RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
I will ask you first Mr Monaghan, where were you born and when?
BH: I was born in Sydney, Australia, 24 September 1935.
What part of Sydney?
BH: Actually, Pacific Hospital in Bay Street, Brighton-le-Sands.
Did you live around there?
BH: We lived in Bryan Street, Rockdale at that time, which is about two kilometres from the hospital.
Did you grow up around there?
BH: I was at Rockdale for four years, then we moved to Brighton-le-Sands and in that year my brother was born, four years younger than me. We lived there from 1939 to 1958.
Were you a large family?
BH: Only two children. Our parents had been through I think the most dramatic time of development. They went through from the early 1900s, creation of many things like motor cars, aeroplane, two World Wars, Depression. Pretty hard life. Credit was hard to get, hard to buy a house, hard to even survive in many cases. No hot water to speak of and very few facilities in those days.
What did your father do?
BH: He was a french polisher.
Did he influence you greatly in any particular way?
BH: Yes I think he did. His values were very good. He realised that people had to make do, that people were part of the human race and if you show respect for others you will get respect back in turn. Don’t worry about other people knocking you at times, if you feel you are right and it seems that you are right keep going. He had great values in life. It was many years after he died that we found out just some of the qualities he had had. He during the Depression like others didn’t have a great deal of money but he shared a lot. He gave not only of his time but pooled a lot of his money. Even my mother didn’t know this. Many people came up and said it was dad’s attitude, dad’s approach to life that really gave them an opportunity to survive, just to basically eat in many cases. Now this is a quality in a person without going out and expounding it and publicly saying it, it was a good quality. It was co-operative, it was understanding of human nature and it was a quality that I think has an influence on one’s life.
What influence do you think you got from your mother?
BM: I think the caring family approach because she didn’t go to work after she married. She had to stay and look after the family concern. When you think about it with no hot water and many difficulties in life, the pressures you had, the finances that she would have received weren’t extraordinarily high, you couldn’t go and spend up big and have many of the niceties. Even though we didn’t have a great deal as a family, mum and dad always made sure Christmas, birthdays we got something. We did get something to show that they meant something. She reared us. She put us through school. We went through Catholic schools which is a private education.
Which school?
BM: Primary was with St Thomas Moore’s in Brighton-le-Sands, that was up to third class. Many the time I can remember my father’s trousers were cut down and his legs became my short trousers for school. Mum being a dressmaker before she was married managed to cut a few shirts down and make a few things for us too. Calico bags became sheets, things like that. Again it was a matter that you had to make to do, you had to survive, you had to put together what you could and do what you could. After the primary school I went to the Marist Brothers at Kogarah where I went to Intermediate stage. Mutual admiration between the school, my parents and myself that was enough for me, so I got out. I had had school and I think they had had me. In those days education was different to today. It was a matter of you go so far and then you go out and do your tertiary education afterwards. Now it seems to be that you have got to go to university to get somewhere and that is putting additional pressures on today’s society. In those days it was Intermediate and that was enough.
What did you like and dislike about school?
BM: I say it was a great time, I quite enjoyed school in many ways. I was in the A class and probably in the top fifteen. I was reasonably academic. One part I didn’t like of course if you ended up on the wrong side of the law, as they say, and some of those Brothers knew how to cane when they had to. The general control in schools, the method in which they taught you values of life, you didn’t necessarily appreciate at school but you appreciated them when you left. My father used to say, “Your holidays cease when you leave school, man.” I used to say, “My holidays start when I leave school.” But boy, was he right. You look back and you can appreciate those Brothers, particularly the Brothers at the time, they were a very great influence in your life. They had an academic course and they had to teach academically and they always strived for the ultimate in that. They were very good on sport, and sport was a matter of being part of a team. If you were an individual, a shining individual, your academics had to come as well as your sport. It wasn’t a matter of saying you had to be an academic drop out to be a whiz kid sportsperson, they moulded the two together. You learnt pretty quick smart if you weren’t part of a team, you weren’t doing both parts of it, you weren’t really accepted that much.
Did you manage that, were you an insider or an outsider?
BM: What do you mean, by participating in sport as well academically? Yes I participated where I could. I suffered with asthma for many years. I used to play League. We had our cricket teams, our class cricket teams, our class Rugby League teams and so on. I got to representative level in the running and broke a toe, believe it or not, about a fortnight before the race. That was on Metropolitan Catholic College’s joint. I never got to representing the school. I was, I would say, just mediocre.
How did you get on with your school mates, did you get on all right?
BM: Very good. I have had an association with many of them for years, we still see each other about eight or ten of us. Most of us were at each other’s weddings. In some cases I have been best man, groomsman. They have been at our functions. We still keep in contact. Some we don’t necessarily see for years but we all know that if any one of us need to contact anyone at any time, and I am talking about a band of about eight or ten quite close boys from that era, we can always get in touch with each other. That has been a friendship and a quality of life that is worth having.
What subjects did you like and dislike at school?
BM: Actually I wouldn’t say I had a particular subject. I didn’t like Latin, I got tossed out of Latin class after a while. I found that five of six ways of expressing a word was terribly stupid, it didn’t relate to the English language. I learnt Latin from being an altar boy and I thought that was hard enough, they almost killed me teaching me then. Really I wanted to be a cabinet maker, I liked to use my hands, but being in the class I was in we didn’t have any cabinet making facilities. I left in 1950 and just after the War we had very little by way of chemistry or physics apparatus that you could use, but physics and chemistry I really thought were the best of the lot, I enjoyed those. To be able to get out and experiment and do something and come up with a result, or investigate something. Not doing carpentry I left school hell bent on being a cabinet maker, a carpenter, but that didn’t occur.
So when did you leave school?
BM: 1951.
So it was after the War. Do you remember the War? What do you remember of the War?
BM: Yes I do remember the War. Well the War ended in 1945. I went to the Brothers in Kogarah in 1946. When I was at the Convent they had an air-raid shelter. It was dug out of the ground and we had to go down and put our gasmasks on, put our earplugs in, the plugs up our nose. Have our particular test in case there was an air-raid and so on. I think we studied about two-thirds of the time, and spent a third of the time in the trenches, but we never had an air-raid very fortunately. When I went to the Brothers, from there on in when the War ended in 1945, I remember this distinctly about the school, every class below me received free milk, I was always the one class ahead that never received it. Just one of those idioms of life, I was always one class out. That incidentally has carried through in life, when various government incentives to give housing benefits dollar for dollar and savings schemes and so on, my era of time born I was always one or two years out. It has happened right through life and is still there, it is quite significant and when you look back you can trace it.
So what was your first job?
BM: I went as a clerical person at Malco Industries in Marrickville. I was virtually an office boy running around, in and out of the factory, into the office, running off things on a roneo machine and getting filthy to the core, looked anything but a clerical job when I got home, but that was it. Filling sales orders and doing various things, paperwork, getting lunches, various things you do as a fifteen year-old kid.
Did you like it?
