"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

Tom and Daisy come from that stratum of society that doesn't have to explain itself. They just are, and they're safe in that knowledge. Few people can make them behave differently.

The novel's narrator turns his back on them, eventually, after the disasters they have wrought. But Tom and Daisy couldn't care less. They have more important concerns.

Jump out of the world of fiction.

How many of us can turn our backs on the modern financial system? It may be huge and cumbersome and impersonal, but we rely on it. And we can't seem to avoid its biggest players.

Take the Commonwealth Bank, which has its tentacles everywhere. If you don't directly bank with CBA, then you may own CBA shares (and you may not even know that you own them). It is a massive player in the residential mortgage market. For those of us who started school in the 1980s, the CBA was the bank that introduced us to the world of money via its Dollarmites accounts. Over the years, thousands of Australians have been approaching the bank for financial advice.

But in recent years, the bank's financial planning arm, with its so-called rogue planners, has helped to lose some of its customers' life savings.

Most of us are familiar with the story by now – it has been recycled through so many newspaper articles that it doesn't need to be repeated in detail.

But please remember, CBA customers have lost millions of dollars in total, a Senate inquiry found fraud, and the careers of some of those responsible inside CBA have advanced since the disaster.

But despite the work of Fairfax colleagues Adele Ferguson and Chris Vedelago, there won't be a royal commission into the Commonwealth Bank.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann announced last Friday that he did not think a royal commission was necessary, saying there had already been "several comprehensive inquiries into these events" and another one wouldn't be necessary.

Instead, he said the Abbott government would rather rely on a compensation scheme – run by Commonwealth Bank and without any input from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – to help to resolve any "grievances" that affected CBA customers may have with the bank.

He said the government would set up a public register of financial advisers – to be operational by March 2015 – so investors, employers and ASIC could verify the credentials of financial advisers and be confident they were appropriately qualified and experienced.

Ferguson, the brilliant journalist who spearheaded Fairfax's investigations of these matters, rightly called this is a whitewash.

"Instead of accepting a bipartisan recommendation from the Senate inquiry to launch a royal commission into Commonwealth Bank to investigate fraud, forgery and allegations of a cover-up inside CBA's financial planning division, the government believes a compensation scheme is enough – a scheme that fails to write to all clients, is run by the bank, and has no input from ASIC," she wrote on Tuesday.

"As a result of the whitewash of the Senate recommendations late last week, there will be no public outings of the many rogue planners or their managers who are still employed in the industry. A national register that will be set up next year is being heralded as the panacea for reform. This is a start but it is a drop in the ocean, given the reform the sector really needs."

I can only add my voice to her frustration.

My Fairfax colleague Michael West believes we don't need a royal commission, despite a senate committee recommending it. I disagree with him. But I do agree with him that there is a cultural problem with corporate regulation in Australia.

West argues that our corporate regulator has been "cowed by the big end of town, spooked into inaction," and that regulation in Australia appears to be more about "the appearance of regulation" than much else.

A declension of this problem can be seen in the way in which some politicians apparently misunderstand how markets work.

The government loves to say that it "believes in markets", but capitalist markets only work properly if key institutions can be trusted.

People need to know that if they go to a financial planner and that planner breaks the law and loses their money then they'll receive compensation and the planner will be punished.

A good way to start rebuilding that trust would be to have a royal commission into the CBA. We need to get the bottom of this. There have been allegations of a cover-up inside CBA, so let's see if that actually occurred. Hang the dirty laundry on the line.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.