ANSWCU42 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
I am going to ask you Mr Prince where you were born and when?
BP: I was born in Cessnock on 9 March 1927.
Did you grow up there?
BP: I lived in Cessnock until I was about ten and then my mother made the bold decision that it was about time she took the family of four to Newcastle because she didn’t want us all going into the coalmines. So I have been in Newcastle ever since.
You grew up around here in Newcastle.
BP: Yes we came from Cessnock to Adamstown, we went from there to Islington to Maryville. I lived in Maryville until I got married. Then we first went to Jesmond to live but didn’t like it out there, it was a bit cold, so we sold up and came back home for a little bit and we have lived in Adamstown Heights ever since.
Was your mother the big influence in your life when you were young?
BP: Yes she was very much so, I’ve got a lot to be thankful for because of my mother. I will tell you about her a bit later on.
So when you got to school, where did you go to school?
BP: Well I started off school in Cessnock. We had to go to a little place called Nulkaba, which is on the northern part of Cessnock. In those days there was a lot of bush. We were on the outskirts of Cessnock in those days. A lot of farms and everything and we used to have to walk through the bush to the school and walk home again. I can remember it quite vividly because there was a Catholic school, a little one, attached to a Catholic Church about half way between where we lived and the public school, and we always had a fight going to school and always had a fight coming home from school. So it was lively times. When we shifted from Cessnock I went to Adamstown school for only a short time. Then we shifted out of there, as I say, and we went to Islington and Maryville and I went to Islington school and then went on to Junior Boys’ High.
So what did you like or dislike about school?
BP: Nothing, I liked school, I thought it was great. I enjoyed all my time at school.
What subjects did you like?
BP: I liked them all. I don’t think I had any specialty in any of them, I seemed to do reasonably well at the whole lot. Never really brilliant in anything. But when I got to high school I did Business Principles and Bookkeeping and I did well at that. I did well at French. Did well at English. Did well at Maths. I can’t tell you any more than that.
Did you like sport?
BP: Never did much sport at school. I can remember my aunty, that is my mother’s sister, she played a lot of tennis and she saw to it that we were all educated in the nice sport of tennis. This particular day I wasn’t doing anything great and wonderful and she said, ‘Right, about time you started to play tennis.’ I was round about fourteen at the time, which is quite old in these days to take up playing tennis, and I said, ‘What do I want to play tennis for?’ ‘You’ll find out.’ They used to have an open tournament on a Sunday, an all day tournament, and she said, ‘You can have your uncle’s old racquet, I will get you a pair of sandshoes and you are playing tennis.’ So I pushed my push bike over to where she lived and we went to this tennis court and here it was, open tournament. Didn’t have a clue where to stand, what to do, where to hit them or anything else. I was given the racquet told to go on the court and if a ball came near me whack it and that is just what I did. That is how I was educated in the artful game of tennis. It was a case of learn quick or you were going to get a hell of a lot of holes in you. So I played tennis for quite a long while, about twenty years. I ended up being the President of what was then the Sunnyside Tennis Club until it merged with Rosebud’s Tennis Club and I have been made a life member of the Rosebud’s Tennis Club. I was on the Newcastle Lawn Tennis Association Grading Committee for about eighteen years and was President of it in all that time.
So it looks as though you were an organiser as well as being organised?
BP: Yes I had every enjoyment of being at both ends of the stick. I could enjoy my game and then go and do a bit of organising for somebody else.
What started you with organising and being involved as a volunteer?
BP: Well I suppose tennis did. When I first started off as a President I could see that.
How old were you?
BP: Twenty. I had just come back from overseas during the War years. I went back to playing tennis and I joined this Sunnyside Tennis Club because my brother had started it off. They said, ‘Well what about you becoming President?’ I said, ‘I don’t anything about being President,’ you know blah, blah and they said, ‘Oh there is nothing to it all you have got to do is just run a few games for us and that is all there is.’ Well I found out there was a lot more to it than that. Some blokes didn’t like playing tennis with other fellows, so you had to get them on side and harmonise them and all the rest of it. When it came to competition tennis you found that they didn’t want to play with this one or that one and so on and so on. So you had to find out who liked what, who played best with who, what sort of tennis they really could play, not what they told you that they could play. Then after you got that far into it you had to make sure that your club was well represented at the annual meetings or the half yearly meetings that they had. If you were going to push any barrow, that was the place to push it, so I used to get up and say my little piece. I think from that point on was where it all started.
What was your first job?
BP: My first job was a junior labourer. I started out accidentally at Armstrong and Royce. I was asked if I wanted to earn a few dollars over the Christmas holidays. In those days you’ve got to remember we were just coming out of the Depression, the Depression years, and a few dollars in anybody’s languages, which was pounds, shillings and pence then but I am saying dollars, was good. We had to have it. We weren’t a very wealthy family by any means. As a matter of fact we were real poor. So I already had a brother, that is the eldest brother, had to leave school and get a job and the Headmaster of the high school was very upset because he said he could win his way through college without any trouble. But he left school and got a job. My eldest sister did the same, because by this time my mother and father had split up so we needed money. So when it came my turn I didn’t see where I had any special right not to earn a dollar. So I went and I earned my dollars over the school holidays. As luck had it, there was a vacancy coming on in the office for a clerk and they said, ‘Do you want the job?’ Well I knew if I didn’t take that job I wasn’t going to get another one in a hell of a hurry, so I took one while it was there to take.
What was the job you did first?
BP: Well I was a junior labourer and the job was at the end of the docking saw. They docked off what was called shooks, that is long slivers of wood. Nestlès used to make wooden packing cases out of them in those days and they were the sides, the bottoms and the ends. They all had to be bundled up, so many to a bundle and they used to have a wiring machine and you threaded the wire around it and gave it a few turns and twists and snapped the wire off and stacked them up. We used to do something like about two hundred and fifty to three hundred of those bundles in a day and that is a lot of work. That was about the only time that I did put some muscles on, I had some muscles then, because you had to lift them up and toss them around and bundle them on top of one another. So that was my first job and I didn’t begrudge it because it was interesting, I thought. I had never done it and it was my first job so I liked that.
Then when you went into the office, what was the job there?
BP: Well that was different. The job was in what they called the Order Office. When a builder came in and he wanted to build a cottage or whatever he was going to build, he supplied the order. That meant that you had to take it all down and cost it all out. There was of course variations in price, types of timber. It depends whether he wants it rough, just dressed, or dressed and finished, or just dressed and finished all round to set sizes. Each different variation had a different cost. After a while they just used to bring in their plans and specifications and say, ‘I want all of the material, windows, doors the works, that is what I want, tell me how much it is going to cost and I want it sent out to such and such a lot.’ You used to have to sit down and take it all from what was in there. So it wasn’t a question of somebody walking in and saying, ‘I will have a three by two, six foot long,’ or whatever, you just had to sit down and work it all out. So that was my first job. One thing I do remember that in those days of pounds, shillings and pence, it was a pretty hard sum to work out when you multiplied out pence, then shillings and then pounds. I had learnt at high school we were going through what they called decimals and I thought this pounds, shillings and pence business was a bit weak, so I converted it all to decimals and whipped through it all. The same for superfeet and everything, I converted everything to decimals and I was going through it very quickly. The other fellows that hadn’t worked with decimals before they couldn’t understand why I was getting it down so quick. They said, ‘How do you manage to get all this done so quick?’ and I said, ‘Well very simple, I just do it this way.’ So I showed them how to do decimals and that ran right through the Order Office like steam and became the order of the day and that was that. So much for education in those days.
I thought you were going to say the customers wouldn’t understand it so they wouldn’t be in it.
BP: I didn’t tell them how we arrived at the figure. All they saw was pounds, shillings and pence. I think probably just as well they didn’t know how I arrived at it.
So when did you leave there?
BP: Well I went from there into the army.
When was that?
BP: That was in 1944. I wanted to be in the airforce and they said if I went down and did my medical before I got called up there was a ninety-nine per cent chance I would get in the airforce, or wherever I wanted to go. So I went down and had my medical and everything was all right. I saw myself as being the big fighter pilot. I was going to shoot down every plane in the sky. Next thing I know, it was nearly a fortnight before I turned eighteen, I had my call-up papers and I was called-up. I thought it was a bit rough but anyway I presented myself with two cut lunches and everything else and we go down to Sydney. They told me here to go down and tell them what I’d done and it would be all right and they would just transfer you across. So I go down there and I tried to see somebody but nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. Then we go for a medical and then they said, ‘Well OK, now you are in the army.’ I said, ‘Hang on, I don’t want to be in the army, I’d rather be in the airforce.’ They said, ‘I’ve got news for you, you’re in the army and that is where you are staying.’ I said, ‘Not for me, I’m going in the airforce.’ They said, ‘There is only one other place you can go, you can get out of the army because you haven’t taken the oath yet, and you can go to BHP and you can work in the blast furnace.’ Well I thought working in the blast furnace was not on, so I decided to stay in the army. So that is where I stayed all the time I was there. I ended up being an engineer and that was another story too. When we were doing our rookie training I was very disgruntled because I was in the army and I hated it, didn’t want to stay in it and all the rest of it. They gave us a long questionnaire to fill out on what type of service you wanted to be in. I didn’t care and I had another young fellow that I had chummed up with and his brothers were over in the Middle East and they were machine gunners. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I am going over to the Middle East, I want to go with my other brothers,’ and he said, ‘I’m going into the machine gunners.’ I said, ‘Right, that’ll do me, I’ll put in machine gunners. That’ll do, I couldn’t care less’. So I said, ‘What are you going to do with the rest of the questions.’ So whatever he put down, I put down, see. So they take us into the main room where all this top brass was sitting. They got my sheet and they said to me, ‘Oh yes Prince, you want to be a machine gunner. Why do you want to be a machine gunner? You a pretty good shot?’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ They said, ‘Well, why?’ So I said, ‘Well that is my mate just there, he wants to go with his brothers, I want to go with him.’ ‘Not a good enough excuse. What’s your next one?’ Well I can’t remember what they all were now but it ran off something like this, ‘Transport.’ ‘Have you got a licence?’ ‘No, I haven’t got a licence, I don’t own a car,’ nobody owned a car in those days. ‘Transport is no good to you,’ crossed off. ‘Tank Corp down there. There is nothing of you,’ I was pretty thin in those days. He said, ‘You will just melt, two hours in a tank and there will be nothing of you left.’ So that was that. Then there was artillery and the said, ‘Oh they will fire one shell and you will take off after the shell.’ So that was it. Next thing I know I ended up in the Engineers. I said, ‘But hang on, I don’t know the first thing about engineering.’ They said, ‘You’ll learn,’ and that is where I stayed.
Yes it was a bit of a problem wasn’t it. They didn’t know anything about cooking and everything.
BP: That’s right, a lot of the good cooks ended up being cooks for that same reason.
Where did you go in the army?
BP: Well, when we finished our rookies corp.
Where did you do that?
BP: We went down to Cowra and then we went from Cowra to Wagga and that is where we did our engineering course, which I felt was quite frightening. That was the first time that I have ever had anything to do with high explosives and all that kind of stuff. We went from there to Holsworthy where we were stationed for a month while they shrunk our stomaches. Everybody was dying of starvation for the first two weeks because they gave you about two and a half to three inches length of bacon, a half an egg and that was breakfast, and I think there was one piece of bread. For lunch all you got was a very very small salad and a small amount of meat. Then for dinner at night time was either mashed potatoes, a couple of greens and a little bit of meat. All in all it would fit about the area of a bread and butter plate. At the end of two weeks the dying of starvation feeling left you and you found that was all you wanted to eat. So by the end of the month you didn’t want to eat much at all. There was no chance of you putting on any weight, but you certainly didn’t want to eat real much. I think in principle it might have been a very good exercise, but what they didn’t count on was that when we boarded ship to go overseas, we were on the advance party on the Friday night, being Friday in those days the menu was fish. It was a navy boat and navy fellows always ate well. So we all queued up for tea and I walked in with my dixies and the first thing I saw was this enormous amount of food. Of course immediately my gluttony eyes sparkled and I thought tucker, we were going to get a stack of meals here, which we did. They picked up a fish and they went plop on the dixie and of course the tail and the head just flopped out both ends of it, it was an enormous thing. I stood there and I looked at it and I looked at it and one of the sailors said, ‘What’s up with you mate?’ I said, ‘This fish, how many is that for?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about,’ he said, ‘that’s yours. Just get through you’re holding up the queue.’ The next thing I knew they were plonking on food left right and centre. Anyway we all got the same serving and when we sat down we couldn’t eat it, we couldn’t even scratch the surface with it all. I would say that about ninety per cent of it all ended up in the garbage tin. But by the time the week was out, we were eating it. All our shrunken stomaches had enlarged again, so the whole exercise went for nothing. But I could see their point. When you go overseas you never know when you are going to get a meal and so you don’t want to have a full stomach, what you want is a real short, skinny little one that doesn’t need much. Because there is no fresh meat over there and you only get a meal when you can catch one, so a shrunken stomach does help.
Where did you go?
