Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks to the media during a press conference in Berlin, Sunday, April 22, 2018. Mr Turnbull is in Berlin on a three-day official visit. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) NO ARCHIVING

Occasionally the government gives the appearance of learning from its mistakes: it has allowed the issue of whether it should have called a banking royal commission earlier to only run for several days. Last night, out of news cycle and from Europe, Malcolm Turnbull admitted to a mistake in not calling it sooner. Kelly O’Dwyer’s effort on the ABC yesterday probably helped. O’Dwyer — strongly challenging colleague Michaelia Cash as the minister most likely to be found with her foot in her mouth — was merely sticking to the government’s line that everything was just fine, adorning it with statements like “I’m very happy to concede that we have taken the right action”. But it’s still a car wreck when you deliberately drive into a wall.

So after days of stubbornly refusing to admit getting it wrong, Turnbull made a partial admission, that he’d made a political error. Not a real error, just a political error. Well, it’s only political damage you’re incurring, Prime Minister.

In days of yore i.e. up until last week, this would have gone on for weeks. And this is an area where Liberals traditionally are unable to think straight, due to a combination of millions of dollars of financial sector donations and that instinctive hatred of industry super funds which has meant the Liberals reflexively took the side of the big banks and AMP, and financial planners, when it came to regulation of financial advice.

Look back at the debates in 2012 about the Future of Financial Advice — now acknowledged as not merely necessary but probably insufficient in addressing the conflict of interest at the heart of financial advice under the banks’ vertically integrated model. “These bills impose significant additional red tape, significant additional complexity and significant additional costs on small business, financial advisers and consumers,” said Mathias Cormann. “The financial advice industry is a very good one,” said his colleague Ian Macdonald. “Financial advisers are a great asset to Australia and offer real help and assistance to many people. They do a fabulous job… the Labor government have reviled these people, accusing all in the industry of being as bad as the one bad egg in the nest.” “Financial planners… were most concerned that the reforms in their current form would be detrimental to the industry and also to clients of the industry,” said Marise Payne. “They were very concerned that the government is pursuing changes that will unnecessarily increase red tape in this industry. 

That’s only a taste of contributions that, in the light of last week, haven’t so much not aged well as developed the stench of death about them.

Labor’s now demanding an apology from the government, though if the government has to apologise, so too does Labor, which voted against a royal commission in 2015 because, as Sam Dastyari claimed at the time, it was a “Greens stunt.”

Maybe the government can learn from its years-long misjudgment on financial services. The lesson is, don’t waste political capital preventing the inevitable for an industry closely allied to the Coalition that refuses to do the right thing, that a hopelessly inept regulator can’t bring to heel, and which can be relied upon to regularly embarrass you in the future. That’s exactly the scenario playing out now with live exports. The industry is run by mates of the Coalition. They are utterly unwilling to stop subjecting animals to hideous cruelty. The so-called regulator, the federal Department of Agriculture, has literally done nothing to protect animal welfare (just last week it waved off another ship of shame). Even people involved in the industry are calling for an end to it. Even members of the government’s own ranks are calling for it. Sussan Ley, who’s been a farmer and knows more about the pastoral industry and has met more farmers in her career than most Nationals MPs, has said she will pursue a private member’s bill to end it.

The government will prevent her from bringing it to debate. But it should reflect on the painful experience of the last week, in which it learnt the cost of holding out against the inevitable until it lost control of the process and its hand was forced by repeated scandals and the inability of the industry itself or the regulator to prevent them from recurring.