While the consumer and business advocates agitating for a high-powered inquiry into Australia's major banks speculate about how the numbers in the House of Representatives might fall their way in coming weeks, the federal government's effort to shield the industry from such an inquisition has buckled under a dead weight of public mistrust.In a year in which the government planned to deliver a torrent of reforms in the financial services sector, it looks increasingly likely that parliament's most consequential act will be the one that Malcolm Turnbull always tried to prevent.It is somewhat perverse that the dual citizenship crisis that hacked into the government's majority in the lower house and made a commission of inquiry into the banks possible, is now also the reason why so much of Turnbull's planned financial reforms are hanging in limbo.The government is sitting on a tower of recommendations and bills that should already be enshrined in law.They include proposals to tighten regulation of the mortgage broking industry, rein in the black economy, stifle corporate tax avoidance, streamline complaint schemes in the financial sector and compel the major banks to swallow comprehensive credit reporting.Plenty more measures should have been passed in the parliament's final session of 2017, but they will all have to wait until next year - if Turnbull's government survives a cruel summer of political infighting within the coalition. A temporary silver lining of this policy paralysis for senior bankers is that enacting legislation for the Banking Executive Accountability Regime(BEAR) may not pass both houses before parliament rises.