BM: Yes I did. I got to meet some people. I was a jovial sort of a person I think, and I used to talk to people and they seemed to get on very well with myself. One chap in particular asked why didn’t I start studying. I said, “Studying for what?” He said, “Accountancy.” I said, “What does that mean, I can’t even spell the word as they say?” He said, “Well we will go down to the technical college and have a look at it.” So I went down and got some paraphernalia and went home and spoke to my parents. A chap from Hemingway-Robinson came out, I don’t know how he got involved. He came out one night and he was insistent we take up a course. My father said that three hundred pound, at that time, in 1953 was idiotic. He told the chap to get out and he said, “If my son is going to do it, he is going to do it the hard way.” So I had to go to tech and pay it myself. I went to tech and studied accountancy. I qualified somewhere about 1956, 1957, that range. Then I went on to do higher study after that. I did my costing, became a Cost Accountant, I did secretarial. Then I went out into public practice and now I am a Fellow of the Australian Society of Accountants, Member of the Australian Institute of Managers and Secretaries, a Public Accountant, a Certified Public Accountant, CPA, wonderful terms.
What is the difference between a Public Accountant and a Chartered Accountant?
BM: Well a Chartered Accountant pays a higher fee for having the term Chartered as far as I can see. I can join the Chartered Institute of Accountants, but it serves no purpose. The fact that I have been out in public practice does qualify me for the right to join, but it doesn’t serve any purpose, I am still a Public Accountant and I do precisely the same as a Chartered Accountant. I think the big difference has been that Chartered Accountants were educated basically from an office environment, text-book situation, audit and that type of work, whereas a Commercial Accountant, which is what we call a Society Accountant, many of them went through industry, they saw things at the grass-roots level. They saw a chap hitting a bundy card, bunding on, had to control times, had to relate to costs, had to come up with the financial side. They then had to deal with the auditors from what we might call the real professional bodies, the chartered people. I think their grounding is a different type of grounding but very good. If they can move from there into the public arena they have got the best of two worlds. Of course at that level in the factory you see a lot. You see people paid very little, you see people with a lot of pressure financially, family-wise, every-wise.
Is that what got you into the credit union movement?
BM: I think a number of things did. I think first when my father got sick, he had a stroke and he lasted for three years and then died. He had saved a bit of money over the period, he had nothing spectacular but he couldn’t get any benefits from the government, he couldn’t get any sickness money, he couldn’t get anything purely because he owned a house and he had about one hundred pounds more than what they allowed as being a limit at that time. Yet he had done so much for people over a period of time. We had a good religious background, upbringing. I thought to myself one day that there was something in this world. They say that God created man equal, but man has found a hell of a lot of ways to bring inequality to mankind and there has got to be someway that that can be balanced a bit better, there has got to be something that was different to that. I had been married a year or two and I had heard about the credit union movement, but really didn’t get a good insight into it. We had what we called Earlwood Credit Union at the time and I went up one day and said, “What is this credit union? What does it do? How does it operate? What is it about?” The woman who had been there virtually from the inception of it, I think about four or five years earlier, gave me a bit of an insight. I said, “You will take off me to give to him. Him then pays so it comes back and they take of him to give to her, roughly this sort of thing.” Anyhow I opened a savings account and I thought I really wasn’t going to know about it until I took out a loan, so I took out a loan for some meaningless little thing, I think it was about one hundred pounds at the time, to see how it worked. I had a passbook that had savings in the front and loans at the back. Every time I paid money in it increased my savings, but came off my loan. It seemed to be a very complicated way of doing things and I asked them how it all worked internally. The next thing you know they said, “Why don’t you join the Board. Would you be interested in becoming a Director?” I said, “Well if I find out a bit more about it I will.” So eventually I became a Director.
Did you have a need for credit before you joined the credit union?
BM: Not a particular need. I had a need for the smaller things in life. I had borrowed for the house of course, everybody had a mortgage. To get finance at that stage, back in the 1960s, late 1950s, it wasn’t easy. The banks weren’t very helpful. It had to be a one income family, in other words the wife’s income couldn’t be of any concern, the wife was invariably not working in most cases then. Your commitments were pretty high. To get some of the other things, niceties of life which were coming up like say a washing machine, refrigerator because they weren’t supplying ice, you had to get a car because the transport system was getting worse and everything was going in the opposition direction, the credit union movement became a very necessary thing. They could bridge that gap that the banks couldn’t meet. The banks couldn’t, or wouldn’t, supply the money beyond the loan for a house, you were committed and so too bad.
What about things like washing machines and other household necessities?
BM: That is where the credit union came to the fore. That is where they would do the things. We were perhaps a bit fortunate, we bought an old second-hand washing machine which we thought would last three months and we had it for four years, it was a beauty, I think the bloke was stupid to get rid of it. We didn’t go out first up and buy brand new stuff, we just felt we didn’t have the means to do it.
Were you still working at Malco when you first joined the credit union?
BM: No. I had left Malco in 1958, 1959.
You were an Accountant by that time on your own?
BM: No I was an Accountant, but not a Public Accountant in practice. I went to Australian and National Industries which were over at Lidcombe at the time. I spent two years with them. I married in 1962 and it was 1963 or 1964 that I joined the credit union. It was after I was married and the need became more obvious, or I was becoming more mature in the outlook of family needs and commitments and so on. I had actually Malco at that time.
You were still living at the same place?
BM: I was living in Earlwood, the house I am in now, when I joined the credit union.
You had already borrowed for the house?
BM: Yes. I will say this. Once I borrowed from the credit union I can’t remember at any time since then that I haven’t had either a savings account or a loan account. I have definitely still got a loan account. Without that loan account I would be dead. If I won Lotto and paid it off I would probably have to go to a psychologist to find out what is wrong, because I can’t remember being out of debt in my life. With six children that is understandable.
Well I suppose that is the size of it. How long was it before you met the first Director of Earlwood Credit Union after your joined?
BM: That is a hard question.
You told me how you became a Director.
BM: Well I would have met Directors before I became a Director. The Directors used to work on Saturday mornings on rostered times. When I was going down there talking about the credit union movement, what it was about and so on, I would have met some of the Directors at that time on and off. It would be from that and the interest that I was probably showing in it, coming to grips with what it was about, that they would turn around and say, “Why don’t we approach a chap like Bob Monaghan and see if you would be interested in becoming a Director.” I think it is a matter of education over the time.
Did you have a Supervisory Committee at the credit union at that time?
BM: Yes.
Did you go on it first?
BM: No.
Straight through as a Director?
BM: Yes.
Who was on the Board when you first became a Director? Dom Arrivolo?
BM: Dom wasn’t on at that time.
Who was Chairman?
BM: Stan, can’t remember his name.
Was Ken Byrne Manager at that time?
BM: No.
Did you have a Manager?
BM: Yes we had a female Manager at that time. Stan, I can’t remember his surname now, he was a Director. From memory Pat Lloyd was a Director. At the time I came on Brian Lane, a Solicitor, came on at the same time as a Director. Kevin Naylon was a Director.
Dom Arrivolo was a Foundation Director so I think he must have been on it?
BM: No I think he had resigned. I think he went to Melbourne for some period of time with his business and I think he was off the Board. He came on to the Board in a latter period when I was on the Board. The main members I can relate to the Board were Stan, Kevin Naylon, Pat Lloyd, Magraw, Steve Birt, Ken Byrne was the Manager for a time, Brian Lane, Dom Arrivolo.