BP: I went up to New Britain and served in the Fifty-First Field Park Royal Australian Engineers, which was completely different to my training again because we made airstrips, we made roads, you name it. If they wanted anything mechanical put in somewhere well we did it. We repaired tanks, we repaired trucks. Anything that an engineer is supposed to do or thought resembled what they were supposed to do, that was our job, we did it. I had very little training in all that but as you say, you learn quick. I learned a lot there, it was good experience. I would have been a lot happier if somebody had told me before I went away that I was going to come back all right and nothing was going to happen, I could have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more. I’m not saying it was a you beaut holiday or anything like that, far from it, but it was an experience that I am glad that I was there for. Now that I am away from it all I am glad that I went.
So what did happen when you got up there? Were you in action at all?
BP: Yes. Oh, everything. Too much to say. A lot to be said with it was that when it was over we moved into Rabaul to take over from the Japanese and we would have lost a hell of a lot of life if they hadn’t have dropped that atomic bomb when they did. I don’t think we would ever have taken Rabaul physically. It had perimeters of tunnels stretching in a semi-circle all the way the out from Rabaul itself. No sooner had we been successful in taking one perimeter of tunnels, the next one was fully fortified and they just fell back to that and so on and so on. They had everything that you would need to keep an army going. They had sealed wax lathes and workshops and everything. Anything that they might need to do in that way. Tons of ammunition, plenty of rifles, plenty of hand grenades and anything they could do warfare on. Each perimeter was exactly the same way, all they needed was manpower to do it. We found that when we got there that the RAAF could only come in one way to bomb and strafe and that was over the heads. They would attack the ships and that in the harbour, but as far as the installations went, they were all on railway lines and they just wheeled them in tunnels and none of those were ever hurt. They just pushed them back out again and went straight back into action again. So I don’t think we would ever have taken it, quite honestly. So I am very grateful that they dropped that bomb. When the War was over we built the scaffolding where they held the War crimes trials and where a lot of the War criminals were hanged. It was our Engineer Corps that did that.
Were you up there at that time?
BP: Yes. There was only one to my knowledge that got life instead of being hanged. From what they tell me is that on the way up to the scaffolding he slipped and fell and drew blood and that was enough to have his sentence converted to a life sentence. After that we extended the width of the steps and these two great burly MPs, with one behind and they virtually lifted them up the steps and put them on the top to hang them. There was the Japanese unit that was involved in the rape of Nanking, they were all tried there. There was that many Japanese in compound on the island at that time, that we were all told to move around in twos and threes. We had to get up very early in the morning, we hadn’t to do any work or anything at all, we had to get out and walk and walk and walk all day long to try and make it appear as if there was more of us than them on the island. They were frightened that they were going to try and attempt to break-out or something. I was a sergeant by this time and I had my own personal batman, who was a Japanese fellow. All the NCOs had their own personal batman in their tents and that. They had a tent batman. It was our job to make sure they all had plenty of work to do to keep them occupied. That was our job during the day. Soon as somebody had swept out the tent and it was as flat as a board, then you just scruffed your feet all over the whole top and tell him to go do it again. That just went on for weeks and weeks, until they eventually sent a lot of them home, got rid of them all, or tried them and hanged them. I don’t know how many all-told they hung, but it was quite a few.
Once you had built the scaffolds, that was the end of it?
BP: That was the end of it. We had nothing to do with the War crimes part at all. No. But that was all conducted there in Rabaul.
Were the hangings in public?
BP: No. No there was no public there. No whites were there at all. The civil administration hadn’t taken over.
What I am getting at is, you didn’t take part in any of the hangings, but did you see them?
BP: No, I didn’t.
So you had a job to do wherever you were. So when did you get home?
BP: Got home November 1945 and it was Melbourne Cup Day. We timed our run pretty bad because we came through the Heads in the afternoon and we had to stay out in midstream until the Cup was over because nobody was prepared to throw a line to tie us up. So we had to stay out there until the Cup was over and then when the Cup was finished then they berthed us and let us all off.
Was that in Sydney?
BP: Yes, that was Sydney.
Did you get home straight away or did it take a while to get demobilised?
BP: It took us a while. We went into the Show Ground. We were there for about a week and then we were sent home on final leave. I must admit I got myself in strife on final leave. We were given two weeks. No, not final leave, home leave, we were given two weeks leave and then had to report back for discharge. I never bothered to look at my leave pass just to see exactly what day I was supposed to get back. I decided I would go to the pictures this day and while I was there I pulled my money out of my pocket to pay my bus fare and automatically had a look at my leave pass and I was supposed to be back in Sydney that day, reporting in. So I was AWOL. So I thought, strike, I’m in trouble. So that night I caught the train back to Sydney and that was a four hour trip by train back to Sydney. I got there. Was immediately put under arrest and told that I had to report to the Orderly Room in the morning. I was on a charge for being AWOL and I would have to go up and see the Colonel the next day and so on. So they wanted to know a reason why I was late and I thought strike, if I tell them what had happened they would never believe me, so I thought I’d better come up with a decent sort of excuse. So I had had malaria while I was up their in the islands, and I can thank a Jap for saving my life on that one which might appear a bit strange. Anyway, when they asked me what was wrong I said, ‘Oh, I had a bout of the flu.’ They said, ‘Did you see a doctor?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I didn’t think it was necessary, I’ve got all these attabrin and I took them myself and here I am.’ Anyway, they said, ‘Don’t know much about that. Who’s your family doctor we are going to ring him.’ I said, ‘You can ring him if you like.’ I knew there was nothing he was going to say because I hadn’t seen him. So when I fronted up to the Colonel he asked me what was wrong and I told him. He asked me the same questions, ‘Why didn’t you see a doctor,’ and I said, ‘I’ve got this attabrin here.’ I was as yellow and yellow for taking all this attabrin. He said, ‘All right, seeing as this is your last leave before you get your discharge, I won’t do anything about it. But I hate these blokes when they go on leave and they don’t look at their leave pass and they don’t recognise that they have got to be back to camp by a certain time. At least yours is original.’ So that was it, I got off.
End Tape 1A
ANSWCU42 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
When you got out of the army where did you go? Did you go back to the same job?
BP: Yes I went back to the same job. By this time I had got out of the Order Office downstairs and I had moved into the Joinery Office which was part of Armstrong and Royce. A very big Joinery Office where they manufactured everything, staircases, windows, doors, you name it they made it there. They all had to be costed out and I went back into that job. I wasn’t there for very long when I was approached by a chap by the name of Charlie Dickenson who had come from Sydney and they had started up a furniture manufacturing business in Broadmeadow. He asked me if I would go over there and do all their secretarial work and everything and run their office for them. I was anxious to do some good, so I thought it was a break plus the pay was very good and that always attracts, so I chucked in my job at Armstrong and Royce and went to work over there. The only unfortunate thing about that was that I only worked there for two years and one Christmas, they always used to close the factory down at Christmastime for holidays, somebody forgot to clean out the sawdust bin and they had combustion in the sawdust and there was a fire and the whole place burnt down. Yours truly was out of a job. Luckily he was a very good boss and he said, ‘Look, jobs are pretty hard to get, so I will pay you until you get another job.’ I was about three months on his pay-roll not working and he paid me. He was a very good boss and I thank him for that very much. Then I managed to get a job at the Greater Newcastle Building Society and I have been here ever since.
What did you do when you first arrived here?
BP: Well, in this organisation in those days their staff wasn’t very big. I suppose we had something like about twenty-odd people working on the staff. They had a lot of Starr-Bowkett Societies and Terminating Building Societies. Because each society is separate to one another, they all had to have Annual General Meetings each year. To stagger it so that the staff could meet with this volume of work about every second month we had a number of Annual General Meetings. So we always had a society, or a stack of societies closing off their books and Annual General Meetings. We would no sooner get rid of one and the following month we had to do it all over again. We had ledgers being finished off and annual accounts being completed and so on and so on. So when I started here they said, ‘Right, what are your maths like?’ I said, ‘Oh, fairly good.’ ‘Can you add up pretty quick?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right.’ Because in those days you added up in your head, there were no little ready reckoners or adding machines or anything. So they brought me into an office, not an office the general office, and they said, ‘Right this is where you will work.’ Everybody had a desk of about eight foot long by about four foot wide and I was aghast. All I saw was a little space eighteen inches by about two feet where you could open up a passbook and put it down with a little scrap of paper alongside it and you sit there and just added up. The idea was they had all these passbooks that had to be checked and audited and verified, which was a very hot off the press sort of thing, with the back office ledger machines. So we had the ledger cards and we had to make sure that the member’s passbook was added up, cross-added and agreed with the ledger card. Each Starr-Bowkett Society had roughly seven hundred and fifty members in them, so you did all of those. You had to go right through them real fast because the members wanted their books back so they could make more payments in them. You didn’t have any time to muck about, it was head down, backside up and go like steam. If one didn’t balance, you didn’t fiddle on that one, you just put the card in it closed the book, chucked it on the floor. You went through them all until you got all those that did balance and they could go out to the members again. Then you had to go back and sort out all the errors and problems and that and get them out fast. If you wanted to use an adding machine we did have one in those days, a mechanical one, a hand levered thing. But if you were ever caught on that by the Secretary, our old Mr Lean, you had to go through a questionnaire of about twenty questions as to why you were using it because those paper rolls cost money. He couldn’t understand why you couldn’t add up rather than use the adding machine. If he had that feeling I don’t know why he ever bought it. But anyway when we finished using the roll we had to roll it all back, you weren’t allowed to rip it off and throw it away. We turned it over and had to use the other side. So that was the style of work that you did in those days you see. So everything was done by headwork and that was my first job. I worked at that for about three months. Then they must have thought that I had done my penance and that they had better give me something different before I collapsed on the job so they took me off from there and attached me to what was called the Terminating Building Societies. I was put Second-in-Charge of the Terminating Building Societies. I was doing all the progress payments to builders. In those days, very little purchasing was going on, nearly everybody was building their own home. They were buying land, building and the spread was starting to move in Newcastle and surrounding areas. So that is what I did for about three or four years.
Back to estimating for owner-builders I suppose?
BP: No. We did have some owner-builders in those days and they were accepted. Later on they proved to be a headache and a lot of people didn’t want to know an owner-builder, but we did have some of those in those days. I didn’t have much to do with any of that. The only thing that I got close to was that we did a project out at Jesmond and we did a sub-division and we built forty-five homes out there. I was put in charge of that, well at an advanced stage of it. The General Manager, or as he was then the Assistant Secretary, started it off and then it was handed over to me to finish, to sell and get rid of it and all the rest of it. I bought one of them for myself, I thought it was pretty good stuff so I bought one.
Were you married then?
BP: I had just got married. I had been married for about twelve months, living at home. We had put enough money aside to get a deposit and this house cost three thousand pounds. So we thought this is it we either got one of these or I wouldn’t know when we would get one, so we bought it.
Did you borrow money from the building society?
BP: Yes we did. We borrowed it from the Terminating Building Society, in those days. What we did then was we kept it for about two years, three years at the very outside, but it was too cold out there. It was just on the other side of a bit of a hill here in Newcastle and when you got on the other side it was like being out in the country. On a winter’s morning you could get up and the frost and ice on the ground was very thick and you could hear it crunch under your feet. I am a bit of a warm-blooded sort of a bloke and this didn’t appeal to me at all, so I thought let’s get back into civilisation. So we sold up and came home again for about another twelve months until we bought another block of ground at Adamstown Heights and we built again there and have been there ever since.
When you were first at the Greater Newcastle Building Society they were running Starr-Bowketts. Did they also have a Savings and Loans Co-operative?
BP: Yes they did.
What year was that that they first started the Savings and Loans Co-operative?
BP: They started the Savings and Loans, it was formed in 1945. They also formed their Permanent Building Society in 1945. But you have got to remember that they were not the in things in those days. There was very little movement in them. People wanted homes, they didn’t want commodities like motor cars, well motor cars were very hard to come by for the ordinary person anyway. What we are talking about then as far as savings and loans, or credit unions as we know them today, a washing machine was a luxury, a fridge was a luxury. You are talking about lampshades or probably a bed or a table, furniture, general furniture was the commodities that they were buying in those days. Buying motor cars and fridges and the things that everybody says are necessities today, they were luxuries and they didn’t come until a lot later on. First of all you had to have the house, when you got the house whatever you could afford to furnish you furnished and you shut the other rooms. Then as you could afford to fill them with furniture as you went along, then you filled them with furniture. That even went from the lino in those days, no carpets, lino, upwards. So you found that people were shifting into houses and they had probably a bedroom suite, dinning room suite if you were lucky, a kitchen table and a few chairs and that was it. Very few people had wall-to-wall carpet, they might have got into a carpet square at one stage but that was about all they got into if they did. So yes we borrowed from the Terminating Societies, but I did a lot of borrowing later on from our Starr-Bowketts because they are truly a mutual society. You take up share-holding in that and you are paying share-capital. That share-capital is balloted for and the people get interest free loans from other people’s money until everybody gets an interest free loan. We had ballots by sale. That meant you could bid for the money at a sale up to four per cent interest in those days, which was pretty heavy, it is pretty light interest today. I managed to buy towards the end of some of these societies a fair amount of money at a half per cent interest, which was very good. So it didn’t cost me a lot of money later on to pay off the Terminating Building Society loan and pay it off to the Starr-Bowkett Societies at half per cent, which was good management I thought.
