Commissioner Kenneth Hayne's final report has now been handed to the Governor-General after a year of investigations and interrogations, but just getting a banking royal commission started was a formidable task.

The vested interests against it were as powerful as they come in Australia: the "big four" banks. But that was more like a speed hump compared with an almost insurmountable barrier; the major political parties, which were fiercely opposed to the idea.

Three determined people took up the challenge and, in concert, forced the inquiry against very improbable odds.

The whistleblower

Commonwealth Bank financial planning whistleblower Jeff Morris speaks to the media outside the royal commission. ( AAP: Joel Carrett )

"Don't say it, don't say it" — Jeff Morris distinctly remembers the feeling he was getting from senators during his testimony before he said "it".

Mr Morris, who would ultimately become one of the most potent forces behind the establishment of the banking royal commission, had ventured to Canberra to front a senate inquiry into ASIC's supervision of the Commonwealth Bank.

"Every bank nutter who comes in and testifies calls for a royal commission," Mr Morris said of his 2014 senate inquiry appearance.

He felt many senators were thinking, "Oh, here we go, another nutter."

"Some people had always been calling for a royal commission, it had been largely counterproductive and we probably could have had one much earlier [without it]," Mr Morris said.

Nonetheless, Mr Morris's call for a royal commission was calculated; forged in his time as a Commonwealth Bank financial planner and fuelled by his distinctly unlucrative career as a financial sector whistleblower.

"After I left the CBA in 2013, I knew what my goal was; I'm going to get a parliamentary inquiry, then I'm going to get a royal commission," Mr Morris told the ABC.

If it hadn't been for the culture Mr Morris found at Commonwealth Financial Planning when he landed a job in 2008, and the supine nature of regulators in dealing with the misconduct he found there, it is highly unlikely there would have been a royal commission at all.

Mr Morris became a whistleblower to ASIC. It was a courageous and non-career enhancing move.

CBA received a regulatory slap on the wrist and several planners were banned temporarily from practicing — not exactly the outcome Mr Morris was expecting.

A subsequent alert from Mr Morris to ASIC was even less successful. The regulator apparently allowed another stack of whistleblowing documents to gather dust for almost a year-and-a-half before doing anything.

"I knew it wasn't just financial planning, it went right through banking," Mr Morris recalled, having received evidence of a "carbon-copy" scam being run within NAB.

"It was the culture of sales; "share the wallet" was the phrase, cross-selling products people didn't need, or want."

Mr Morris decided he needed to change tack to get a royal commission. Ditch the regulators and find a politician and journalist to prosecute the case.

The politician

Nationals Senator John Williams at the National Party Federal Council last year. ( AAP: Mick Tsikas )

By 2011, National Party senator John "Wacka" Williams had a gutful of the banks.

One year into his tenure in the senate, he'd found himself on a 2009 joint parliamentary committee inquiry into the failure of a number of wealth managers, including Storm Financial and Opes Prime, listening to harrowing accounts of the victims of poor, and often outright fraudulent, practices.

Fifteen years earlier, Senator Williams had endured first hand the impact of bad, sales-driven advice from the banks.

He had been one of thousands of farmers and small business people enticed to hedging their loans in Swiss francs.

It was the sort of game banks like. They hold a winning hand whatever the outcome.

The collapse of the Australian dollar against the franc — it fell more than 50 per cent in a little more than a year — effectively doubled the size of the loans sold by the big banks.

It left many, including the then Mr Williams, unable to service their repayments. Often their assets were flogged off at fire-sale prices at the liquidator's discretion. After administration fees, the banks trousered the proceeds.

On September 21, 2011, armed with a sheath of documents stuffed with details of hardship and appalling behaviour by financial institutions and protected by parliamentary privilege, Senator Williams dropped his unilateral, non-party endorsed policy in the Senate.

While his speech railed against the banks, it also ripped into the activities of insolvency practitioners and inactivity of ASIC in policing the sector.

Senator Williams' anger was distilled into one simple idea.

"It is time this country had a royal commission into white collar crime. I believe it is systematic, it is growing and innocent people are losing their livelihoods from crooks," he told a fairly empty and largely uninterested chamber.