Did the credit union go along quite well at first?
BM: Well when I became involved it had moved out of the meeting room at the bottom of the Catholic church and had acquired its own premises at 263 Homer Street, Earlwood. They had built the premises, Pat Lloyd was a builder and he had built the premises. It was only 800 square feet, had a reception area in the front and a work area at the back in which they did handwritten records, from ledgers the whole thing right through. We used to hold our meetings in there, very congested, very confined area, put all the desks and tables together and hope to heaven we had enough chairs to fit five or six Directors around the table. As I said loan accounts and savings accounts were in a passbook, savings in the front, loans in the back. You add to one and take off the other. Then we had to do minimum monthly balances to work out interest loans. We had Rule of 78, you would work out a loan and then apply a loan of x-number years and they would divvy up the interest on a pre-earned or un-earned interest over future years. I remember having quite a discussion one day, when I got up and said, “I don’t agree with the method of allocating your interest. It is incorrect and will cause you a lot of trouble.” Of course that was just too much for the Board at the time.
Was Ken Manager at that time or not?
BM: Yes I think he was from memory.
Whose side was he on, can you remember?
BM: He could understand to a point what I was talking about. I think as a Manager I think he just wanted to make sure he was still in favour on both sides and the bread was fully buttered. He had to be very careful I suppose. Anyway I got to a blackboard situation and tried to spell it out. Eventually, Brian Lane, the Solicitor, came to grips with it, he could understand it. Then some of the others started to understand it and became a little bit more sympathetic and it changed the attitude of the credit union. Because quite frankly to take a six year loan that has got $6,000 interest, so it is a $1,000 a year is a very senseless way of allocating your interest when you think about it, because it probably earns about $1,800 interest in the first year and about $600 in the last year. So our allocation of interest back along the line was not very correct in the first part of our status as a credit union. I think this really was why many credit unions had a 1.5 per cent or 2.0 per cent variation between their savings and their loan rates. It was very good while you did this sort of thing because you had future income supposedly up in your accounts, but I told them they would very soon go broke if they kept doing this. I also told them there would be no way they could develop the credit union, no way they would get out of voluntary assistance, and no way they could get to paid staff, because they wouldn’t have the means, the profits, to reserve something to make this work. So that was one of the in-house traumas. I think probably Earlwood was amongst the leaders in getting this attitude of allocating interest on a straight basis, divisible by years, changed to a more accurate allocation basis. Of course they had to get a bit more sophisticated in their accounting then and they also had to get an accounting machine. We then had to get an operator for the accounting machine. We then had to change our passbooks to a different situation. We had to get the Directors involved a bit more in making sure these minimum monthly balances were correct. Of course from there it went on to computers and I think the history is known, the development from there.
Have you got any idea when they went on computer there? Was Ken still there?
BM: Yes Ken would have been there when they first got involved with computers. They had moved from 263 down to 301, which is virtually right opposite the Catholic church. They bought those premises as well. They sold 263. He was involved in putting the computer system in, the original one. Ken was also involved when they moved from 301 over to where they are now, on the corner of Bruce Street and Homer Street. They bought that building, sold the 301. After Ken left the credit union he went to Berrima I believe, Geoff Harnan became Manager here. He was understudy to Ken. Geoff was a very nice person. The Board at that time had a Solicitor, or Barrister, a QC, as Chairman. I had to resign from the Board because it decided under that Chairmanship to leave the League, which the Association was known as at the time, even though Earlwood Credit Union was Number 2. They felt that it was too expensive, it wasn’t serving them. Unfortunately it was a matter of a Board coming on that really didn’t understand the intricacies of business, what a credit union was but had the influence and the power to make a decision of that nature. Eventually it was the downfall of Earlwood. It had to amalgamate with Oatley and had to become what is now known as George’s River Credit Union.
Were you involved in the arguments at the time of Ken Byrne’s leaving?
BM: No. I did not get into that argument, that cross-fire.
Do you remember the argument about deficit budgeting?
BM: I was always opposed to deficit budgeting. I cannot accept it. I used to oppose it from the League’s point of view. That rather put me in a one man out situation in many cases, it didn’t put me on the numbers rank in the League nor in various bodies. To me a deficit budget could only be accepted in a particular year where you might write-off one particular involvement such as installation of a computer system, removal from premises A to B, or something of a very sophisticated once-off nature. To plan your future and to go into deficit budgeting has a lot of hairs on it. It means you have to recover not only what you have budgeted for and actually achieved as a deficit, but you have got to achieve double that to break even in the next year. That means a terrible big turn around, so it inevitably got to the stage where if you didn’t write the deficit off and start again you were always playing what you could call catch-up football. It was hard to get the points on the board after somebody has got a big jump on you. It had to be a very, very good reason for deficit budgeting. I still can’t accept it. I don’t accept that governments should even be involved in it. I think in the history of Australia you can look and see what has happened in the past on that too.
Yes it is a real problem. In the credit union movement for a while there I understand that even the Registrar encouraged it at one stage.
BM: Yes that seemed to be his approach.
His idea was, I understand, at that stage that credit unions couldn’t grow effectively without it.
BM: That is what he felt. That could well have been at some point that he was right. But who has to pay for the deficit down the track? It has to be met somewhere, he has to be paid for. It is OK to say today we will budget for a deficit now, plan for the short-term future, but unless you can give an absolute undertaking that in the short-term and a defined time that will be reversed, you are living in a fool’s paradise.
End Tape 1A: 4910 Words: 1 hour 35 minutes.
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
Now how did you first become a Director of the League? Were you on the Supervisory Committee here at the League?
BM: No.
How did you come to be a Director at the League?
BM: I think mainly because the members of the credit union movement wanted a member on the Board to represent community-type credit unions. Earlwood was the oldest and a pure community-type credit union. I became nominated as the representative from Earlwood to stand for election to the Board of the League and when the nominations were held I became elected to the Board. I did not go through any Supervisory Committee or any preamble as to what the League Directorship was about.
Did you know a lot of the other Directors when you first were appointed, first stood?
BM: No. I was a new boy to them and they to me, I suppose.
Ken Miller was Chairman then?
BM: Yes Ken Miller was Chairman at the time. Helen McIntyre, who was Helen O’Keefe, she and I came on at the same time.
How did you get on with her?
BM: Fairly good first up. We developed our personalities as we went on. We used to sit together because we were two greenhorns and knew nobody so I suppose we needed each other. We were both on one Committee at one time, the Development Committee, I suppose a starter’s committee so we could get familiar with what was going on.
Did you have anything to do with the Chapters?
BM: Only as representatives of the League going out and attending the Chapters as a League Director. I was not involved in the formation of Chapters or disintegration of them.
Any involvement with development?
BM: No, not of the Chapters, no.
So you weren’t on the Chapter Development Committee?
BM: No.
Did you know Owen Jones?
BM: By having met him, not to get involved with work matters or a great deal of work with him.
Were you in for a shock when you first became a Director?