The Greater Newcastle had a Savings and Loans Society from 1945, now that was even before Universal Credit Union was started, well Universal Savings and Loans was started in Sydney, wasn’t it?
BP: That is correct. I think Universal didn’t come along until about 1956, somewhere around about then.
I think it might have been before that, Universal, however.
BP: No, sorry, 1946 that came along. That is correct. 1946 that started. It remained Universal for a while and then it transferred engagements.
That went into the Metropolitan eventually. The Common Board and then the Metropolitan.
BP: Yes. Yes, there were a number of Savings and Loans Societies formed and they were mainly all formed before that.
Do you know what was behind the formation of the Savings and Loans Society, the Greater Newcastle one? Who was behind it and where did they get the ideas from and such like?
BP: Yes it was our normal Boards of Directors, we had what we called a Common Board of Directors in those days. Whatever the Board was for the Starr-Bowkett Societies or the Terminating Societies was the same Boards on every Board that we had. Not so today, we have got a mishmash of all different Boards, but in those days they were all Common Boards. Our Directors in those days were very forward looking. They had read a lot about savings and loans societies from America, they could see the need for it here in Newcastle being an industrial city, a very heavy industrial city in those days. You have got to remember that at four o’clock you didn’t dare try and move up Maitland Road. When BHP knocked off you had about twenty thousand blokes pushing push bikes all the way down Maitland Road and they occupied the whole ruddy road, all coming this way, so that was the finish of it. You had a population in Newcastle which was made up of ordinary working people, not on really high salaries, just ordinary salaries and so they needed this kind of finance. The main thing was we were providing the finance for them to get their own home and we thought we should provide sufficient finance to enable them to fill the house with furniture. The only way we could do that without letting them go to the loan sharks, which were available in those days, was to have this savings and loans society. It was quite strange to people to have someone wanting to provide low cost finance. So they kind of walked away from it a bit, they were a bit dubious. They thought there had to be a catch to all of this. Who are these people who are going to give them the money at very low interest, because when they went to a shop or anywhere else they were going to pay such high interest rates. So they thought there was something funny behind it all. It took a long time educating them to accept it.
So when did you get your first involvement with the Savings and Loans end of it?
BP: Well I started here in 1949. As I said the first few years I was pretty busy with Terminating Building Societies and Starr-Bowkett Societies, so it would be about 1953, 1954, somewhere around about that, when I got on to this Terminating Building Society part. Mixed in with that you had to be a Jack of all trades, when you worked here then and you have still got to be that today. There is not a society in the whole organisation, even to today, I expect my officers to know about every one that we have. You had to be an expert on everything, particularly on a Saturday morning when we opened up. A lot of people didn’t come in during the week because they worked so Saturday morning was question time. From nine o’clock to well after twelve, and it didn’t matter how long you stayed here you had to stay until you got rid of the last person, they were between four and six deep at the counter and they would all come forward and they would have questions to answer and problems to solve, everything about anything. You had to know the answer and you had to know them quick because you weren’t going to get rid of that queue. So you had to know it all. So I first handled savings and loans, or credit union inquiries then. I used to handle applications for loans and write them and assist people in getting their furniture and stuff like that, round about 1953, 1954.
So when did you first become an officer, when did you stand for office of the organisation?
BP: Well, we run a very strange ship here. We have a group of societies and so to make sure that everybody contributes towards the running of the place, because we have a group, we formed our own association. The association employs all the people, owns all the buildings and buys all the equipment. The individual societies don’t do anything in that regard they just provide the funds for it. They are all joint owners of everything. The individual Boards appoint the people. I worked as a Loans Officer for quite a number of years, taking applications for loans. It was my job to take housing loans and credit union loans for I suppose from 1953 until about 1960. In 1960 the then Assistant Secretary came to me and he said, ‘The Board is not happy about the way our credit unions are being run. They are not getting anywhere, they are not doing anything and they want you to take hold of them.’ I said, ‘That’s strange,’ I was Internal Auditor right at that particular time, I had just been made Internal Auditor. I said, ‘What’s up with my job?’ ‘Oh, nothing. They just want you to take that over and run it.’ I said, ‘Well, what have I got to do?’ ‘Look, that’s all up to you. You’ve just got to run it. Now you have got to get brochures out, you have got to do anything you like, you’ve got a free hand. Go to it, it is all yours.’ I said, ‘Well, I am going to need some help.’ ‘Well you can get whatever help you can, but that is it.’ Well I had to kind of wrestle with the whole idea. I didn’t know much at all about the Act in those days or what you were allowed to do or what you weren’t allowed to do. I had to learn the Act backwards and then go from there and find out what was needed. So I wrestled with it all and went with it from there. I was called the Executive Officer in those days, a nice fancy title.
You mentioned there, at that time I seem to remember you were talking about it earlier before I started to tape, about becoming credit unions as opposed to savings and loans societies. You said that you remembered an occasion when you were up on the Gold Coast or Queensland or somewhere when this first started. When they were changing the name over.
BP: That’s right. The Registrar I think at that time was David Horton and we had a bit of a mishmash with the various types of credit unions that were around in those days. There were savings and loans societies, some were credit co-operatives and quite a number of them were credit unions by then. It was getting around about 1966 when we decided to have a Credit Union Act of our own. So they decided that they weren’t going to have all this mishmash of names. They were all doing the same thing, we all made the same loans, we all carried on our business in exactly the same way, it was just that in the original days you were allowed to grow like Topsy. So the Registrar decided that wasn’t good enough for him, everybody had to change their name and as there were more credit unions about than any of the others, credit unions were going to be it. We all had to transfer our names and become a credit union. So we did the right thing, had an Annual Meeting changed our name to Greater Newcastle Credit Union and Greater Newcastle Miners Credit Union and we have been known as a credit union ever since.
What was this meeting that you were talking about that was addressed by Stan Arneil?
BP: Oh, this was a meeting up in Gold Coast. I think it was an Annual General Meeting that they had and they decided to hold it in the Gold Coast. Stan was up there welcoming us all to this meeting and saying, you know, we were all good fellows, blah, blah, blah. But he didn’t want to have a bar of anybody that was a savings and loans society. He reckoned that they weren’t credit unions and he didn’t think they ought to be mixed with credit unions, they ought to be out of it and he didn’t want to know anything at all about them. They were terrible people and as far as he was concerned that was the wrong thing to do to put them in the credit union movement. He made us feel real welcome, he was a real friendly guy Stan, no two ways about him. We felt very much at home with his comments and we thought we had better pack up our gear and go home straight away. But we decided to stop there and see it through. But that was my first encounter with Stan Arneil and I learnt that was very much the way that he operates. Straight off the shoulder and whether he is trying to run a credit union association or not, offending people didn’t worry him. As far as he was concerned he had his ideas, and some of them were a bit way out, and that was it. You accepted them or you didn’t accept them.
At that stage in the proceedings the Greater Newcastle were they in the League, the Credit Union League?
BP: The Greater Newcastle Miners Credit Union had joined the League, our Greater Newcastle Credit Union did not.
So this was between, I notice from the paper work here which I have generated from the Annual Reports, that the Savings and Loans Co-operative Association Limited was from 1956, when the League was formed, until 1958. Then from 1958 on until 1966 then it was in the League.
BP: During that particular time, right. Now our main credit union which was Greater Newcastle Credit Union, and I know this is going to get awful confused after a while. We had our Miners Credit Union which was formed in Newcastle here to service all the mine workers on the northern mine coalfields here, specifically formed for that. It was the only one around in Newcastle to do it.
So what is this one that is now at Cessnock, NMCU Companion?
BP: Oh, that is called Northern Mineworkers Credit Union, ours was Greater Newcastle Miners Credit Union. The former one didn’t come in until a long, long time later, right. I used to go out through all the mines and I set up all sorts of educational schools and I also set up pay-roll deductions. I think I was one of the first to set up pay-roll deductions around the mines. But our main credit union at that particular time was part of what was called the Northern Region of the Association of Southern Credit Unions. During that time there had been a break-away from the League.
How did this happen?
BP: There was a hell of a fight about subscriptions. The dues to the League they reckoned were exorbitant. There were jobs for the boys and they reckoned it was a bit of a rip-off.
So what year was this do you think?
BP: We are talking about after they were credit unions. We are talking about in the ’60s, round about the 1960.
Who was President of the League at that time?
BP: Ken Miller, I think, was President at that particular time.
So that is after 1967 then. According to the Annual Reports 1956 to 1959 was J S Ward, then 1959 to 1961 is Berry Calverley and 1961 to 1964 Stan Arneil. Then Stan Arneil was working for the Registrar as a Development Officer and during that time there was some disagreement as to whether he should give up his Presidency and Don Harvey stood against him and got the Presidency. So that was 1964 to 1965. Then Berry Calverley came on 1965 to 1967 and Ken Miller came on in 1967.
BP: Well we have got to go back, it is earlier than that then. It would be round about the end of Stan Arneil’s time, round about there.
So that is when he got defeated by Don Harvey, so that is 1964.
BP: Somewhere around about there. Anyway, the whole problem was about dues. Quite a number of the larger credit unions at that stage thought they were paying for too many of the other smaller credit unions and they weren’t going to pay such high dues. So when the meeting decided that they weren’t going to reduce the dues, they showed how they were going to vote by using their feet and they walked out of the League.
Was the Greater Newcastle one of those?
BP: No. Our Miners Credit Union was still in it but our main credit union wasn’t a member of anything at that stage. When they left the movement they set up their own association in Wollongong and that is where it gets the name Southern. They then set up regional offices, or regional groups, in Newcastle and in Sydney. In Newcastle we were a free meeting group of credit unions, if you care to call them that, at that time. We were meeting of our own accord and helping one another. Trying to solve one another’s problems as we met, discussing all the things that happened during the day. If anybody had a problem they gave one another a ring and said, ‘What would you do?’ and we’d say, ‘Give us time to think,’ and we’d try to come up with an answer and say, ‘Try that, see how that works.’ Or if they had an accounting problem, we being a building society and having a fair amount of work to do with the Registry Office one way or another, they usually fed in here pretty often to see how we dealt with different things here. We then related that back to our credit unions. So that is probably how I became a focal point in Newcastle, everybody was coming to me after a while. When ASCU was formed, they came up to Newcastle and they said to us, ‘How would you like to be the Northern Region of the Southern Association?’ We thought there was nothing wrong with that. They said, ‘You just have your own meetings like you have now. You do your own thing. There will only be nominal dues that you have to pay and you will be part of our Association.’ We didn’t see much wrong with that. As long as everybody left us alone to do our own thing, it would be nice to be hooked in with an association. So we did. I was Chairman of that for about ten years, I think. That is how we first kicked off in Newcastle. Well from there they went to Sydney and they formed what was called a Sydney Region of ASCU and the same thing happened there. So they had three groups.
Now, when the insurance split happened and the Association of Central Credit Unions started, where was that? That was nothing to do with the Southern one, or was it?
BP: Yes it was. Yes that spill-off went straight into there from a lot of the Sydney credit unions into the Sydney Region of ASCU. That was a pretty bitter fight that insurance bit. They felt that CUNA Mutual, which was tied very, very closely to the credit union movement.
End Tape 1B
ANSWCU43 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
You was telling me how you got annoyed with the Southern Association.
BP: Well, I think it might be better to go back just a little way. We are dealing with ASCU and its two other regions, the Sydney Region and the Northern Region. I started a bit of a push, quite unwittingly, when we decided that we needed some money to spend up here in Newcastle. Remember that we paid small token dues to ASCU down in Wollongong. So our two representatives who went down to Wollongong for their monthly meetings were sent on a mission to ask them for this very small amount of money so that we could expend it in Newcastle and do a bit of interest education for the people in Newcastle. Anyway they came back with their tails between their legs and they were told down there that we paid our dues to Wollongong, Wollongong was going to look after where the money was spent, they didn’t have any need to spend any money in Newcastle and as far as we were concerned we weren’t going to get it.
You didn’t have any voting rights? Newcastle didn’t have any voting rights?
BP: No, we didn’t have any voting rights at all. Well, to us here in Newcastle that was just like a red flag in front of the bull. The bull reared up on its hind legs and it really got stuck into it. We told them that if they weren’t going to give us the money, we were going to form our own association and do our own thing. They laughed at that and thought those fellows wouldn’t do that, that it was all bravado. Well we shocked them, we got stuck right into it then and there on the spot. We got the necessary forms from the Registry Office, we set about forming ourselves into an association and that we did. That horrified them and shocked them. We put it in and they said, ‘They wont even register that for you. You will come crawling back to us.’ ‘No way, no way at all,’ I said, ‘we will never come crawling back to you at all in any case, we would rather stay where we are than do that.’ So that shocked them again. We eventually got our association registered and it was them that came crawling back to us. They came back and said to us, ‘Well now you are an association, which we didn’t think you would be, where do we stand now?’ I said, ‘We stand as very good friends, very good mates. We want to be friends with you. We want to share everything with you, we want to share it on an associational basis not otherwise.’ ‘Righto.’ So we did, we stayed very good friends. The next thing that happened was that the Sydney Region saw the moves that we made and Ian Milburn, who was the Chairman of the Sydney Region, came to me and he said, ‘What did you do that for.’ So we related everything to him and I said, ‘Quite honestly, you are big enough, why don’t you do your own thing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ Well he uhmmed and aahed at it for a while and then they decided that they would break away and form their association as well and we assisted them in doing it.