In the corridors of power it was met with the sound of one hand clapping. Neither the Coalition nor Labor thought it was an idea worth pursuing.

However, Jeff Morris had been listening at the time. In early 2013 he gave Senator Williams a call, and yet another pile of documents.

Senator Williams suggested Mr Morris should also contact senior Fairfax business journalist Adele Ferguson to help push his agenda.

The journalist

Business journalist Adele Ferguson ( Supplied: Nine/Simon Schluter )

Fairfax published a series of stories on rogue financial planners in June 2013. Within days Senator Williams won cross-party support to hold a senate inquiry into the CBA and ASIC.

"We couldn't believe the response," Ms Ferguson said.

"There were hundreds of thousands of hits, which was most unusual for a business story, I got around 500 emails [with new information]", she said.

"There was a cascading effect, we just kept writing stories."

Other whistleblowers came forward and the scandal spread to the likes of NAB, Macquarie and back to the CBA and its CommInsure business.

The senate inquiry into CBA's financial planning scandal and ASIC's response wrapped up in June 2014 with the recommendation a royal commission was needed to get to the bottom of a fraud that left customers millions of dollars out of pocket.

That recommendation was slapped down pretty quickly by the Abbott Government and its senior finance ministers Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann.

It was a position the Government would grimly hang on to for another three years.

In the meantime, scandal after scandal emerged with depressing regularity.

The next blockbuster instalment in banking malfeasance dropped in March 2016 through a joint Four Corners/Fairfax investigation into CBA's life insurance business CommInsure.

For Adele Ferguson, who would go on to pick up another Walkley Award for the expose, CommInsure was a major step towards the royal commission.

"Within a couple of weeks, [Opposition leader] Bill Shorten said 'enough is enough' and called for a royal commission," Ms Ferguson said.

Resistance crumbles

The royal commission push now had the support of Labor, the Greens and a significant number of independents, but the Coalition's narrow victory in the July 2016 federal election again stalled the momentum.

The Turnbull government showed every intention of toughing it out.

However, the politics of that stance disintegrated once the Coalition lost its majority in the House of Representatives, as first then deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce in late October, then Liberal backbencher John Alexander two weeks later, departed under the cloud of potentially holding dual citizenships.

It emboldened a number of Senator Williams' National Party colleagues to not only agitate for a royal commission, but start drawing up legislation to support an inquiry.

A late as November 22, the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was publicly dismissing the idea.

Nationals Senator Barry O'Sullivan had a bill ready to go on November 30. More importantly, he had the numbers to ram it through both houses.

The image of a group of dissident Government members crossing the floor would be far more than acutely embarrassing, it would be politically catastrophic — effectively amounting to a proxy no-confidence vote.

The banks' political antennae seemed far more acute than the Coalition leaderships'. The four big bank bosses wrote to Treasurer Scott Morrison suggesting a royal commission wasn't such a bad idea.

While the banks couched their capitulation in terms of being "in the national interest for the political uncertainty to end", there seemed an obvious and less altruistic rationale.

It would far less painful to get an inquiry set up under the terms set by a government that had always resisted the idea, rather than "rogue" backbenchers or, worse still, Labor and the Greens, who had much broader ambitions and thousands of furious constituents queuing up to testify.

Senator O'Sullivan's bill stayed under wraps.

On the morning it was set to be tabled, the Prime Minister and Mr Morrison fronted the media, announcing the policy about-face to "give all Australians a greater degree of assurance" about the banking and financial services sector.

"Since the financial crisis, there have been examples of misconduct by financial institutions," was Mr Turnbull's succinct summary of vast volumes of evidence unearthed by Mr Morris, Senator Williams, Ms Ferguson and others over the years.

"Some of them extremely serious. And that's demanded a response from the institutions themselves and from government," Mr Turnbull said.

The royal commission was now up and running.

Royal commission-lite?

Jeff Morris says the result would have been impossible without the hard work of John Williams and Adele Ferguson shovelling the evidence before an increasingly irate electorate.

However, there were others doing some heavy lifting before the masses jumped on the bandwagon.