BM: I don’t know that you would call it a shock. I suppose it is like everything else you approach it with perhaps a professional basis. You have to find your feet to start with, find out what it is about, how it works. I found it was in many, many ways different to the local scene of a credit union. I found that we were dealing with many, many credit unions and they all had similar problems. But the one thing I did find difficult at the League was its approach to supposed development where we were trying to develop credit unions and the movement of the credit union, the League was strapped for funds and always had to go to the credit unions and say we want a fee structure of this and were forever arguing whether it should be a base fee, per member fee, service fee or whatever fee it should be. Of course a fee went out of the League to AFCUL and down the line to other people and we were always paying out and never seemed to have enough income to meet our pay-outs and to meet our needs. The League seemed to want to go into a deficit situation, which to me always seemed very funny from an accounting and financial point of view. Whilst it is good to have deficit to develop something, it should be for a particular short-term defined situation. Let’s face it, somewhere down the track somebody has to pay for that deficit. It has either got to be a future generation or the present people asked to support it. I think history will show that at some stage there was a support given for a virtual share issue in the League to try and pick up that deficit.
Who in the League Directorship was for and who against, can you remember? This is on the issue of deficit budgeting.
BM: Well I would say Ken Miller as Chairman seemed to support the proposition put forward, probably very much by our Manager Les Robinson at the time. I would say Les was frustrated to the point that he knew he had to get things done and he had to get the means and the wherewithal of doing it. I think Frank Richards, who was Adviser to the League then rather than on the auditing side, he used to come up with Les and they would work on the budget and they would come up with a deficit budget. I think the Registrar at that time was sympathetic because the issue was probably put that we were developing and we needed to have this support and I suppose everybody said this was the way to go. I would say in hindsight that probably at least one-third of the Board was very hesitant about deficit budgeting. I know I was, from memory Beresford Calverley wasn’t terribly sure of it. I think Tom Kelly was on the Board at that stage and he certainly was a bit shaky about it because he could see what was happening down the track. But it happened, it came in, and it was used for many years.
I think the year you came on Tom lost his position as Vice-President.
BM: This could well be.
He was still on the Board there for a couple of years I think.
BM: He was. I did have some time with Tom Kelly on the Board.
Do you remember how he came to lose his Vice-Presidency?
BM: I can’t recall that. I know some of the issues there, but I might be misquoting.
I think it was the Co-operative Bank actually.
BM: Well he had put up a bank issue. I was going to bring that in because we had a session down in Warburton in Victoria. Actually the place was burnt down some years afterwards, we lost a beautiful place. I spent some time with Tom down there, we roomed together for the two nights we were there, three nights or whatever it was. Tom brought up the issue on banking and the Credit Union League didn’t want to go banking and that was for sure. Tom was a man of foresight, he had vision. I think this is what the credit union movement needed, I think a lot of people with vision probably throughout history get a lot of knocks before they necessarily come up with the goods. Maybe what they initially envisage may not come up in that form, but some good will come of it later on. I think from Tom Kelly’s approach to this banking thing we probably ended up with the Centralised Banking Scheme which has been very good for the movement, so his contribution ended up with a good outcome.
Wasn’t the issue that they were mutually exclusive? In other words, if you developed the centralised banking system you couldn’t have a bank, and if you wanted to have a bank you couldn’t have a centralised banking system?
BM: That’s true. The issue was whether the government of the day, or the economy of Australia would allow the credit unions to be mutual and have to go into a bank, what would be the amount of reserve funds we would have to put up. What would be the backing the bank would need. This would be beyond the credit union movement. Of course an off-shoot, as I think I said, the centralised banking was the next best thing. There were a lot of issues. Tom was very much pushing for a bank. He put it up to the Annual Meetings, he put it up to the League Meetings, various Chapters many, many times.
I think the argument was that when he actually lost the argument he continued to push it in Quest, of which he was the editor.
BM: Yes, that’s right. He was sold in his own mind on that banking situation. He was very disappointed that he hadn’t got it through I think. Tom felt, I think, that he had to keep the barrow pushed up the hill, I suppose. I suppose in hindsight the movement needed to settle down a bit and they probably needed that sort of in-house difficulty like a hole in the head.
Did you agree with Les Robinson? How did you get on with him?
BM: Most times I found Les was a very, very capable person. He was many times frustrated, I think the pressures were obviously there. I mean to run an organisation of this nature, to be able to service all the credit unions, deal with the State and Federal Governments, knowing that various other States were not necessarily going the way New South Wales went. We had to be a leader in many ways, we had to give protection to the movement. We also had to work at a Federal level and the complexities of mutuality whether we were taxed or whether we weren’t taxed. Then of course whether the Association, or League at the time, was to be a taxed entity or whether it could get mutuality, we went through all those traumas. I think again, this is one of the reasons for deficit budgeting, if you had a deficit budget and came up with a deficit result you certainly weren’t going to pay tax. The answer to whether the League was a taxable body or whether it was a mutual body subject to the laws to being able to avoid a lot of tax, was still unsettled.
Were you involved at all in that challenge? Or any of the challenges? The two court challenges had both gone through by the time you became a Director.
BM: No I wasn’t involved with those directly.
It was the Water Board here. Well of course there were all Father Gallagher’s challenges, do you remember any of them?
BM: Yes I do remember a bit about them.
Did you know Father Gallagher?
BM: Not personally, no.
Did you meet Father Ganey at all?
BM: We did meet him at one function. Saw him in the group of people, but not to have any great personal contact with him.
You weren’t at the Newport Schools. Sorry I got off the subject. I queried the legal challenges and you answered no. First was the Water Board then finally that was transferred to South Australia and that lost and they went the political way, the political lobbying. Were you involved in any of that? Dermot was the main protagonist.
BM: Well Dermot was with the support mainly of the League coming from Les Robinson, Ken Miller and those, and the Chief Executive. We had Chief Executives of the Board and they would report back to the Board where the situation was and Dermot was the co-ordinator with various States. It had to be of a national nature.
Were you aware of, did you have any personal knowledge of Dermot’s loss of support? You were aware of his lobbying for the tax exemption that was finally successful?
BM: Yes I know of his lobbying for it.
Did you know anything personally about it? Did you have anything to do with him?
BM: Not personally, aside from the League no.
How did you get on with him?
BM: Oh well I met him and talked to him and found him a very forthright sort of person. Very determined man. He would push what he wanted and he was very strong in his vocal pushing of points and issues and so on. In many ways people might say he is the old dinky-di rough Australian bushwhacker sort of person, but he got his job done. When he had to do something he would push the barrow and do it. Unfortunately I think he also liked some of the niceties of life a little bit and maybe they were his downfall in many ways. He should not have liquidised so much, let’s put it that way.
He wasn’t alone in that.
BM: No, but he always wanted to make sure he wasn’t the first to leave, and don’t leave a bottle with something in it.
As my doctor said if there was a famine in Australia I would be a healthy man.
BM: Probably true too. I think Dermot probably created that for the doctor to be able to make a statement.
Were you at an Annual Meeting of the League, or Half-Yearly Meeting of the League in the early days when the issue was the appointment of a South Pacific Representative to CUNA International?
BM: No, I will pass on that one.
Dermot was out of this sphere. When you came into the League he was already translated to AFCUL.
BM: A lot of these issues were probably before I came on. They had been basically resolved. AFCUL had been structured and he was in charge of AFCUL at that time. Of course the World Council was going.