So by that time you had got four, the League and three associations. But at that time the insurance split hadn’t happened had it?
BP: It was around that time. Just about then.
But you would end up with five if that was the case, did that ever happen?
BP: We ended up with five associations going in New South Wales, but the five came about with the formation of the Association of New South Wales Credit Union Associations.
What about Central? The Association of Central Credit Unions, ACCU? That happened after the insurance split didn’t it?
BP: That’s right.
Was the Central one still going?
BP: Central was what they called the Sydney Region. When they transferred into their association they called themselves the Central Association.
Did that actually happen before the insurance split?
BP: I think it happened just before, yes.
Somebody mentioned to me that Stan Arneil wanted to join the Southern Association and that they turned him down. Is this true or not?
BP: Yes that is true. You have got to remember that Stan Arneil was always very outspoken even when he was not outspoken. I don’t think they thought that they wanted any more problems within their movement than they had had with two associations being formed underneath their umbrella sort of business. So I think Stan Arneil was going to be problem number three for them, so they would rather not have him in so I think they told him to stay away and that was it, he did.
So in actual fact then, his credit union and a number of the others joined the Central Association.
BP: That is correct.
They didn’t form it they joined it.
BP: They joined it, they didn’t form it. No it wasn’t formed with them, they joined it. A number of them actually joined it when the split really took place.
Were you there at that meeting when the split took place?
BP: Yes, I was there at the meeting. There was quite a lot of heated arguments went on. Some of them really got wound up. The general consensus of the opinion was that CUNA Mutual was part of the worldwide organisation. It had been with the worldwide organisation pretty near from day one. It had expended a lot of money into helping credit unions get where they were. They had come out to Australia, particularly to New South Wales, on the invitation of our Association, or the then League, and they had just started to move around and assist credit unions. They had only been here I think about two years and were starting to feel their way about when all of a sudden the Credit Union Association decided it was going to go on an opposite tack and take on CIC as the main insurance agency for the whole movement. The only thing that the Association could see out of that was the gain of dollars. They were going to get a nice hefty commission out of all the policies they were going to write through the credit union movement. A lot of credit unions thought that was just dirty pool.
Now from reading the Minutes and also from looking at Quest, I notice that Dermot Ryan who had made the report when he went over in 1967 on the setting up of a Savings Stabilisation Fund, which became the Savings Protection Fund, he spoke up about using the rebate money from the insurance to found the Protection Fund, the Stabilisation Fund. There was an argument as to whether they should do that and they had actually kept the funds back, that hadn’t given them back to the credit union. For three years running they had managed to hold those funds and the fund had actually reached a million dollars and there was still an argument as to whether they should start the Savings Stabilisation Fund with it, or Protection Fund with it, or whether it should be a levy. Do you remember anything about that?
BP: Well that was another side issue altogether.
Well Dermot was making it rather central or trying to.
BP: Well he was as far as all the credit unions were concerned. You see you have got to realise that credit unions were run mainly in those days by voluntary labour. A lot of people that were trying to do the best they could knew very little, if anything at all, about finance, running a business, making a profit, because the philosophy in those days which was pretty hot and strong was that if you did a line-ball job at the end of the year for your credit union, that was the best thing you could ever do. You never worried about putting any money away into reserves or for rainy days or to meet any bad debts that might happen, because nobody thought that people would be a bad debt. They were all tied up and fired up with the good philosophy of being in a credit union. But that was all thrown out the window very quickly about that particular time and there were credit unions falling over left, right and centre. They hadn’t been prudent enough, they hadn’t put money away into reserves, they hadn’t provided for bad debts which occurred. As a matter of fact there were a lot of Antigonish credit unions operating in those particular days and I can remember I sat on the committee that was formed by the Minister for writing up all the rules and regulations for the Reserve Fund that is now in force.
Was that the Savings Protection Fund Committee?
BP: There was a Savings Protection Fund Committee that formed a Stabilisation Fund for the then League. No this is the Savings Reserve Fund, which we have now.
Because the Protection Fund was from 1973 to 1980. I think Brian Charlton was on it in those days. You are not talking about that one?
BP: No.
This is a Government committee that you are talking about.
BP: Yes, a Government committee.
It wasn’t the Credit Union Advisory Committee?
BP: No. This was a special committee and it was set up by the Minister and it had all four associations sitting on it.
Which Minister?
BP: Sidney Einfeld. He got sick and tired of credit unions falling over and he gave the movement two choices: ‘Either get together and form your own and you write your own rules and regulations how you want it run; or I will legislate and I will give you a Government one and you are going to be stuck with it.’ He told the four associations, ‘That’s it. What do you want?’ So we decided that we would see what we could do about doing one for ourselves, so we all had to get together. Now you have got to realise that here we were, three associations which are reasonably friendly to one another, we had been all part of one, that’s ASCU, Central and Northern. We were quite happy to talk to one another and we did. I formed, or help to form, became a Foundation Director on the formation of the Association of Credit Union Associations. We three associations sat on it and we discussed and formulised our image and where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do as a group of three associations.
Can you give me any idea what year that was?
BP: That would be round about 1973, 1974, when we formed the Association, or Union of Credit Union Associations.
Was it a formal organisation?
BP: It was registered, it was a formal organisation.
Was it registered at the Co-operatives?
BP: It was registered through the Registrar of Co-operative Societies. It went through all the same formal meeting to open it and register it and everything else.
Who was the Chairman in the first instance?
BP: Ian Milburn became the Chairman in the first instance. They offered it to me and I said no. I lived in Newcastle which was a long trek down to Sydney then by road, it took you four hours to drive down by road. Besides, I always felt, and I still feel today, that the action happens in Sydney and if you are not Johnny on the spot it takes you a while to get there and so we should have somebody in Sydney. So Ian Milburn was the ideal choice. He was in Sydney, he was Johnny on the spot and if we wanted somebody to represent the Union of Associations he was the one to do it. So he became the Chairman and I think that was the best choice that we made because he was a good fellow. We operated there until about 1982, when all the associations joined as one. By that time the League had joined the Union of Associations. They joined it in about 1978, 1979, the idea there being that they were trying to get together, they were trying to win us back, win us back into the fold, all become one association.
I notice in 1980 they became the Credit Union Association of New South Wales. Was this the same organisation, or another one?
BP: That is the League changed their name. Yes that is true. They changed their name to the Credit Union Association. They did. When they all got back together again in 1982, we changed it again to what it is today. They saw benefit in changing their name from League. People always kind of got the Credit Union League mixed up with the League of Nations and that was always the first question, ‘What have you got to do with the League of Nations?’ It might have been all right in the USA, they have different connotations to different things there, but here in Australia it seemed to be to be a normal question.
Now let me get it clear again, the name of the Association that you had going there with the three groups as the Union of?
BP: We had the Union of Credit Union Associations, which had as its members
Of New South Wales or not?
BP: Of New South Wales, we had the Association of Southern Credit Unions, Central Credit Union Association and Northern Districts Credit Unions Association, which was us up here. We all came under that umbrella. Mainly for PR exercises, for being a singular voice for the three of us, and direct contact to the Minister and Registrar and for that kind of thing.
Now this committee that Sid Einfeld, the advisory committee that you were on, for the Reserve?
BP: No, it wasn’t an advisory committee. It had an advisory nature but it was given to us to form our own committee to establish the rules and regulations of the current Reserve Fund.
So who was on it?
BP: Well there were representatives from the four associations on it, ASCU, Central Association, Northern Association and the Association of Credit Unions, at that time.
What about the Antigonish?
BP: Yes, they were there. Yes. They didn’t last long. We had trouble with Father Gallagher, that’s the fellow, Father Gallagher.
What was he like?
BP: His feet used to stink I know that much. He sat near us and boy his feet ponged. But anyway, he had a very way out idea of what credit unions were all about. He kind of made us all aghast. He had a much more divine right to money, I think, he got a better message to credit unions than what we seemed to get.
But my impression from reading about the subject is that he thought they were an educational organisation. What’s wrong with that?
BP: Nothing wrong with it so long as he was allowed to his utilise his credit union to the way he thought fit, it had to run. He quite honestly without any problems at all stated that if he wanted to take people’s investment monies and give it the poor and needy, that was quite OK, that was what credit unions were all about. We said, ‘Well what happens if Joe Bloggs wants to come and withdraw his money?’ ‘Oh, he will get it in due course.’ We said, ‘Where from?’ He didn’t quite have the answer to that, but he was freely doling the money out. That was what he thought credit unions were all about.
Well not in his own credit union he wasn’t.
BP: Wasn’t he? Why didn’t you get any?
No, I don’t mean that. I wasn’t in the credit union. All I am on about is the fact that they didn’t always stick by his line. He wasn’t Chairman of the credit union. He wasn’t a Director of the credit union.
BP: I don’t know what he was in his credit union, but his philosophy was certainly way out of our kilter anyway.
He had an association of co-operatives, not credit unions only. He founded the Australian Antigonish Association. He represented them, I presume, on this committee?
BP: Yes, that’s right, and that was his idea. As far as we were concerned he just wanted to do the complete opposite to what we were all about.
This was the ’70s wasn’t it? So by that time, he had nothing to do with his own credit unions at all. He had been retired to the Little Sisters of the Poor, I understand.
BP: Not what I was led to believe he wasn’t. No he was very much hands in, boots and all.
Oh he was, I understand, because he had nothing else to do then when they retired him.
BP: Yes well he was a Government appointee, let us put it to you that way. I think with all the stuff that we had to read, had to learn, had to study. The various Acts from overseas where they had funds, particularly in Canada and USA, and what have you. Reams and reams of stuff to go through, I think that was too much for him and he bowed out and we were glad to see the end of him anyway and get him out of the place. We settled down to some pretty hard talking amongst ourselves which wasn’t easy because we had the three associations under the Union of Associations plus, we will call it the League, sitting in there as well. We always found it very difficult to carry on a conversation with the League.
Well the League reckoned they should be representing you.
BP: Well yes they reckoned that they were the voice of the whole of New South Wales and we told them they didn’t have a voice at all, that they didn’t know what they were talking about, we were the only rightful people to speak up. That is where it all lay. We argued for years like that, backwards and forwards and we never got anywhere. It was a bit like when they decided to hold a meeting, and I am just digressing a bit, our first meeting together to see if we could come to some focal point of discussions that we were all in accord on. We decided to have this meeting and it was held in the Commonwealth Bank in the city up on the top floor.
Well they weren’t in the Association, in the League, either were they, the Commonwealth Bank Credit Union?
BP: No. They have been out of it ever since. I don’t think they are in anything even today. They have been a one off and been allowed to stay that way too. Anyway Brian Hazell arranged the meeting and so we had our three associations, we had the League and we had CBLA, they were allowed to come in on it. It was like the old hollow square, we all sat round it and we sat and glared at one another for an hour before somebody said anything. Then somebody said, ‘You tell me what you’ve got and we’ll tell what we’ve got.’ That was kind of trying to show us that we had nothing and so we ought to be with them in any case. We all got very disgruntled after cursing one another and what have you, picked up our cricket bats and all went home. That was the end of it. It was the most unproductive meeting I have ever had the misfortune to be in. It was a complete waste of time.
Was that during the League or the Association days? Who was the President then? Was it Bill Howe or was it Kevin Bain?
BP: Kevin Bain was the Chairman in those days, I think. We had Ken Miller along, who didn’t enthral us at all. I don’t think anybody was prepared to discuss anything or come to any terms as long as Ken Miller was about. He didn’t come over real good as far as we were concerned. His style of running the League was not as we would expect one to be run. We saw too much of a heavy fist and a heavy hand, like, ‘I am right no matter what I say.’ Consequently, we felt that everybody had their due rights to say what they wanted to say, as long as they wanted to say it and so long as it was relative to the business, which we felt wasn’t done. So I would say that his presence at any of those meetings did not help the situation at all, not by a long, long shot.
Now what about when Bill Howe came on?
BP: Bill Howe then came in. He came into the Union of Associations as part of their representative and Bill Howe is what I would call a first class negotiator. He will talk and talk and talk and talk until you can come to some sort of arrangement. He believes that as long as he is talking there is room for more talk. I would say that his presence there did a hell of a lot to get all the associations back again. If you had had Ken Miller there we would still been functioning exactly how we are today. Reg Elliott was with Bill and they made up a very good team.
Who moved in first? Who amalgamated with the League or the Association again?