He says Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson was unstinting in his support for a royal commission since landing in Canberra in 2012.

Labor Senator Doug Cameron's demolition of ASIC in a Senate hearing rates a special mention, as does former Labor senator Sam Dastyari for lobbying Bill Shorten to move the party position to the pro-royal commission camp ahead of the 2016 election, and former senator Mark Bishop who pushed for a royal commission in the 2014 inquiry.

The coup de grace was delivered by the band of rebel Nationals, including Barry O'Sullivan and George Christensen, who marshalled sufficient numbers to finally make the commission a political inevitability.

For the principal agitators, there are mixed feelings about the result.

All agree the commission was hamstrung by its brevity, narrow terms of reference and paucity of witnesses.

Despite more than 10,000 public submissions being made, only 27 "victims" made it to the stand to tell their stories.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ran for five years, heard evidence in more than 8,000 private sessions and had seven commissioners on the case, not just one.

Adele Ferguson says the result can be seen in two ways.

"It was a victory to have a royal commission allow a spotlight to shine. We have discovered a lot of things, most notably in superannuation where you can't just dismiss it as a few bad apples — it was systematic, it was institutionalised theft," Ms Ferguson said.

"Yes, it was 12 months and should have been longer, had more resources, more topics, you couldn't go after the executives who were responsible — there were many short comings, but huge positives as well."

Ms Ferguson can't speak highly enough of her collaborators and their courage.

"John needs every accolade, he crossed the floor numerous times against his own Government, he never wanted to be a minister or toe-the-line. Jeff sacrificed his career to do something he knew was right."

Wacka bows out

John "Wacka" Williams will be leaving parliament when his current term expires at the end of June.

After a decade in the senate fighting misconduct in the financial sector, John "Wacka" Williams is bowing out this year. ( AAP: Stefan Postles )

He is clear about his aims once the final report is tabled.

"I don't want to see heaps of restrictions put on the banks' lending. Vertical integration [in bank products] needs to be removed, criminal sanctions need to be introduced in superannuation [for misconduct and theft] and ASIC and APRA need to to do their job, and to do that they need better funding," is his whittled-down list of recommendations.

He believes an opportunity has been missed in addressing inequities in section 420 of the Corporations Act that still see receivers and banks sell assets of loan defaulters at well below fair value.

"When people are put through the mill, they need protection, they should get the best possible price and that is not happening," he said.

"Hayne has done his job, the banks know they are on the nose and they have to lead the way on tidying up their act. They just can't continue to put profit before people."

Apart from that, he is content he achieved something meaningful and fought for people who voted for him, people who thought they were powerless and the system corrupt.

John Williams has another battle ahead of him.

In March last year he told his colleagues and constituents he had been diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson's Disease.

He's moving back to the family farm at Inverell in northern New South Wales.

It won't be a retirement though. There are funds to be raised and public awareness campaigns to run in the broader battle against Parkinson's.

There's also a farm to manage and sheep to be shorn.

Morris still fighting after 'quick and dirty inquiry'

For Jeff Morris, the battle against the banks is far from over. He is more disappointed than disillusioned with the royal commission.

"We got a very lightweight commission," he said in the days before the release of the final report.

"It was a quick and dirty inquiry and you have to remember it was called by a Government that didn't want it in the first place and was deliberately starved of resources.

"Banks have succeeded into spinning it into a series of unfortunate accidents. A good example is the fee-for-no-service rorts. I know it was deliberate theft from clients — you don't just accidently steal $1 million.

"There were some good outcomes. The royal commission glimpsed at the truth, but didn't have the time or resources to prove the banks were deliberate in their actions.

"If we had hundreds of victims in the stand, not just 27, the banks would have had nowhere to hide."

With the ink barely dry on the final report, Mr Morris is urging a second crack at the royal commission.

There is a precedent with the two royal commissions conducted into the tragic collision of the HMAS Voyager with the HMAS Melbourne in the 1960s.

Pushing for a second inquiry could seem like another quixotic crusade, doomed to fail.

Then again, few would have backed the "bank nutter" tilting at windmills five years ago to end up skewering both the banks and years of political indifference.