Dermot and Ken Miller had a great deal to do with the structuring of that.
BM: Yes. Ken Miller became President of the World Council later on. Ken Miller was the League representative who went to the World Council meetings and so on.
Do you have any personal knowledge in that area?
BM: No, I would decline to comment on that one.
We are just clearing a bit of the brushwood away here. What about the AFCUL end of things. When they got the tax exemption, then Dermot was under threat to some extent and he lost support at AFCUL. Were you involved in any of those arguments and difficulties with Dermot? Some people refused to work with him I understand.
BM: Yes this did occur and it was a pity I thought. I used to throw a question up and my question was, “If you are not happy with what Dermot is doing, who is going to be his replacement? Don’t burn your bridge until you are over the other side. What is going to be the situation?” I would say that from the people I used to speak to at the time you would find as many supportive of Dermot as there were opposed to Dermot. Dermot had the strength in his knowledge and ability to control it and I think the pity was it was almost like an egotistical thing, or a power machine, coming within the movement. That wasn’t good. We had this at League level too. You could see there were people there who didn’t necessarily want to go along with change, even though it might be for good, because it might influence their power-base. Such as change the structure of the League from say eleven Directors down to seven, or six, seemed to be a massive thing and a number of people would lose their seats, it went on for many years before the Board did come to the decision to bring the League back to some reasonable number of members. It seemed to be that in the early stages the more positions that could be created, the more situations where people had a little niche in the credit union movement, the better. But they became expensive things to carry. Of course people didn’t like necessary changes. I think it was the same in the AFCUL situation too. Somebody had done a lot of the spadework, done a lot of the stuff, got it to a certain point and there were moves afoot for people to move in and push aside. You have got to get the personality side out of it before you can really look at the issue. So many personalities did come into it.
That is what I have been having difficulty with here. It is what I am after clarifying in the project too. Now for instance there are the personalities of Ken Miller, Stan Arneil, Dermot, Les Robinson, to some extent, Tom Kelly. Quite a number of people.
BM: Frank Richards. He was involved with both AFCUL and the League, financial advising and eventually auditing and so on. That can become a bit difficult. You are on one side supporting an issue, whether it be deficit budgeting or otherwise, and then you are saying on the other side that you have to get a fee out of the Association, or the League. So the League has to go into a deficit, but not AFCUL because that would look terrible. There were a great deal of personalities. Actually the change of personality came on the League Board when Ken Miller moved aside.
Why did he do that do you know?
BM: Well he was with World Council at the time and he had a lot of issues there and he felt it would be better to leave.
Was he pushed at all?
BM: Publicly no.
Privately?
BM: I don’t think so. I think there were probably suggestions that others should be moulded to the Board. He would be spending a lot of time with World Council and if that was to be the case they wanted the Chairman of the credit union movement to be stabilised in Australia.
Of course in some ways there was also the matter of Kevin Bain, who became President afterwards, some people felt that Ken was ruling from outside. They felt that Kevin Bain had been put in because he just followed Ken Miller, so to speak.
BM: Oh I see what you mean. I thought you meant influence from outside in the way he worked.
Ken Miller still remained on the Board, didn’t he?
BM: I think he remained as Vice-President at that stage. Ken did influence Kevin quite a bit. Kevin had not been a Chairman at that stage. Ken was still there and he still had a lot of knowledge. Working in the scene through AFCUL and the World Council it was a challenge to our League here. Also this League was probably the leading League in Australia and it had to give directives and initiative and leadership in many ways to the other credit union leagues. They had problems in Victoria, particularly Queensland always wanted to be an odd-bod out in many things. I think Kevin took the opportunity, in the first year anyhow, two years I knew him but particularly in the first year, to make sure that he used and took the opportunity of gathering as much support as he could from Ken Miller, because that experience was there and worthwhile having. He was a different type of Chairman.
Exactly how were they different? First can you describe how Ken Miller went about it and then later how Kevin went about it?
BM: I had Kevin for two years and then I resigned as a Director of the League. In those two years Kevin would be more of a pacifist sort of a Chairman. Issues would be put up, things would be placed before the Board and he would evaluate and then perhaps summarise it, this was what we should be looking at, this is what we should be doing. Ken Miller, on the other hand, was more forthright, almost saying that these issues had arisen and had to be considered, but fields are very narrowed and we were down to this so a lot of thought had to be given to A and B. C and D were a little bit down the line. In other words, a lot of decision-making had been in the hands of Ken and the Executive I feel in many cases. This was probably good because they had the knowledge at the time. Kevin Bain had a different approach to it. He seemed, the time I knew him as a Chairman, to want the Board to participate and the Board to come to a value decision on the numbers, because that is what they were there for.
Some people felt that under Ken Miller the Executive had decided what should be done ahead of time.
BM: That is what I was saying. Ken Miller had narrowed it down to A or B in the pretext of saying we had decisions about A and B, but C and D had already been discounted by the Executive. Kevin had a different approach. He would say, “Let’s look at the issues. Let’s see what we have to face.” Then as a Board we would eliminated C and D as options and come back to A and B. He had a different approach. Ken and the Executive did, to my way of thinking, do a lot of running of the Board with the co-operation and involvement of Les Robinson.
Did you hear about the argument caused by Dave Palmer putting in a report objecting to the way the Board, and therefore the Chairman, ran meetings?
BM: Are you sure this was in my time?
I think it had to be 1970, because Dave Palmer rapidly disappeared from the Supervisory Committee in 1970.
BM: The AGM was in October of 1970, so I would not have come to the Board as an appointment until about November.
I don’t think this happened at a Board meeting, it happened at an Annual Meeting.
BM: I think the issue was resolved before I became a Director as such.
It must have been because you became a Director at the same time that Dermot became Chief Executive Officer of AFCUL, and he was the one who reacted far more than Ken Miller at the AGM.
BM: I think that is right. I think it was probably the 1970 Meeting. I think that was held at Kensington, in the Round House.
I don’t know whether it was the Round House or Unisearch House, actually.
BM: Could be, but I think it was at Kensington that one.
See all I was looking at was a report in Quest. Tom Kelly was the editor of that so he might have been somewhat biased in his selection.
BM: Tom Kelly was always a vocal speaker at the AGMs, he wasn’t short of getting up and saying a word if he felt like doing it.
That is the year that he lost his Vice-Presidency over the bank issue. I was saying he could have been biased about what he put in Quest.
BM: Could well have been.
So I can’t take that as exactly read. I am trying to get historical balance here.
BM: Many of the issues that came up were largely personality issues and I think this has been the history of the movement. You would find a person, or perhaps a small group, might be pushing a particular barrow. Often times it would go on for months and there could be a lot of debate and fighting, in-fighting and that, but if the thing could be resolved, once it is resolved whether it is for or against what they are saying, the issue is gone.
Well can you give me an example of an issue that went that way?