BP: Well there was ASCU and the Northern Association moved in first. We had some considerable difficulty getting Central to agree. I was the behind the scenes negotiator if you know what mean. I was Devil’s Advocate for everybody. I was seen to be on all sides and no sides at the one time. We had representatives from the Central Association there and they were given strict instructions that under no circumstances could you agree with anything, to become part of anything, or to say anything much. All you had to do was go back with what went on and they would make the decisions later on, which was not the brief that we gave them. You had to be able and free, without signing finally on the dotted line, to speak on behalf of your own independent association. You were part of the negotiation. You had full power and a brief to do that, otherwise your presence there wasn’t really much at all. So we had a situation where their Secretary, the Central’s Secretary, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know whether he should be talking or whether he shouldn’t be talking. We had their representatives there and I was getting a bit of a nudge from Bill Howe under the table. I was passing little scribbly notes up and down the line, you know, from one to another saying, ‘You’ve got to vote for this,’ and ‘You can’t vote for that,’ and ‘You’d better hurry up and say something for this.’ They could see all these hands moving up and down and people going like this but they didn’t know what was going on. I was feeding these messages left, right and centre to different people around the table, telling them what they had got to do and what they had to say, and ‘You’d better say something now,’ and this was how the meetings carried on. It worked quite well and everybody had input into it except Central Association. Unfortunately we got them right to the brink, but they wouldn’t bite. They fell away again and they stayed where they were until, unfortunately for them I suppose, they got problems with their centralised banking. They mucked that up no end and I just can’t understand how they did that, but they did. So that was their downfall. They had to go somewhere, something had to happen to them, somebody had to come in with some money. The League, if you care to call them that, well the new Association as it was formed had the money. We were in it, they couldn’t come to us, and so there was only one place to go and that was in the Association. So they were in by default whether they liked it or not.
Some of them, I understand, don’t like it even to this day.
BP: That is pretty true. I think it is fair comment to say that there is quite a number of credit unions that might do exactly what they did many years ago, very soon, and that is walk with their feet. That would be a sorry tale I think for the movement, but I think it is heading back that way again.
Well, I know it is jumping an awful long way, but at the present moment there are negotiations to virtually do away with the Associations, the Leagues.
BP: Yes, the current Association they want to form companies to deal with their various products that they have to sell, as a trade association. The Association will only be, as I can see it, a so-called figure head. Everything will be dealt with through the Companies Code, which is quite foreign to a credit union movement. I think that there is no need for all of that. If you can’t manage it now, under the Credit Union Act, you certainly can’t manage it under the Companies Code. There is no difference.
Well it is like cutting out the middle man, or trying to, isn’t it?
BP: Well yes and no.
The credit unions will be dealing directly with the central organisation and the representation will be a main Board and a Council.
BP: I really don’t see any benefit for the small credit union at all to be in this current set up. I think it will be to their detriment. It will be the small credit unions downfall. I don’t think they have really looked into it thoroughly enough to see that. A lot of them haven’t voiced their opinions at all because they honestly don’t know which way they ought to go. Unfortunately, I think that has been taken when they have their regional conferences, they are asked who is in favour and they count the hands that go up, they are asked anybody against, and if somebody votes against them it is one. So supposing you have got three for and one against and there are fifteen there that haven’t voted, they will carry it. There are three in favour of it against one. That is not the right feeling at all. I think the feeling out there is a lot more against what they are doing if they can’t find a place for themselves in the current Association, if all this does come about. I really don’t think the Registrar is happy about it or the Minister. I think they are going to have trouble with that because what they are virtually doing is thumbing the nose to the current hierarchy and saying we want to go under the Companies Code. I don’t think they will be up to letting them just walk off just as quickly as they want to walk off.
I get the impression Bill Howe is doing a lot of negotiating there?
BP: I think he will need to do a lot of negotiating. I think it is even beyond Bill Howe. I don’t think he has all the support from the other States, particularly in Queensland, from all the information that I have received through the mail.
End Tape 2A
ASCWU43 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
I remember looking at Quest there a few months ago and I see that Dave Palmer was virtually the only active member of the Supervisory Committee of the League during the Presidency of Ken Miller. Dave Palmer put in a report criticising the running of meetings. I notice that he was actually shortly thereafter no longer on the Supervisory Committee. That was not thought to be the job of the Supervisory Committee.
BP: Well I would have to agree with the statement that he would make because I felt the same way about it, particularly the general meetings that were made in the time of Ken Miller. It appeared to me that everything was well and truly mapped out before hand. Very well orchestrated. Beresford Calverley was nicknamed the hatchet man and it was up to him to apply the gag if there were too many people going to voice objections to whatever was on the agenda paper. He smartly jumped up and moved that the motion be put and no further discussion be allowed, and that was where a lot of business concluded. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t think that was good policy for a Chairman to tolerate, or to even ask to be tolerated. That happened on a number of occasions when Ken Miller was in the Chair and I thought that it was pretty poor Chairmanship. I didn’t like it and I didn’t like Ken Miller for it.
Do you know when Kevin Bain became President of the Association? You weren’t actually in the League at that stage were you?
BP: Yes we were, we were in it.
How did he differ in his methods of Chairing meetings?
BP: Oh his were a much different style altogether. He was, I wouldn’t say low-key, but he was more plausible, more presentable. Pretty determined though. He knew what he wanted and how he was going to get it. But Ken Miller’s style was knock ’em down and drag ’em out sort of business and that was the difference between the two. You could tolerate Kevin Bain’s but I could never tolerate Ken Miller’s.
What about the days when Dermot Ryan was the Vice-President and he was the main one to assist Ken Miller on his running of meetings?
BP: Well Dermot Ryan had a very picturesque period through the credit union movement altogether. He was very involved in the Association. He was involved from his own credit union’s point of view. He then chucked it all in and became, I think, the Executive Director for the Association in Canberra before AFCUL was formed. Then he became the Executive Officer, I think, of AFCUL after that. In the early days he was a very forceful sort of a speaker and very colourful. He knew how to use the right kind of language at the right time and he never changed. But he was one of those fellows that you could easily like and I liked Dermot quite a lot. I thought he was the usual typical Australian and he was always out to try and help the battler. I thought that whilst he was very forceful in the piece, he mellowed quite a hell of a lot as time went on. In the end, before he died, he used to give little speeches about his historical co-operative and they were quite humorous, quite worthwhile staying to the very end to listen to him and he was top notch as far as I was concerned.
What about Tom Kelly? Do you have much to do with him?
BP: I haven’t had much to do with him personally, but Tom and I know one another. We speak quite often and what have you. Tom Kelly was one of the very early leaders in the credit union movement and did a hell of a lot for the movement as editor of the paper that he put out. He put many, many hours into that in producing it and editing it and getting it distributed and what he got for that was a belt in the back of the head from the Association. I thought, and a lot of other credit unions thought, it was completely uncalled for. Which was the usual policy of the day.
What was that over? He was voted out as Vice-President at that time and I believe there was a particular issue. Do you remember what it was?
BP: I can’t quite remember what the issue was at that time.
I believe it was the co-operative bank?
BP: Yes he was very much involved in the co-operative bank. He was very insistent that we should have a co-operative bank for all of the co-operative societies and credit unions in the State. He felt that was the only way that we would have complete control over our future destiny, to have our own bank. He was pushing that barrow pretty strong, but I think there was more than that behind the scenes why he got voted out. That never surfaced really and I never was privy to what it is.
My impression was this, and I don’t know whether it is true or not, perhaps you can confirm or deny. As long as he was advocating the starting of a co-operative bank, well they actually wanted to take over a South Australian one, as long as he was putting that point and the League, as it was then, had not decided on the issue then that was all right. But once they had decided on the issue and turned the thumbs down, then that was another thing, he was not supposed to be pushing it in the Quest after the League had actually turned it down.
BP: Well that boils back to the whole thing of that particular time which is freedom of speech. Once you got policy from the League, you darsen’t open your mouth against it because it wasn’t tolerated. Poor old Tom Kelly felt he lived in a land of freedom of speech, he had a paper which he felt was part of the freedom of speech. As far as he was concerned he felt could, if he wanted to, voice an opinion as editor, which every editor has and that just went against the hierarchy and so he got the chop.
But Dermot could do that and get away with it.
BP: But Dermot had a nice way of getting around things with the people that he worked with. Dermot was a very good public relations bloke. Poor old Tom didn’t have much of that. He only had eyes for certain goals and he travelled in a specific direction. As honest as the day is long. Loved the credit union movement. Felt that this was what they ought to have and that was his barrow that he wanted to push. It was just as simple as that, but he got crucified for it.
On one occasion they were about to kick us out.
BP: Well they can’t kick us out, I am the General Manager.
That is not what Maurie Daly said in Sydney. He said we would have to get out.
BP: Well that is Sydney all over. In Newcastle we run it completely different.
Maybe he wanted to get out as well. During that period there, I don’t know whether you will remember this, because this is the issue that Dermot Ryan was bringing up and he did it over and over again. He lost in the end. He would bring up this issue of using the insurance rebates which had been kept back by the League, and it had been agreed at Annual Meetings, for the Savings Protection Fund, Savings Stabilisation Fund. He would put it up and I think the first time he carried it a half-yearly meeting. Then they turned it around at a Board meeting. So he put it up at the next half-yearly meeting and got it reversed at the half-yearly meeting. So they turned it around again at another Board meeting and he put it up again. This time he lost. No, he carried it again.
BP: That’s right.
But at the stage of the proceedings he went to AFCUL and it was never acted upon.
BP: But I think you will find that by other means that money did find its way into the Savings Reserve Fund. That was one of the main bones of contention that caused the split anyway. Not only was CUNA Mutual seen to be the right insurance agent for the credit union movement, because it had proved itself as being part of the movement for years. It came here at the special request of the Association and then was dumped because of a better deal with CIC. There were these rebates that were held by the Association which the credit unions felt were rightfully there’s that the Association had its sticky hands on and wasn’t parting with it. So as far as they were concerned, they were going to part with the Association and they did. That is really, the summary of what happened. They had just all had enough.
But what about the situation that Stan Arneil was in. He had taken over as Manager of CUNA Mutual, CUMIS in Australia, but he was subject to direction from the United States. One of the things that they brought over here as general policy, was Policy Holders Advisory Committees. Were you involved in any of those?
BP: No. We never joined CUNA, CUMIS, in any shape or form but I know about these Policy Holders that you are talking about.
Didn’t they act as a sort of method of putting CUNA Mutual’s point of view?
BP: Yes, CUNA Mutual’s point of view. They came out here and they played a very heavy-handed sort of attitude back to the Association and pretty near demanded that the Association had no right to dump CUNA, CUMIS here. They were going to do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to the Association and I think they even threatened at one stage that they were going to have them de-registered and not allowed to meet over in the world meetings and so on and so on. I tend to believe that they tried to move along that way over there, but they never got real far, they got knocked on the head.
Well Stan Arneil was meat in the sandwich as far as that was concerned, at that stage in the proceedings. Several people told me that in fact pressure was put on CUNA Mutual to fire Stan Arneil. Pressure was put from Australia and if Dermot Ryan wasn’t involved everybody would be surprised.
BP: Well Dermot had his fingers in the pie in lots of things at that particular stage. Dermot at that time was all fired up for the Association. He was Association this, Association that.
He was in AFCUL then.
BP: Yes I know, but he was very much Association. Dermot knew which side of his bread was buttered and who was paying the large share of his salary in AFCUL, the New South Wales Association.
You look at the books and it was Sydney Credit Union.
BP: I don’t care what credit union you are talking about, but that is where it came through.
I only know his one.
BP: That’s right, yes. So Dermot was playing it Dermot’s way. If that meant that Stan Arneil got the axe, well Stan Arneil got the axe.
I see what you mean. But the donations given by Sydney Credit Union at that stage in the proceedings, I don’t think AFCUL had much money.
BP: They didn’t have any money.
That is what I mean. I don’t think the Association, or the League at that time, was paying him very much. I think he was living on the donations from Sydney Credit Union.
BP: Well he may of, but we saw what was supposed to be going, at Annual Meetings, from the New South Wales Association to go to AFCUL to pay his way. It seemed to be pretty hefty as far as I was concerned. I mean if poor old Dermot never got them I can’t answer for that.
Well he was using that to run the Annual General Meetings.
BP: Well that could be so. He did his own thing. See when he was Executive Officer of AFCUL he was it. It was a one man band and that was him. He operated in the way that he felt he should run it. Quite honestly, I think that as far as the Federal Government was concerned, until he became the Executive Officer of AFCUL, I don’t think they knew a great deal about credit unions and what they were all about. They knew they were out there somewhere, but they were only a poor insignificant little group. He certainly smartened them up and he made them fully aware what we were all about. I don’t think that anybody else could have kept up all the luncheons and consuming all the necessary liquid fluid that he did to get that message across. I think that in the long run that might have contributed to his early downfall. He certainly got our name out, there is no two ways about it.
Yes well generally speaking it seems that he was the one that did most of the negotiation towards the tax exemption and such like.
BP: That is correct, with the Treasurer of the day then. Yes. It was his personality that did it. You know he has got one of those natural personalities, he can make a wisecrack that is funny. It would take me six months to think about a wisecrack and try and make it funny and then I don’t think it would be funny then. He can move into talking with people quite easily, no matter what standard in life that they are. He was a very good negotiator. In the early days that you were talking about there in CUNA Mutual, yes he did have a lot to do with it, yes he was about to try and preserve the status quo as far as the Association, or the League, was all about at that time. If that meant that Stan Arneil had to go, Stan Arneil had to go and I think that was it. I don’t think there was a great deal of love lost between the two anyway.
