PRESS RELEASE: ‘Shocking, overwhelming, disgusting’—Andy Schmulow denounces ‘lawlessness and the breakdown in the rule of law’ in Australia
Australian Citizens Party (ACP) Senate candidate for NSW Dr Andy Schmulow laid bare the shocking depth of corruption in Australia in his appearance last night on Martin North’s Digital Finance Analytics YouTube livestream—see https://www.youtube.com/@WalkTheWorldDFA
Associate Professor of Law and the University of Wollongong and an expert in corporate law and regulation, Dr Schmulow gave more than 1,000 live listeners a masterclass in the corporate corruption that undermines the Australian economy and drives up the cost of living of everyday Australians.
“This is unacceptable and I’m pissed off and I’m absolutely finished and fed up with it, and that’s why I’m running”, Dr Schmulow declared.
He recounted his experience of corruption in his native South Africa, corruption in Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1990s which he studied for his PhD, and the shocking revelations of misconduct by Australia’s banks that he started to study in 2014, which led him to be the first academic to call for the banking royal commission that was held in 2018.
In a striking discussion at the time with a Russian bank official who consulted him on insurance company misconduct, the official told Dr Schmulow that the shocking case of CBA’s insurance arm Comminsure laying off an employee who had developed multiple sclerosis (MS) on the grounds she was permanently disabled, but then refusing to honour her insurance policy with them on the grounds that Comminsure didn’t regard MS as a disability, wouldn’t even happen in Russia.
Comminsure denied their own employee her insurance claim, and stole money from dead people, so then-CEO Ian Narev could be paid $13 million, mostly in bonuses. “These people are cruel, they are wicked, they are venal, they are heartless, they are psychopaths”, Dr Schmulow denounced.
“I became exposed to the reason why there was a call for a royal commission”, he explained. “Fraud, theft, dishonesty, misconduct, venality, wickedness on an industrial scale—it was out of control. People stealing money out of customers’ accounts; people forging signatures on customers’ accounts; as we later learned—stealing money from the dying and the dead. And I looked at this and I thought to myself, ‘This can’t be Australia. This can’t be happening in the country that I’ve chosen to immigrate to. I’ve chosen to immigrate to this country to get away from lawlessness and the breakdown in the rule of law, and what I’m seeing is shocking, it’s overwhelming, it’s disgusting.”
Unlike most people associated with the two major political parties, Andy Schmulow did not choose to look the other way. Having demanded a royal commission more consistently than any other academic until it was achieved, he has subsequently chosen not to delude himself that the royal commission cleaned up the mess.
As he demonstrated last night, he has continued to apply his analytical blowtorch to: PwC and the other international consulting firms and their corrupt relationship with the government; failed corporate regulator ASIC and its pathetic leadership; CBA, ANZ and the other big banks which have continued to steal from their customers and drive up house prices and the cost of living; the Australian Banking Association which flexed its muscles to block a law that would have imposed million-dollar fines on individual bankers who were found to be culpable for misconduct; Qantas’s corrupt relationship with politicians so it can charge the world’s highest prices for domestic flights; and the Coles-Woolies supermarket duopoly that boasts bigger profits than the banks.
Andy Schmulow’s devastating exposé of corruption last night showed why he’s the most qualified Senate candidate in Australia to take it on in Parliament.
The Australian Citizens Party is an independent, federally-registered political party, founded in 1988. It is committed to policies that promote the economic development of Australia for the benefit of all its people, not just the vested corporate interests which have too much influence over the major political parties. It takes its inspiration from the "old Labor" party stalwarts including King O'Malley, who fought to establish Australia's national bank, the Commonwealth Bank, and John Curtin and Ben Chifley, who used the Commonwealth Bank to lead the economic mobilisation that saved Australia in WWII. The ACP fought against the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, which has concentrated financial power in Australia in the Big Four banking oligopoly that gouges short-term profits at the expence of Australians and the nation's economic development, and is campaigning to re-establish a national bank, modelled on the old Commonwealth Bank, as a government post office bank which would guarantee face-to-face banking services, and access to cash, for all communities, and break the Big Four banking oligopoly.
