We’ve all seen plenty of hypocrites in our time but Future Fund chairman David Murray whingeing about excessive fund manager fees to The Weekend Australian is one of the more brazen examples of chutzpah you’d ever come across.

Murray is the former chief executive of the Commonwealth Bank who led the charge on punitive banking fees during his 13 year reign. Armed with a banking licence from the Federal Government and a Treasurer who sat back and watched whilst a ferocious cartel gouged away, Murray built himself a personal fortune of more than $40 million.

This didn’t come from taking CBA to the world or generating export earnings, but rather from gouging millions of Australians going about their daily lives.

For the five years that I owned Crikey, the Commonwealth Bank clipped the ticket for an average 4.2% on every credit card transaction we processed. All up, they helped themselves to about $50,000.

When Crikey was sold, we tried to close the merchant facility but discovered there was a $500 fee. Given there is also a $500 establishment fee for setting up a new merchant facility, we decided to hang in there and just cop the $12 monthly fee on the basis that we might need it again one day.

Over the past 30 months, this has amounted to $360 in fees even though the bank hasn’t processed a single transaction. Lo and behold, when the July 2007 statement arrived we discovered the monthly fee had been tripled to $38.40 without so much as a letter of explanation.

When you add all the brokerage that has been paid to Commsec assembling a 410-strong stock share portfolio, plus the mountain of fees and charges on other credit cards, overdrafts, margin loans and the like, I reckon my activities have contributed more than $100,000 in clear profit to the bank over the past seven years.

The same thing has happened to hundreds of thousands of other Australians — the $20 billion net profit posted by the Big Five in 2006-07 had to come from somewhere.

Whilst big business has the clout, skills and time to negotiate better deals with their bank, it is the punters and small operators who get mercilessly screwed. Inertia explains much of it because we’re so entangled with our bank through direct debit and the like that it’s just not worth changing. Besides, in a cartel, everyone’s as bad as each other.

Having seen what Geoffrey Cousins is achieving by taking on Malcolm Turnbull in Wentworth, maybe it’s time someone ran an anti-bank campaign against Peter Costello in his seat of Higgins – because nothing else has woken him from his slumber on this issue over the years.