In the early days they thought a lot of each other, I think?
BP: Well they might have in the very, very early days, but I don’t think that persisted too far along the line. For the same reason what Stan Arneil was. He was a very vocal sort of fellow and felt that he had certain ideas. They were very fixed and he didn’t change them whether he was right, wrong or indifferent. They were his ideas and he just carried them on and you just couldn’t persuade him to be any different.
This credit union that is under your wing, the Greater Newcastle, did you insure with CUNA Mutual, CUMIS?
BP: No, we didn’t.
Why not?
BP: Well we could do a better deal by ourselves.
Well what is wrong with the Association, the League, doing that?
BP: Well that was always our argument. That we could always do a better deal and we didn’t see any point in us being part of it. I used to always argue to credit unions round here, ‘If you can do a better deal, you do a better deal with your own insurance company. You don’t have to have what the Association wants to give you.’ Unfortunately, they used to try and ram it down their throats and say, ‘You have got to have it because it is part of the movement and we have done this deal for you and you should take it so that everybody participates in it and make it a proper deal like we have tried to get for you.’ Now I take that as being their job to negotiate a good deal. I also take it as the individual credit union’s job if they can negotiate a better deal individually for their own members, that is the deal they take. You go for whatever is good for yourself. You’ve got the option. They didn’t want the credit unions to have the option. We always took our option. We have never changed. We do it even to today.
What about the central banking system?
BP: We are in parts of the central banking system because it is the best option that we have got for cheques. That is why we are in it. Up to now we haven’t been able to get a banker to pay our credit union interest on the money that we have put in there on a daily basis. Whilst the central bank still proves to be the best option we have got we will stay with it. If not we will go somewhere else.
What about the other services that the Association, previously the League, has provided at various times, like the debt collection service?
BP: Never used that. We always did it ourselves. We found them too costly. You have got to remember in those days a lot of the things that they provided as far as services were concerned, like debt collection and valuations and all those kind of things, were pretty relevant to Sydney. Outside of Sydney it became a problem because those people had to travel. They came out of Sydney and had to travel to come to Newcastle. We could always do it cheaper here by getting somebody locally to do it. So why take on something that had a travelling expense to it. That is probably one of the main reasons why we didn’t embrace them. I can understand a lot of Sydney-based credit unions saying it was a good deal as far as they could do in Sydney, but we never did. As far as any of the products that they have brought out, there is very few of them ever worth taking on.
What about Edvest and the other investment advisory service?
BP: We don’t even do that. As I said we have grown to be a heck of a lot different. I think a lot of people in the early days, and not so much today, they probably saw me, some of them outside of Newcastle, as a Permanent Building Society interloper with a credit union coat on. That wasn’t true, because I had spent many hours at meetings and going and helping credit unions and doing all that I could to foster credit unions outside of the League’s eye, because all my activities were done locally here in Newcastle, Wollongong and in associations outside of the then League.
Do you have a Chapter up here?
BP: We didn’t call them Chapters. We just called them meetings. It is now called the Newcastle Regional Committee. When we became part of the current Association they badly wanted me to keep the regional meetings going in Newcastle. They still go on to today. I was Chairman of those meetings for the first two or three years. I gave that away earlier in the piece because I found I was getting miles too involved in the building society part of the Society here and it was taking up much too much of my time, so I couldn’t devote the time needed for that. So I got off that and then I eventually had to resign from the Association Board for the same reason. I became Deputy General Manager, then General Manager in pretty quick fire time when two of our previous General Managers retired, one on top of one another. So it all got dumped in my lap.
Were you Chairman here?
BP: I was Chairman of the Newcastle Association of Credit Unions and I was then Chairman of the Regional Committee for two or three years here.
But you were not Chairman of this organisation, you were on the management side?
BP: Not in the Directors of that. Our Directors have a ruling that no staff can ever sit on the Board.
But the Manager is the Secretary, is he?
BP: No. In this organisation we have a General Manager, two Deputy General Managers, a Secretary and then we run down from there, Accountants and so on and so on. We have a Manager which is Greg Davis, who runs the two credit unions at the present time. It is his responsibility, under me, to look after those credit unions. They have grown the same as our Society has grown, enormously in the last three or four years. I think we have got something like twenty-five thousand members in our main credit union now, which by the way is the oldest credit union in operation in Australia.
You mean the Savings and Loans Society originally?
BP: I mean that. I am not ashamed that it was a Savings and Loans Society in those days, because that was all that they were called in those days. I don’t see any difference between a savings and loans, a credit co-operative or a credit union.
Were you before St George? Because St George had one. But they haven’t got one now, that’s right.
BP: No. We were before St George. As a matter of fact there were very, very few. I did a survey throughout the whole of Australia. I wrote to all the Registry Offices in Australia and it was prompted on me by Charlie Butler.
Does he still agree with this or not?
BP: He does. There were other credit co-operatives or savings and loans societies registered before us, but they have all gone out of existence. They folded up many years ago. Ours is still the oldest on register and still operating today.
What about some of the ones within the friendly societies? Weren’t some of them registered before?
BP: No. You see they only came on the scene in Australia round about 1945. Our Board then were pretty keen to have one for our group, because they thought this was the only way they could see their members being able to make their payments on their loan. Once they went to the old loan sharks they were going to get themselves into financial trouble and that would mean they had problems with loan repayments. So they had to negate that in some way and they thought these savings and loans societies were the you beaut thing to help the poor little worker which needed help. So they formed them and they proved a great success. The only thing was that as far as we were concerned, in the early stages with not a great deal of staff to deal with it, everybody did about twenty different jobs for different societies within the hour, you know what I mean. You were that fast whipping your cap off and putting another cap on you didn’t even know if you had the right cap on after a while. The permanent societies came along and we had to devote a lot of our time to foster the Permanent Society. You talk about Jack Ward, I can remember going down and meeting Jack Ward and the Manager of United Permanent, who were kicking off their permanent societies in those days and didn’t know a great deal about the co-operative movement, and they were coming up here to see our Secretary, old Fred Lean, to get his advice on what they should or should not do to form their permanents. Those fellows were up here seeing us about all these different things and they had very little length of service in co-operatives at that time. I was an old campaigner even then, when they first came on the scene.
Did you get to know Jack Ward?
BP: Yes, I got to know Jack Ward.
What was he like. You are the first person I have come across that knew anything about him.
BP: In the early days when he was a hands-on, he was quite good. He knew what it was all about. He was a go-getter the same as what St George is all about today. I think that is where it gets its sort of impetus from. It was, ‘Don’t stand still or somebody will stand all over the top of you.’ United was a bit more laid back, I should say. They had a different sort of General Manager and they were pretty careful not to ruffle the feathers of anybody. They grew and they grew fairly quick, but they were, how shall I put it, like BP, the quiet achievers, that was like United. That was the difference between the two. I remember talking to them in the car when I used to pick them up and bring them down here. They were amazed that I had about nine years service here, then, when they came on the scene. They didn’t think anybody could be in the movement that long at that particular stage.
Is there any area that we should cover now, I am going to go through the check list so to speak. No, wait a minute we haven’t covered the years that you were on the Board at all, on the Board of the Association. What were the big issues during those years?
BP: I think the big issue early in the piece was to make sure that the associations were bedded down, that they were all happy in the one organisation, and to keep them that way. One of the main issues, I think, as far as we were concerned, I say we I mean the Newcastle Association, was the dues structure. That was the number one thing that sparked it all off in the first place. So we came in on a firm agreement that the dues wouldn’t move for at least two years. I think everybody was pretty keen to come into it. They wanted to be part of one association at that time. They could see good advantages in being together. The hierarchy at the top, which was Bill Howe and Elliott, were pretty straight forward and seemed very honest people. What they said they would do and they meant it, which was quite different to what we had been used to in the past. We always felt when somebody told us something, it was only as good while they were speaking about it and after that well it was anybody’s guess as to what might happen. So we felt a lot more comfortable and we felt we could sit with those arrangements a lot more easier and recommend to our members this is the right way to go. But still by the same token we had a membership back here that was three parts sold and the other part that wasn’t sold was still ready to walk away with their feet very rapidly. If we didn’t ensure, and I am talking about Bill Griffith and myself now, that we were looked after and what they promised was delivered, well that was exactly what they were going to do. Whether the Minister was going to agree to it or not, they were going to go. That was the main thing that we had to do, I would say, was to bed them down and we did that.
End Tape 2B
ANSWCU44 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
Now, you were talking about the settling down of the Association as on entity again in New South Wales. What should we go on to next, do you think?
BP: Well the next part of that was that I remained Regional Chairman in Newcastle and it was pretty important that we got the then League credit unions and ANDCU credit unions together and made them feel happy to be in one another’s company. Not only in the past years when associations where bristling at one another, member credit unions also bristled at one another. What we had to do was to try them together and try and make them happy. So those first two or three years after the formation of the one Association for all the credit unions it was very important to do that, especially in the Newcastle area. That was part of my job to try and make sure that everybody accepted me. I knew that my credit unions would but I didn’t know how the League credit unions would take it, to see the opposition Chairman still being Chairman of the Region, and I didn’t even know if whether they would bother to come along to the meetings. But they did and they found them very useful, they were glad that this did come and they expressed their wish that way and we got along like wild fire ever since and it has been very good.
You are not all together yet are you, I mean you have still got the Antigonish outside? Is there anybody else outside?
BP: Oh there are a still credit unions that walked away for the same reason from the Association a few years ago since we all formed into one, and that is because of dues structure and costs. I believe a rumour around that they are going to form another association. If they do, it is all on again. If the big fish goes on the way they want to do it, I think you will find a lot of credit unions who will want to welcome an alternative association and that is where they will go to.
So you reckon Bill Howe is going to have another full-time job?
BP: Another full-time job on his hands. I think they have got to realise this. I can’t honestly see them convincing everybody that this is a good deal, particularly those that aren’t in a large credit union themselves. They will eventually see it is not for them and they will want to go somewhere where they are not going to get their fingers burnt. I can see this other association gobbling them all up.
You were Director during the time when the ATMs and all the electronic banking systems were getting in their stride. Did you agree with the way that went through and the way it has turned out?
BP: No I didn’t. I thought that was handled very poorly and it proved that way because they ended up with one enormous bill. It took them a long, long while to swallow, if they have got over it even today. They came back with a proposition, as far as I can remember now, for one kind of an ATM which proved to be the wrong ATM altogether and they had to go and re-do the deal all over again. There was a lot of money spent on research and everything that those credit unions couldn’t afford. There were only a very few credit unions that could even afford to want to be in it anyway in those days. It was one of those sort of projects that was only put on for the privileged few and I thought all the time and effort could have been better spent in doing something else at that time, rather than going into ATMs. Sure they have got a big network now, but it is mainly built up of not their own ATMs but other’s ATMs, like NABs, NAB Bank, Cashcard and all the other organisation that have got their own systems. They have all linked together and quite honestly that’s the only way that I think they should go, everybody’s ATMs should be serviced by anybody who has got a card.
Have you got some ATMs here?
BP: Yes we have got ATMs in this group here.
Are they only within this group or are they linked to the Association’s ones?
BP: No, they are owned by this group. We have something like about thirty-two ATMs in our own right here. Our credit union runs what we call a Trump Card and that is through the Cashcard system. That is because it is cheaper and that is why we are in it.
Even though it is cheaper, is it still expensive?
BP: It is expensive. It is not a cheap thing to have. If you look at the cost of your cards, your cards aren’t a life situation about every two years, three at the outside, you have got to call them in and issue them again. You have got problems with your own ATMs. We have got one, a classic example of what people do, at the corner of Union Street and Hunter Street in Newcastle West, we have a branch office there. Unfortunately in that part of town there is a brothel and they sell all these kind of books and what have you and that and amusements. There is a pub that holds way out sorts of fancy ladies not very far from it. There used to be the Workers’ Club there until the Workers’ Club collapsed, and they are rebuilding it. But from twelve o’cock on it seems to be the gathering place of all weirdos and God only knows what and when they run out of money they go to our ATM, not matter whose ATM cards they have. Some of them are half drunk and they can’t remember their pin number or what else so they smash in the ATM. If they don’t do that they hurl a brick through the window. Just recently there was a seventeen year old girl, she had smashed the window because she couldn’t get money out of the ATM, she was half drunk, she was found in the Branch Manager’s chair quaffing down beer when the police walked in wanting to know what the hell she was doing there. She said, ‘I was just about ready to get stuck into the building.’ That goes on very regularly down there, so ATMs are not cheap. They are very expensive things to run, you’ve got a lot of money sitting in them which is not earning you anything and they have got to be filled by the likes of Armour Guard or some other system and they are not cheap to keep going. So they are expensive and you really have got to have a lot of cash to warrant putting them in, and a lot of service. People don’t realise that if you are talking about five thousand cards going through your machine in a month, the machine is just ticking over and no more. What you want is about twenty thousand cards going through a machine a month to make them really pay. I don’t think there is that many ATMs about that that does happen too.
So why didn’t you go in with one of the high turnover people, like a bank then?
