Has Australia's FAR Delivered Accountability?

In a recent opinion piece for the Australian Financial Review, journalist Joyce Moullakis argues that Australia's Financial Accountability Regime (FAR) has fallen far short of its promise to curb misconduct in banking, insurance, and superannuation.

Designed to make it easier to pinpoint responsibility for governance failures and impose consequences, the regime has yet to deliver a single enforcement action, Moullakis explains. The FAR and its predecessor, the Banking Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR), were meant to prevent executives and boards from hiding behind layers of management and bureaucracy to avoid consequences, she writes. In this direction, the FAR was initially intended to feature individual penalties of up to $1 million, but industry lobbying succeeded in having them stripped out before the regime was legislated in 2023.