its knees. The financial industry and its badly behaving executives escaped with mild censure while many customers and other citizens suffered devastation from which they will never recover.

In this world of enthusiastic deregulation it seems that more than ever we need a national, independent and properly funded Commonwealth corruption watchdog along the lines of NSW ICAC that might replace independent state bodies by maintaining active offices in all states and territories.

This would be the kind of body that a number of Senators, including Senator Xenophon, the Greens and many prominent citizens keep calling for but that the major parties seem shy of for reasons they keep to themselves, fobbing off the idea with the vague but erroneous claim that it’s “not necessary”.

As well as the union and financial sectors such a body could keep a close eye on political donations and lobbying; the private sector education scandals and rorts where millions of dollars have been transferred directly from taxpayers into the cavernous pockets of shifty executives, not to mention the student victims who have been left with expensive student loans for courses that have not materialised.

The mere presence of such a body, independent and powerful, would act as a deterrent against germination of the kind of corruption that festers in dark places and “untouchable” institutions.

It’s time, Turnbull and Shorten, It’s time!