BP: Because they don’t have the same kind of high turnover either. Nobody has the same high turnover that is needed. That is why they are all starting to come together now. They are looking for everybody else to use their machines.
Whenever I got to a machine there is always a queue.
BP: Yes, I can never understand that. You go to a machine and you will see a queue of ten people there and there is nobody inside.
I am not talking about that, I am talking about in the middle of the night.
BP: Oh, the middle of the night. Yes, well that is this kind of people that I am talking about, they run out of cash for their own pleasure so they want to get some more money fast. But you usually find they are pretty sozzled so they can’t remember their pin number. Or if they have got no balance in their account they boot the front in. We had some bloke hit it with a sledge hammer and smash the front of one in. We’ve had people back up a fork lift and try and carry it out with a fork lift. You name it, they’ve done it. Milk shakes go down the front with regular abandon, they even do other things from their own body in them as well and so on.
I have never come across this.
BP: Haven’t you, well you want to get around earlier in the morning and you’d see them.
I used to drive a cab, I did get around early in the morning.
BP: Oh, you were sitting inside in the comfort of your nice cab.
Not any more.
BP: No they are expensive and they are under a maintenance agreement and they are like any other machine they run out of usage and you’ve got to get a new one. You are always buying them and they are not cheap, they are about twenty-five thousand bucks each.
But you can’t do without them either?
BP: No, you have got to have what everybody else has. If you don’t have the products that somebody else has you are out of business.
Do you think that the Association should have other co-operative services, more co-operative services, than they now do?
BP: I believe that if everybody would have stayed in their own backyards a few years ago, we wouldn’t have all the trouble that we have had today. If building societies had remained as building societies they would have been right. If credit unions had stayed as credit unions, they would have been a lot happier. If people hadn’t have wanted to be greedy and jump their other bonds of other people that they had, the movement would have been a lot happier.
Wait a minute, you’ve jumped everybody. You have got the whole lot in one organisation.
BP: We have, but we always keep them separate. What I am saying is you can run a permanent society for the permanent society’s purpose, for what is was originally formed for. We have got a credit union, two of them, that were formed for a specific reason for a specific purpose. We would never, ever put anybody who wanted to borrow for home ownership into our credit union, right. You might say that I say that because we have got building societies there. Well, why don’t they form a group, why don’t they get together and form a co-operative building society, if they want a co-operative building society. If they feel that they are good enough to run a permanent society, which costs a lot of money these days to do it and I think that is a bit out of kilter now but we are talking about years ago when they were first kicking off, why didn’t they do it then? The opportunities were there. The opportunities are there still today if they want them bad enough. To try and do all things to all men is not humanly possible, particularly in one society. I will just push that a little bit further, credit unions are geared for quick turnover business. That is making loans on short-term, rolling over them again into other loans for the short-term. Once you start to tie up your capital that you’ve got in from investments from people on long-term that means that it is very slow to roll that money over. If you keep on lending your money long, you will end up not making as many loans as what you should make as for the purpose that you are there, that is consumer-type loans. You will find that you can’t do both. If you keep on trying to push the image that you can do everything, you don’t have enough money in doing all things and when people start to say, ‘Why can’t I get it, that is what I joined for. I am going down the street somewhere else,’ that is when your credit union starts to fall apart. They get disgruntled and want to go somewhere else.
What about consolidation loans and loan counselling?
BP: I think that is part of a credit union. I think that is a very important part of a credit union. I do believe that a lot of people out there have been educated much better than they were when I first moved into the credit union world. We did a lot of counselling and all that. We did a survey from Hunter Street all the way the down and we were aghast to find out what the lending rates were in those days. I am talking twenty years ago. The interest rates varied from somewhere around about ten per cent to one hundred and fifty per cent on consumer-type loans. The average worked out to somewhere around about seventy-two per cent interest that was being charged on loans. Now there are still a lot of those blokes out there charging high interest rate loans depending on who is mug enough to still go and sign on it. Unfortunately, we still have people, I feel, in the credit union movement who are trying to do all things to all men and consequently what they have done is, and you will hear them, they have allowed people over the radio, papers and TV offering high interest rates for money above market rate to get money in, only to find that they are lending at much higher rates to the people that they should be making low consumer loans to. Usually those people are lending up to somewhere twenty-five and twenty-six per cent interest. Now isn’t that getting back into the finance company’s realm, to what they were.
So how do you handle that situation?
BP: We don’t do it.
You don’t give high interest for savings?
BP: No, we stay right in the market, where the market is. If the market is as it is at the moment, about fourteen point five, that is all that we give in our credit union. We only offer what the market rate says it is. I heard when I was going down to Sydney one credit union was offering fifteen point five, I think. Now that is one per cent over the market.
Yes I know some of them are, but they are offering for long-term or something like that.
BP: What expertise have they got to offer it for long-term? We wouldn’t offer it for long-term and I think we have got far superior expertise than ninety-nine per cent of the people in the credit union movement. That is my worry.
They are also saying, the more you put in the higher you can get if you are prepared to leave it in for so long.
BP: They must have a much better crystal ball than I’ve got or have ever seen in my life. I wouldn’t even go to anything beyond three years if I was going to leave it in for long. But I know some of these credit unions go for five and I think some of them have even gone to ten.
I haven’t seen any of those, I am talking about six months or a year.
BP: Oh, six months or a year is not long. You can roughly gauge what the market is going to be in that period of time. But it is a very risky business to go much beyond that and I wouldn’t like to see people, when I say people I mean credit unions, trying to gauge what the market is going to be after twelve months. I don’t think they are that much in tune to the money market.
Were you always a community credit union here, or not?
BP: Our bond originally was such that members of our component societies were the only people that we dealt with. So you had to be a member of one of our group and that was all. We then became a mutual credit union. That came about by Tomago Credit Union, which was a mutual credit union, had got to a stage where it was two million dollars and it didn’t have enough money to pay for more staff, but it had the potential to grow bigger but they couldn’t take on the extra business because they didn’t have the staff. They were between the devil and the deep blue sea so they approached us and asked us if we would like to take them over. They had a lot of industry bonds and what have you there. So we took them over and we became a mutual credit union. Pretty much at the same time, down in Wollongong, there was a metal industries credit union down there which was in difficulty. This was in the days when we were running backwards and forwards down to ASCU and I heard about it down there and I related that to my Board and they said, ‘What is the Southern Association going to do about it?’ I think the Southern Association gave them something like twenty thousand dollars to try and get them out of the mire but it didn’t do any good so they washed their hands of the whole affair and were walking away from it. So the Board said, ‘This is no good, we can’t have people losing any money that is what the co-operative business is all about. You go down and have a look at it.’ So I went down and had a look at it and it was a mess, a shocking mess. I couldn’t really come to any great conclusion as to what it was financially like anyway and I came back and I told them that. I said, ‘You could be buying a heap of trouble, or you might not be.’ They had a lot of pay-roll deductions and they had a lot of contacts with a lot of different industries where they had those pay-roll deductions and our Board said, ‘Well if nobody is going to pick them up and save their investors, we will.’ So we did. It cost our credit union fifty thousand dollars and boy we couldn’t afford that in those days. It made our credit union sick for quite a while. It was a lot of dough that was going out of our coffers just for the sake of making sure that nobody lost any money, which was a very nice principle but one I had to use all my skills to overcome, which I didn’t go much on at that time.
You didn’t think of picking up the tab to assist the Shop Distributive and Allied Credit Union, did you?
BP: No that was a mess the day it started and we could see it was going to be a mess. That ended up being a great shemozzle. Thank goodness the Association had their own Reserve Fund and it was administered and taken over. That was a terrible thing. They even started it off wrong and it was run wrong and it never improved and it just got worse and worse.
Did you think that the Common Board was a way? Do you remember in the ’70s when a number of credit unions were getting themselves in trouble and they had the Common Board which used to administer a number of credit unions in this way. Do you think it was a good response? Did it work out?
BP: I think it worked out fairly well for the League. They had their own Stabilisation Fund and there were a number of credit unions got into trouble. As a matter of fact, in and around that time we were in the Association, there was Central Association, there was Southern and there was the League. Sidney Einfeld used to take a very stern view with finance companies and credit unions and he was very positive that he didn’t want in his time of office that anybody was going to loose their money. Credit unions were starting to fall over like nine-pins. Roughly around about that time the League, I will call them that because that is a name that they were known by in those days than anything else, the League had come up with a brilliant idea of deficit budgeting.
Whose idea was that?
BP: I don’t know who originated it, but it was one that they pushed very severely. What they were trying to do was to get credit unions to expand and expand rapidly. They wanted to charge people an application fee and that was to be part of the cost of the credit union expansion. They worked out some kind of a formula that if you budgeted say for a deficit of twenty thousand dollars to expand your credit union and to go into other areas and do all these nice and wonderful things, you would be able to pick that up in say three years time and eventually your deficit would get less and less. In theory, I suppose like everything else you can get it to work out on paper very nicely, but it has a terrible time in practicalities to get them to work that way. That is what happened. They just didn’t work and the deficit got bigger and bigger. Even the Association itself decided that they would show them the way and the light and they went into deficit budgeting themselves. That was only ever got right by the members of the Association coughing up dough and getting it right. Paying extra money in with their dues to make sure that the budget was written-off. Even the king-pin couldn’t get it right. So all these credit unions were falling over, all over the place. Sidney Einfeld then decided that he would call his meeting of what we called ourselves, the Faceless Seven. There were seven people nominated, one from each Association, the Minister and so on and as a credit union fell over, we got a message and you had to front up. He expected you there when he wanted you there and that was it, no matter where you were. You had to front up and we met in his rooms and he would break the news to us and he would say, ‘Right, this is the problem, how are you going to fix it?’ The first one was pretty hard and the second one was harder. I think our friend, Universal, which became George’s River Credit Union, got all washed into this at one particular stage.
Ken Byrne said he didn’t approve of deficit budgeting.
BP: No. Well I don’t know, but they did it. I think there were some people who didn’t approve of it. I didn’t approve of it, I have never approved of deficit budgeting. You can easily get into deficit without even worrying about it, but getting out of it is a heck of a hard job. We then arranged a lot of take-overs. We pushed them into other credit unions, we arranged for them to transfer engagements. When we couldn’t do that, all of the Associations had to kick in money, inject funds into a credit union to get them lending. We found that was the quickest way to solve their problem, give them a big injection of money, get them working, make loans and generate income and then pay it back. From all of that and all that nightmare of stuff, it resolved the fact that Sidney Einfeld said that we must have a Stabilisation Fund or Reserve Fund for the movement and that is when he gave us the ultimatum.
What do you think was the main problem, or were there a number of contributory problems towards these credit unions getting into trouble in the ’70s? Do you think that it was that too many small credit unions had been started in the first instance, without being viable, or do you think it was the deficit budgeting, or do you think it was the push towards community credit unions, or what?
BP: I think it was a number of things that all seemed to happen at the one time. I think you have mentioned quite a number of them. A lot of them, as I said earlier, were run by volunteer people who only knew what they saw in front of them at the time. They could have been people who worked in the plant, and I am not saying that they are dumb or not brilliant or anything, but when it comes to managing finance it is a different thing. If I was to go out and try and weld two pieces of steel together I couldn’t do it and I think the same thing applies if you take people out of a factory like that, bring them into the office and say, ‘This is a financial institutions, now run it.’ They do their best but they loose sight of a lot of things that are going to cause problems later on. Really that was what happened. A lot of these were run by volunteer workers who when they kicked it off could handle a small number of accounts, but as the accounts grew quicker they couldn’t do it. Then arrears crept in, a lot of them made bad loans because they didn’t want to not make a loan to Joe Bloggs because he was a mate and he worked down on the plant, and if he didn’t get it he would go crook. But you give him the loan and he leaves the plant and doesn’t pay his bill and away he goes. A lot of them were caught up in the philosophy that was around at the time, that you are not for profit, all you have got to do is do right for everybody and if you come out a line-ball job and don’t put anything away for reserves or a rainy day, who cares, we are doing the best we can for our fellow man. It is all very nice in words, but in practicalities that is the way to go if you are going down the skids and that is what happened to them. So yes, a lot of learning curve but they didn’t know a great deal about it.
Well, yes I suppose so. Now Schools is one thing that we haven’t covered yet. You say that you went to Schools earlier on. Can you remember when you first went to a credit union School?
BP: No, I didn’t say I went to the Schools earlier on.
Didn’t you say you went to Newport?
BP: No, I have never been to a credit union School yet. I went to a few of the World Conferences. I went to the first conference for credit unions in Canada in 1982. I went to another one in London in 1986. I don’t know where this photograph is, I think it is in Melbourne in 1990. I have been to all their General Meetings for years and one thing and another.
Didn’t go to the one in 1979 in Sydney?