BM: Whether we bought this building that we are now talking in, or whether we didn’t. At that time we had Beresford Calverley who was on a Building Committee and we used to hold the meetings in Burwood Road then on the first floor of premises that the League were renting. Many discussions would come up as to what we should do. The feeling was that the we had to buy a building or we had to build a building, we had to be involved in a building. That was right, but how did we do it. Did we use funds from borrowing, whether we used some of the funds from within the movement, or whether we asked the individual credit unions to be shareholders in it. Of course borrowing is one thing, and you have to pay interest on a loan and the credit union movement knew all about that. I believed that was the way we should have been going towards doing our building. However, I think the end result was that part of the Savings Reserve Fund, or Stabilisation Fund as it was called at that time, was invested to get a return, interest was paid to it out of the building account. OK we got the building in the long run, but there was a lot of division on the Board as to what sort of building we should have, how big it should be, how it should be funded, which way should we go, what even should be the name on the building. Interesting times, but really a lot of them were small issues that if let go for a month or two could be resolved and get on with the business of running the Association, or your League.
End Tape 1B: 4149 Words: 1 hour 20 minutes
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
We were talking about the purchase of the building. Wasn’t there an argument about the use of the Savings Protection Fund for the purchase of the building?
BM: Yes.
Who lined up and how on that? What was the objection?
BM: Well the Stabilisation Fund was put there for a specific purpose to protect credit unions. If it was tied up with a building and there was a need to use that fund, how could a building supply the benefit of those funds for the purpose for which they were created. Of course another argument came, that if the Fund had ‘x’ amount of money there and it had to be invested, it could well be invested within the movement itself by its building and its accounting structure whereby interest was paid back to the Fund, so why not use the money. Largely a matter of convenience I suppose in many cases. Argument didn’t sway the proponents to use the money for the building, it was done that way. The real worry was if a demand or a claim of any substance was made on that Fund, how would you get it out of the building. Bricks and mortar are great but they don’t give you dollars, do they?
You could sell it?
BM: That could be long term.
What was Les Robinson’s attitude? Did he think it should have been used for that purpose or not?
BM: I don’t think Les was opposed, but careful on this one. Les really wanted the building, he wanted to have better operational facilities. He wanted the League to come to grips on how they should pay for it and get it done. If the question was put to Les as to what would happen if the money was required and it was in the building, he would say that would be the difficulty. He wasn’t prepared to say yes or no. From my memory of it he wanted the building. If it was to be a Board decision if it went this way, they used the Savings Reserve Fund moneys, Les would accommodate it and do it through the accounting side of it.
So the next issue, that is the insurance split, you must have been involved at that time with all the ramifications of that?
BM: Disaster, absolute disaster. Something that should really never have occurred when you look at it in hindsight. The movement could do with that like they could do with a hole in the head, as they say. You don’t worry about having influenza until you’ve got it and they you think a lot about it. I suppose when CUNA and CUMIS and all that came up it was almost going to split the movement. It was getting to the stage where the whole thing could be self-destructive. It was a terrible thing. To me Stan Arneil had been, and still is, the founder of the credit union movement in Australia. I think we owe a lot to that man. He had the foresight and the power and the drive to get the thing moving in the early stages. There was a great need in those days and that need still exists today. Stan did it. It is unfortunate that the business of CUNA and CUMIS and the split that happened there. It was like the North and South of America or North and South of Ireland I suppose who is the winner who is the aggressor, who is the valiant one. There were a lot of issues on all sides. I thought it was bad for the movement, terribly bad. It was very, very bad for Stan Arneil in the end. I feel sorry for him as a person because I think he is still the father of the credit union movement and I respect him in that vein.
Did you agree with him taking the job as Manager?
BM: It was probably a decision that only he could make himself. I think he would have been best suited not to take the job as Manager. It would have been better for him in the credit union movement. But it was his life and it was his decision. He made that, and when he had made that decision it was probably not appropriate for him to back-track and come out.
Do you think he was caught between a rock and a hard place? Once he was there the policy of CUNA Mutual in general of having these Policy Holders’ Advisory Committees that were dealing directly with credit unions, on the one hand, selling insurance directly, and then agreeing on the other hand to sell insurance through the League.
BM: I don’t think Stan could of got out of that. He would have had to make a big issue with CUNA as to why he was getting out, why he was changing.
Do you think he was caught in that way?
BM: I think he was caught. He was caught and of course things developed from there on in. I think really if the insurance companies had respected the credit union movement for what it was worth it would have been very, very beneficial to them to have worked more in line with the credit union movement and worked through the credit union movement. It is like having a divided house in many ways, you don’t know what your right hand is doing, you don’t know what the left hand is doing. In the middle they are supposed to sit around a table and eat together. It is a bit hard if somebody thinks that somebody is bringing the turkey in and the other party thinks the same, they don’t even have turkey in the end, they have an empty table. They didn’t want to really allow the credit union movement to be the credit union movement, they wanted to be as I saw it the super force out there. That is very unfortunate. That is really the issue that came out of it.
Do you remember the events? Where did you first hear about the problems, who from?
BM: At Board level. I came on to the Credit Union League and that is where it hit. In any essence prior to that there was just movement around the town. Stan Arneil had come out, he had been at a couple of meetings. The Executive had a lot of discussions with Stan on the issue. Stan and CUNA and CUMIS, they were prepared to deal with non-affiliated credit unions, non-affiliated bodies with the League as well, and that, I suppose in the power struggle that many people felt wasn’t very good. Maybe not good for co-ordinating the movement into one united body. It was fragmenting really. It was fragmenting the movement.
How much of it was personalities do you think?
BM: Initially I suppose none, but eventually it became personalities.
Can the issues be separated from the personalities and what exactly happened?
BM: Well it is difficult to separate them. I feel that Stan, who had been President of the League and was still a League Director at the time, had been offered this position with the insurance companies. The manner in which the insurance companies wanted to operate were very similar to what they were overseas. Now Stan took that position, to him it was a very obvious chance to come back up into the movement proper and be in a very good position, that was a personality side. Then you probably had other people in the League and AFCUL and so on, working their ways to have their personalities and their marks on the movement. Then, as I see it, the insurance companies wanted to operate very similar to overseas where they dealt directly with the credit unions, also with the Association, and even with individual members and perhaps even outside of the members of the credit union. This didn’t seem a fair and reasonable thing. There was a fee structure to be levied, the League at that time was trying to get some sort of benefits for its members and a better insurance deal for itself. It needed to protect its members’ funds, it needed to protect the credit union movement itself, it was looking at that sort of thing. Well how can it do it if the insurance companies are going to do their own thing completely outside of the Association, League, and AFCUL. I think it boiled down to that sort of issue. Of course Stan Arneil was caught in between. He had his instructions from the insurance company, he had accepted the job, he was trying to negotiate with Leagues and AFCUL, and where did it go from there.
There is also the other real issue of the rebates from the insurance. That is still in dispute as to exactly that was the issue of whether it was a power struggle and personalities.
BM: Well the rebates became a very important thing. I mean that was a source of income, wasn’t it? It was also a source of giving some element of control over the insurance companies within Australia so that they didn’t undermine and that they were giving the right sort of protection for Australia. It meant that they would have been able to control the cost of their services a little by using the facilities of the League and the Association. Well there would be a rebate if they didn’t have very heavy claims, and rebates could come down through the Association, through the Credit Union League, and then go out to credit unions. Of course what happens if a credit union wasn’t in the League, wasn’t in the Association and it had an insurance policy with CUNA or CUMIS it would naturally expect any rebate to go directly to it. On the other hand, a credit union that is in the Association may not get the same rebate. It has got the same history as the first credit union, which doesn’t pay fees to an Association. In other words, one credit union doesn’t pay fees to an Association and gets a rebate from the insurance company, another one pays fees to an Association for a service, but doesn’t get a rebate. The whole thing became a financial consideration in the end, didn’t it? The whole structure of it was not clearly defined from the beginning.
