Australian financial prudential supervision: an historical view

Australian financial prudential supervision is still to some degree influenced by the Banking Act 1945 that restricted the Australian central bank's regulation only to 'banks'. One of the aims of the Campbell Committee Inquiry of the early 1980s was to increase competitive neutrality in the financial system so those financial intermediaries could be treated on an equal footing. The more recent Wallis Inquiry has advocated that this process should be pushed further. As the Australian government is now in the process of creating a single body, separate from the Reserve Bank, to conduct prudential supervision of all deposit-taking institutions it seems an opportune time to reflect on the manner in which the Australian prudential supervision has evolved. This paper provides an historical description of the current institutional approach to regulation of deposit-taking financial institutions and analyses the reasons behind the predominance of institutional rather than functional financial regulation in Australia to date.