By the time Kenneth Hayne released the final report of the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry in February last year, there were not many royal commission sceptics left. Malcolm Turnbull was one.In his memoir, A Bigger Picture, published today, Turnbull says the royal commission was good politics (for the then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten) but bad policy. He says the government was already acting on many of the reform issues that came out of Hayne's deliberations.And he says the Australian public was on the losing end of the royal commission because "one of the consequences of the commission was that the banks became even more risk averse and lending terms for consumers, investors and small business became tighter than ever."Turnbull says: "As I understood the problem, it was simply this: the banks, and others in the financial services sector, hadn't put their customers first. Like a doctor who recommends unnecessary tests or procedures or a lawyer who runs up hours on fruitless litigation, the banks had all too often put their profits ahead of their clients' interests. "This very often involve conflicts of interest - recommending to clients funds and other products that just happen to be managed by the bank itself, or perhaps involved a higher fee to the advisor."We knew what the problem was. Essentially, there'd been a governance or cultural failure to act as fiduciaries for their customers -  to put them first and in doing so, apply the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you."As a cabinet we took the view that a Royal Commission would be expensive and tell us nothing we didn't already know; it could only hold an inquiry and write a report. The failures in governance and culture at the banks were already well known and documented. "As the government, we should get on with the reforms to ensure that the wrongdoing didn't happen again. There was extensive regulation of the banking sector with agencies like ASIC and the prudential regulator APRA that had considerably more powerful than a Royal Commission. It would be more effective to give them better resources to bring the wrongdoers to account."It's not a very persuasive reflection. As Hayne pointed out, there was no need for more law or regulation. Instead. there was a great need for financial institutions to obey the law.Hayne also showed that the regulators were not using their powers to their full extent. This was due, in part, to the gutting of their budgets by Turnbull's predecessor Tony Abbott.Turnbull's point about changes to banks' lending standards is weak. The banks did tighten their lending standards because after Hayne they had to do a better job of complying with responsible lending rules. But the banks have shown that while the change in lending practices reduced capacity, the majority of borrowers never borrowed up to their full capacity. In reality, only a minority of borrowers were offered less than they would have