What about the Pool, that was another issue?
BM: What happened to the Pool in the end?
Well the Pool went to America in the first instance. They wanted an Australian Pool but it never happened.
BM: That’s right. What happened to the American Pool, it stayed there didn’t it? We never got it back.
They said they were financing all sorts of things. I don’t know, is that true?
BM: Well not as a tangible thing. It may have come back in kind, in part in time. What was that Pool? How much was in it? What was it really? They are questions back along the line. That is deep dark history. I can’t answer those because I don’t know the figures involved there.
I am asking for your point of view.
BM: We did feel strongly that the Pool should be an Australian Pool. It was created in Australia, it was from Australian involvement with insurances and that is where it should stay. Why should it go back over there?
Dermot wanted an Australian Pool and he wanted to use it, they did initially use the first million dollars, for the Savings Protection Fund. He put that up three times and won and he got rolled on four.
BM: Would you call that a loss? Maybe good odds. I would have stopped at three and not had the fourth one come up.
If he got beaten on the Board he would then talk the Board round to letting him put it to an Annual General Meeting, which he then did and it was carried.
BM: That’s right. He was a tactician, a politician. A political worker really. He was good at that.
Do you remember anything of that at all?
BM: I heard a bit about it. I wasn’t involved, but I did hear a bit about it.
Ken Miller was against him on that.
BM: Ken was I believe.
He wanted, as it came out in the end, a capitation fee and that is it. A levy.
BM: That is what we ended up with. There was no stability in those early days in what the Insurance Pool was generating. If heavy claims were made you wouldn’t have a Pool. How can you rely on being able to support a structure of AFCUL or a Savings Reserve, Stabilisation Fund, whatever you like to call it, and Associations, anything if you had an uncertain Pool factor? So many influences could come in and say there wasn’t going to be a Pool this year, so what did you do close up shop? You have got to have a base of some sort of income to be able to keep your funding going and keep your operation going and your Stabilisation Fund. It was all right to take the Pool in the first place, or part thereof, but there was no guarantee there would be a Pool next year. Claims experience had to dictate that Pool level didn’t it?
I understand what you mean, but isn’t there usually some kind of average?
BM: Yes, but don’t forget if credit unions were being serviced by the insurance companies outside of the Association, or outside of the League, any involvement that they had, any expenses they had, could have if they had bad experiences reduced the Pool in Australia as such. The League and the Association may not have got anything out of that Pool. Conversely, if all parties outside and inside the Association, the League, were successful in that year and had no claims, a Pool would have created so much that would have gone, would surely have gone to other members who were not part of the Association. It was a very unknown sort of a thing. It was a figure which you could pick out and say was going to be x, y, or z. Tell me any certainty with insurance rebates. They are only certain when you get them and they are banked and the cheque is cleared, that is how I feel. All due respect to insurance companies.
Now as far as the insurance split was concerned, do you actually remember the public meeting when it actually happened?
BM: I did not attend that public meeting that I can remember. Can you tell me what date that was?
I can’t tell you the date. It was a Half-Yearly Meeting. I don’t know whether it was the Annual Meeting. I believe it was at Unisearch House, I am not sure, but Kensington anyway.
BM: I could have been there.
I am talking about the one when Stan Arneil wanted to speak and ended up being not allowed to speak and walked out.
BM: That’s right. Yes from memory, I was. He had spoken and then they were trying to put for and against issues on a motion and Stan wanted to come up and have another go. They ruled at that time he had enough time, or they had had enough of him or whatever it was, and they told him he wouldn’t be heard any further. He walked out. Eventually he walked out of the credit union movement at that stage. That was his swan song, sort of. That was in Unisearch House. The one on this side of Canterbury Road, where they have got the sculptors on the front. Unisearch House.
The Round House is a round place inside the University.
BM: Yes, Unisearch House.
It was a bowling alley I understand before.
BM: Yes and they converted it over.
I am still trying to find out which meeting this was at. Was that the meeting that, I can identify this meeting but I can’t identify the other one unless they were different see, I know that at one of these meetings Jack Bannister, who was by that time Chairman of Sydney Credit Union, Dermot had gone to AFCUL, he got up and proposed a motion of confidence in order to force a motion of no confidence.
BM: I would have to go back through actual Minutes of Meetings. I can’t give you that answer.
Do you remember Jack Bannister getting up? Maurie Ryan seconded it.
BM: I can remember Jack Bannister. I can remember a number of the meetings. I can remember meetings where Tom Kelly would get up and have a go.
This one was reported on the front of Quest.
BM: No without going back and looking at some sort of records that might be around, I would be guessing at some of the issues now, I really would.
I will probably pick it up from the Minutes when I get a look at them. I haven’t had a look at the Minutes here yet.
BM: Well I might be able to talk in a little bit more detail then. I would be guessing at some of it now. It is not as clear to answer that question the way you would like an answer to it, I couldn’t.
I am sort of trying to tie down which meeting. Obviously you were there that day when Stan Arneil finally walked out.
BM: Yes.
Do you remember anything he said? Do you remember his point? I do have them in writing, I have a copy of that if you don’t remember them.
BM: No, we will pass that one.
Now do you reckon at that stage the split could have been avoided? We then come into the matter of the Southern Association and the Central and all that sort of thing.
BM: I doubt if it could have been avoided. Destiny had sort of put it in that direction. We had gone that far. The various associations, Southern, Northern, New South Wales Credit Union League. Larger types of credit unions were wanting to get out and not have any affiliation because they thought it was expensive. The fee structure was a contentious issue within the League. There was Qantas, there was the ABC. They thought they could go it all alone. They felt that perhaps the movement had benefited too much from the big ones. Then they perhaps thought the movement could not offer them any more because they were big enough. I think it was just a point of time, the growing up of the movement, and it was growing up in a lot of little off-shoots, some need to be primed and brought back to a solid growth in the middle up. Maybe in hindsight it might have been a good thing that all of this sort of aired around the same time, because it was a traumatic time that it was developing.
Were you at AFCUL at the meeting when Stan Arneil came down there to speak and was turned away? It was at Wollongong I believe.
BM: No. I can’t remember the Wollongong one. I went to Melbourne, South Australia, Hobart.
The Berkeley at Wollongong I think. I think it was Dermot who turned him away.
BM: That may well be. No, I don’t know. I wasn’t at the Wollongong one that I can remember.
There is another one I can’t quite pin down. That stirred things up even further of course.
BM: There was a lot of hard feeling between the parties. It developed into personalities, definitely. It was unfortunate. This issues were big.
They were big enough without the personalities.