BP: I did. Yes. As a matter of fact I had the duty, and I forget who it is I think it was Bill Howe, came along to me and he said, ‘Oh, Bill I have got a job for you.’ I said, ‘Oh, yes, what’s that?’ He said, ‘I have got a Member of Parliament here and it is your duty to look after him tonight. Do you mind doing that?’ I said, ‘Righto, if I’ve got to do that, I’ve got to do it. I suppose it is my job. Who is he?’ ‘Oh he is a young fellow coming up in the Liberal Party. Come over and I will introduce you to him.’ So I went over there and he said, ‘Right, this is a Mr Nick Greiner, this is Bill Prince.’ So we started to chat away there and I didn’t know Nick Greiner from a bar of soap, he meant nothing to me. I said, ‘Do you know much at all about credit unions or building societies, or anything like that?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do, I know all about you. I know all about your group, you are from Greater Newcastle. I can tell you, you won’t exist beyond twelve months, building societies have had it and they will all be taken over by banks. Within three years you will be all finished.’ I thought that was a good way to start the night and that is exactly how we finished. I never did very much talking to him and he never did very much talking to me. He stood there and I stood here and that is how we spent the night.
You didn’t happen to meet him when he came up to Newcastle after the earthquake did you, by any chance?
BP: No. But I did know that he drove up the front of our building and I suppose he was saying to himself that he wished this had happened eight or nine years ago, we mightn’t be around. Anyway we were still here.
End Tape 3A
ANSWCU44 6 JUNE 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BILL PRINCE
There is one thing that I should ask you before we break up and that is, going down to meetings at the Association, did you find this onerous on family life and what have you? Late nights and everything.
BP: Well, my wife got used to these meetings, I supposed if she ever got used to them. She got used to them a long a while ago because they just seemed to get worse and worse. When we were part of the Union of Associations we had our Association in Newcastle, I was on the Advisory Committee as well, and we used to try and lock a lot of these meetings into the one day. I used to take another chap with me, a fellow by the name of Tom Cleggett. We would leave here at round about four o’clock in the morning to be in Sydney about half-past eight. We would grab a little bit of breakfast at one of the shops that might have been open at about that time then. We would go to our meeting in the morning, we would usually have another meeting in the afternoon somewhere else and then we would have another meeting again after tea again that night at another location for another Association or whatever we had to do there. We normally left to come home about eleven o’clock a night. So that was our day in Sydney. I can remember one time we had been to Burwood and we weren’t too sure where we were because it was very thick fog and I ran the car up on to the footpath in the hope that the lights might shine on the telegraph poles so we could see what the name of the street was, to see whether we were lost or not. We were lost and it took us quite a while to get out of Burwood that night. We would get home somewhere round about three in the morning and then up again in the morning and off to work like as if nothing had happened. I reckon my wife took it quite well and I have just found out by ringing home just now, she is still used to it. She will put my tea on the old kettle again, as the saying goes, and I will get it when I go home. She is a very considerate and I have got a lot to thank my wife for. I don’t think I could have done all I’ve done in the credit union movement if she hadn’t have been the sort of person that she is. I think everybody that has been married and has done a lot of work in the credit union needs a very understanding wife.
In this Greater Newcastle group you have numbers of Boards of Directors. How do you manage to service all them?
BP: With great difficulty. You’ve got to know the little intricacies of each and every Director. How to get what you want by not going bull at the gate at some or working round the corner so that you can make sure that if you want something through no matter what is going to happen the other Directors are in accord with it and they are there on the night. You never bring anything up if you know you are going to get beaten. I learnt a lot of this through the credit union movement and I just applied it to the Boards here.
Do you know Bob Galloway do you?
BP: Yes I do.
He is in charge of a group isn’t he.
BP: That is correct. A very volatile group too.
Friendly societies.
BP: That’s right. We have a friendly society here by the way.
How do you get along with the various associations? Do you spend all your time going to meetings of them?
BP: Yes, I do. I am expected to attend all the associational meetings. Sometimes seminars, not necessarily instructional seminars these are top management and Directors seminars. Conferences for all the various types of groups that we have here. Then make reports on them when I come back. Still attend to my ordinary business and make sure that the agenda papers for all the various societies and all the various Boards go out on time and attend the meetings here as well.
And give time to me as well, to ask silly questions.
BP: Well, that is only part of the work.
Well you have given me a lot of time. Thank you very much. What about ICUD and ICUM? Were you involved with them?
BP: No, I am only members of them. I became a member of the Institute of Credit Union Directors back around about 1980. I have only joined the Institute very recently. As you might guess being involved in this concern occupies a lot of my time and I can’t be everywhere. I have never been one to join something unless I am going to participate in it, I didn’t see much value in it unless you could.
What about the co-operative movement, which Helen McIntyre has more to do with?
BP: We were members of that here. Our co-operative housing societies and those kindred societies all were members of the Co-operative Federation. We were members of that for quite a number of years and we went along with that. When Helen McIntyre came along and joined it and took an active part in it, we didn’t pursue it very much and we pulled out of it at that particular time.
Talking about Schools, you said you had never been to any? You had never been to Newport?
BP: No, I have never been to Newport. I have never been to any Schools.
Did you operate any up here?
BP: No. We held a lot of seminars and that up here and I have acted on seminars when we were the Union of Associations, we had some in Sydney.
That is what I mean when I am talking about Schools.
BP: I thought you meant in the League in anything like that. No well the Union of Associations put on several seminars and what have you and I have spoken at those. We used to run a lot of seminars here in Newcastle and I have participated in them. But that is about all. I have never seemed to push myself out as an expert, all I have done is spoken on what I have known and what I do and hope that it rubs off on somebody else.
At the present moment the credit union movement is competing in many ways with banks, do you think that is the right way to go on? Or do you think they have got no choice?
BP: Whilst banks aren’t very good negotiators with the public, and they have proved that themselves over many, many years they are picking up their act very quickly, I think you can quietly take on the banks but if you declare them as being your rival, banks have got too much reserves, too much money and they can kill the credit union movement at any time should they desire to do so. It is like the sleeping giant, let him sleep. There will be time enough for him to awake when you are strong enough to try and do battle. The movement will need to get a heck of a lot stronger than what it is to take them on, head on.
In the days of Les Robinson’s managership of the League, as we will call it because he was during the League period, he was responsible for, though he didn’t initiate, the consolidation of the central banking system, do you think he did a good job with that?
BP: I think he did. Les Robinson was a very good operator as far as being the Manager of the Credit Union Association. He was well-liked by all and sundry. A very honest straightforward sort of fellow. Never got himself at fever pitch about anything and I think he did a good job in its formative work. Of course it took a lot of other people to pick it up and run with it from there, but he put the ground work in.
Wasn’t that taking on the banks to some extent?
BP: Well it was, but the banks wouldn’t have seen the credit unions as being anything of significance at that particular time. They just saw us a an insignificant little group of people that were running around trying to do good things for people and that wouldn’t have worried them at all. As a matter of fact I don’t think that they even thought that we would get a bank to let us be an agent. So whilst we were being occupied in that, who cares what they do.
I know banks haven’t been criticised for letting people have credit that shouldn’t have credit, but lots of organisations have and some people can claim that credit unions too, some of them particularly, are pushing credit more than is good for their members.
BP: Well that originated in the usual financial companies and they were the group that the credit unions really attacked and they won on. They attacked the finance companies and all the finance companies have retreated. You will only see an odd office of a finance company open here or there or somewhere. They’ve all either gone out of existence or retreated back into the safe repository of the bank like AGC and Avco, which is ANZ. So they really have killed the finance system. Those companies really didn’t care whether the person could afford to take the loan on or not. So long as they made the loan the Manager had a job. When he wasn’t getting rid of the money, he didn’t have a job. It was just as simple as that. I do think today that credit unions have got past the philosophies that they used to hold so dear to them years ago. They are getting back into the stream of finance companies where they are making consumer loans available at a very high rate of interest, which is not what their charter should be. They don’t really care much about the people outside because everybody is becoming more and more a community credit union. With overlapping bonds it means that everybody is in one another’s backyards, so it is grab this bloke quick before the other fellow grabs him. They just don’t care anymore, I don’t think.
There was another thing that Les Robinson particularly was pushing, I don’t say that it was his initiative although I don’t know whether it was or not, that is community credit unions.
BP: Well we are a community credit union now and being such I suppose I can’t say anything wrong about them. I don’t see much wrong with them, I think that is the natural evolution of a credit union. But we seem to have started off with ground rules for the running of community credit unions, you all had your bond and your own backyard you operated in. Then some smart credit unions decided they would have an overlapping credit union where their bond overlapped into somebody else’s area because Joe Bloggs lived there and he worked in their own credit union area. Things got out of hand and I blame the Registry for that, for allowing all these little anomalies to creep in. It means you can lend to anybody now today. I don’t think the bonds are anything. I don’t care what anybody says, or what anybody does with them, credit unions will still remain credit unions as they are today because they are only interested in one thing, that is get big and get bigger than the other bloke. With that in mind, they wont care where they operate. You can bring all your legislation in as long as you like and they will still abuse it and they will still want to go where they are not supposed to go. I think if that’s what they have got in mind, they do away with bonds which I feel they should do, throw the area wide open and let everybody go and only the fittest will survive. Anybody whose not playing correctly by the rules, they’ll get caught out, they will suffer and then they will fall by the wayside.
Don’t you think the members might suffer?
BP: I don’t think so. I think the members will be the ones who will gain in the long run. They will be the ones that are looked after properly because it will force credit unions to offer low interest loans to compete with one another, not high interest loans that they are at the moment.
Yes. That is something that Dermot used to be keen on.
BP: Yes very much so. Dermot felt that the whole movement had lost its way.
Stan Arneil feels the same thing you know.
BP: Well I would say Stan does, yes, he is very much of the very old flavour. I am not a hundred per cent sold with all the philosophy. I believe you should run your credit union prudently, you should have a surplus, you should never go into deficit budgeting, you should put money away for reserves and I believe you should also put money away for bad debts. You should recognise a bad debt when you see one and write it off and get rid of it. If you do all those things you are going to run a pretty good credit union.
Well there is one more question in this area and that is the current balance of saving and credit is correct or do you think it has gone too far the other way?
BP: I think it has gone too far altogether. I think it is like a mad man chasing better results than last year, not being one to try and stabilise the situation and gradually move forward. I think everybody is out to try and be big, big is beautiful, I think. But I have yet to see that as the answer. To prove that a lot of big permanent building societies are not with us today because they thought that big was beautiful.
Well you are big here in your small puddle, shall we say.
BP: Well, yes, but I want to stay big in our small puddle. We don’t want to take on anybody, we don’t want to cause any sort of ruffles or anything. As long as anybody out there wants to take on somebody else they can do that quite happily. I’ll just move along in my nice little quiet manner and gradually get bigger and consolidate and bigger and consolidate. I think that is the way to go, the consolidation is the way. You don’t charge off and let your consolidation catch up with you because you can run faster than your consolidation can. As long as I have got time to consolidate, I’ll be around when the cows come home, the other bods wont be.
Right. Well what about challenges for the future of the credit union movement, and particularly for the Association?
BP: Well I think if the Association goes on with this Project Renewal or whatever it is, I don’t think we are going to have an Association.
But that is the idea.
BP: Yes, I know. Well you have got no voice speaking for you then.
The Council?
BP: That’s nothing in my book. I don’t see the credit unions being represented in their true form and in their right nature under Project Renewal. I also don’t believe that forming companies to run the processing of their various trade products as being the right way to go. I think that is just taking them out of one sphere where the Registrar and the Minister can’t dip their hands in and say, ‘What are you doing there?’ They want to put it somewhere where know that nobody can have a look at it. I think that is going to cause a lot of problems because the members will end up not having a say in how those companies are run, later on. Early days everything will be crystal clear and real good and bells will be ringing and everybody will seem happy. But you give it about three years down the track when it is all done and I will guarantee you it will be a vastly different story to what it starts off with. That is when the crunch will come.
Now is there anything that we haven’t covered that we should, do you think?
BP: I don’t know. We seem to have covered a heck of a lot. No I would just like to say that I have experienced a heck of a lot in the credit union movement. Even though some people might see me as a permanent society character who sat amongst their midst and eventually became accepted I hope by all and sundry, was very pleased to be amongst their midst. I have made a lot of friends. I hope I haven’t made any enemies, or if I have not too many. It has been a part of my life, a very important part of my life speaking from a permanent society wallah. I can thoroughly recommend it to anybody who wants to get into something worthwhile, who wants to be involved and when I say involved, you get heavily involved because you will enjoy every minute of it. There will be lots of frustrations, lots of worry and a lot of outside hours work, but it is all worthwhile.
Have you any memorabilia that you can donate to the project?
BP: No I haven’t. Sorry and all that.
Well have you got any criticisms or suggestions for the project? Have you been happy with the way it has been handled so far today?
BP: I think it has been excellent. I can only commend the Association in taking the opportunity of going around and arranging for as many people involved in the credit union movement to have their views taken on tape. Unfortunately, in the past a lot of these people who have been heavily involved aren’t with us today and it is a pity we haven’t go their voices around so you can just, if you wish, turn them on and just hear what they had to say.
Well Dermot was involved in starting this. We have got quite a few tapes of him, but on more convivial occasions.
BP: Well they would be the right ones to have. That is true Dermot I reckon.
We are carrying on where he left off.
BP: That’s correct and I think he did a very good job in starting off the Historical Society and it is nice to know that it is still being kept going.
Well thank you very much Mr Bill Prince.
End Tape 3B