Former Bendigo Bank managing director Mike Hirst believes there is a future for the Australian Banking Association as an industry peak body, despite acknowledging that regional banks have been frustrated by some of the policies it has advanced.When Hirst ended a nine-year stint as Bendigo's managing director at the end of June, he also resigned as deputy chair of the ABA, a role he held since 2013."I think the ABA has got a really strong future," he says."There is always going to be tension in an industry association because by definition you have a whole lot of competitors sitting around the table."The need to manage through divergent views across constituents is something the association understands well and navigates pretty well."The reason that regionals, foreign-owned banks and small banks stay in the ABA is because, on balance, the value that we get from it is greater than the frustration we get from it," he said.  Hirst acknowledges that Bendigo's engagement with the industry peak body has sometimes been "tense" - especially in the fallout of the global financial crisis when he sparked a long-running public debate on whether the Rudd Government's banking support schemes delivered competitive advantages to the major banks.Hirst was the first industry participant to assert publicly that the wholesale guarantee discriminated against regional banks because it required them to pay higher fees than the four majors to secure government-backed funding.While the ABA's former chief executive Steve Munchenberg always supported the government's guarantee schemes in public statements, he also found ways to deflect questions from journalists and politicians about the merits of differential pricing for access to government-backed funding.This issue highlighted the ABA's strategic limitations as an industry advocate, even when a majority of its member organisations were screaming for the government to recalibrate the guarantee schemes.It also reinforced public perceptions that the ABA's agenda was a captive of the four major banks.In 2014, Hirst and other regional bank CEOs took the unusual step of lodging their own submission to the Murray Inquiry in which they articulated policy proposals, some of which the ABA would later oppose vehemently.Hirst and his peers argued for the removal of the higher risk weights that APRA's standardised capital approach attached to mortgages sold by regional banks. They also highlighted that the major banks were deriving a funding advantage courtesy of Australian taxpayers because statements made by APRA had led international credit ratings agencies to believe the operations of CBA, Westpac, NAB and ANZ were underwritten by an implicit government guarantee.The regional banks argued that the majors should be made to pay for the implicit government backing through a "Too Big to Fail Levy".When the Turnbull Government unveiled a "wholesale funding levy" on Budget night in May 2017, the ABA unleashed an attack on the measure, claiming it imperilled jobs and investment in the Australian economy.While the regionals got exactly what they proposed to the Murray Inquiry, the peak body's chief executive Anna Bligh described the levy in official statements issued on the night