BM: Well when you get a big issue, particularly when it involves financial arrangements and modus operandi of perhaps insurance companies and credit unions, movements or whatever, a personality does have to come into it. Some people have to dominate for and against and so on. I tend to discount personalities as being pig-headed personalities, I think they were all trying to do what they thought at the time was the correct thing to do. I think there were definite attempts by all parties to resolve issues, to come to grips with what was there and come to a satisfactory result. Unfortunately some people would get their nose out of joint, some people would be hurt in the end result. But I think the thing had to evolve, it had to go through that. Somebody had to carry those personality problems to get an end result. It was no good just continuing on in that fashion.
Do you reckon that Ken Miller was overly dictatorial in his manner as Chairman at that time? Or do you think he was right to go the way he did?
BM: I think he was very strong. I would support his final action. I think he had to go that way in the end. We had to make that decision not to support CUNA and CUMIS, I think we had to go that way.
What about Stan Arneil, do you think he had to go the way he went?
BM: Well that was very much a personal decision from Stan Arneil’s point of view, because that was his livelihood. He was involved as a Manager in the insurance field. He could well have decided that he didn’t want to go that way and he could resign out and let somebody else take it, but he elected to stand in. Ken Miller on the other hand was what you would say was an unpaid voluntary Director of the League, not using that to rely on as an income base, but applying his ability, knowledge and whatever he could come to grips with for what he and the Board and others who advised around him was the best decision at the time in relation to that matter. I think there are two different issues there. One is an employment factor and the other one is purely a voluntary one which was a much bigger range.
Did the Board split at that time or not?
BM: Yes I would say there were people who were very sympathetic to Stan Arneil and his problems. Some who were very strong on the other side.
Did any resign?
BM: I don’t think so. Did you come across one, because I can’t remember any of it. I am positive there wasn’t. I can’t remember any resignations over that. It was a Board decision. We spent a lot of time trying to evaluate the situation and when the decision was made that was it.
Maybe I have a nasty suspicious mind, but how much was the Board a hand-picked Board?
BM: Who did the picking?
Was there anybody to do the picking, I don’t know? Could Ken Miller have done the picking?
BM: He could well have. He didn’t know me, had nothing to do with me before.
Well he can’t have done the picking as far as that is concerned.
BM: I think as I said before the movement seemed to feel they wanted a community-type Director. Maybe there could well have been influences along the line to pick the Board, but I know in my case it wasn’t. I didn’t know Ken beforehand.
There is nothing wrong with that. I mean everybody picks their own Board in some respects because they support certain candidates. If there is anybody standing against each other then you make a choice between the two, or whatever.
BM: That’s true, but it doesn’t augur well for a democratically elected Board if you have pre-selected candidates put up by the numbers race does it?
Well it does happen. For instance when you got put up, did anybody stand against you or were you unopposed?
BM: I can’t remember. Look I would have to go back to the actual meeting papers at that time. No I think we did have an opposition because I was elected, I don’t think it was an unopposed thing. But I would have to check on that. You see in the issue of my situation, the movement had expressed at previous meetings that they wanted involvement, or a representative, of the mutual or community-type, as we were known then, credit unions. That is what they wanted. That was a Board decision sort of allowed. They had country positions and so on. There probably would have been about four positions on the Board that were certainly not of a numbers nature. They would be the three country ones and perhaps the community-type credit union. The rest of the Board, what about another seven members, whether they were picked or otherwise I don’t know.
Of course there was a lot of development of community credit unions, very keen development by a number of people including the Registrar. Also Les Robinson was very keen on the development of community credit unions wasn’t he?
BM: Yes.
They actually had somebody doing it as well, Ron Swanson wasn’t it?
BM: Right. The difficulty there was there is a community-type credit union which is purely community-type. It means that people come in, pay over the counter, deposit money into savings or make payments off loans. Then there is another type which is a mixture between community and industrial where you have a pay-roll deduction basis as well as your community level.
End Tape 2A: 4260 Words: 1 hour 30 minutes
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
BM: I was saying there is a community-type credit union which is probably people paying over the counter and there is the mixture where there is a community-base as well as a pay-roll base. Then there is the pure pay-roll base. Well Ron and Les and decided that the best way to promote community-type credit unions was to encourage a pay-roll deduction base, which was quite a different approach to what a community credit union had had. It meant that credit unions could develop very quickly by getting a pay-roll from four or five different operations. It meant that a community credit union could be created but have five, six, or a dozen or more industrial businesses belonging to a credit union. The basis of it was good.
Sort of insurance scheme in actual fact?
BM: Well yes in many ways, but in the early stages the experience was not there. A community credit union knew from its experience what it should be doing and how it should be controlling its funds. The industrial-type knew what theirs was because they had whole of pay, or basically a large percentage of their pay, going in and they knew what their funding was going to be and how they could run. But when you marry the two together you have got a mixture of both and we had a different type of credit union come in the middle. It was a good concept and I think it had a lot of merits. Of course now it means that the likes of Earlwood, which is now George’s River Credit Union, has moved from a pure community to being a credit union that has a mixture of both. It has got whole of pay deductions for some very large organisations within its Charter and its community-type structure. Of course its bond is enlarged. Where the bond was basically people within a two-mile radius or something of the credit union office, it is now a much larger area plus membership of x-number of companies or businesses who are in that area.
Earlwood Credit Union had a bit of trouble there for a while, was it solved by doing this, by making it an industrial and a community credit union?
BM: No.
How was it solved.
BM: Putting it under Stabilisation and merging with Oatley at the time to make George’s River Credit Union. Earlwood was going reasonably well, I would say quite well, until they decided to buy a building of theirs. What happened there was, they announced that they had bought a building, the one on the corner of New Street and Homer Street. It worried me no end. I went up and spoke to the Manager at the time and said that I couldn’t accept this was the right way for the credit union to go. I would have much preferred if they were to buy that building for the credit union that they would have bought it from borrowed funds from say the League, but to use members’ savings to be applied to buy a building to me is sacrilegious and only heads for a disaster as far as a credit union is concerned. It means you have got money coming in from depositors that you must pay interest on, but you can’t let that out to any borrowers because it is tied up in the building and there is no return. You save a bit of rent perhaps, but the mathematics isn’t too hard to work out that you are going to have a very big void, a hole in the middle. Of course it was only a matter of time, less than twelve months, that this thing became very apparent. That is when the Reserve Board stepped in. That is when Les Robinson became the official Administrator I suppose of the credit union. That was when they decided that Oatley was in a similar situation, so put the two together and broaden the bond and make them George’s River. Now broadening that bond, Oatley did have some industrial, very small. Earlwood had probably Canterbury Council as the biggest industrial part. It came to grips with marrying the two, the community-type and the industrial-type and when they became a big Charter it was viable to co-operate as a credit union. Again they had to pick up all the deficits and problems of two credit unions merging together. Back to my old question, who has got to pay for the deficit when you run deficit budgeting. It has got to be paid somewhere. You just can’t write it off. So the two married together had to overcome all those problems to get back on-line. Now they are out of administration and running with their own Board.
Were you ever on the Savings Protection Fund Committee or involved in the Common Board?
BM: No.
So you didn’t have any actual inside experience on the problems of all the various credit unions that went through them during that period?
BM: No, I was stirrer from outside.
How did you stir?
BM: Well I often used to have talks with Brian Charlton and Pat Lloyd and Ken Byrne. Various people who were on them. I suppose knowing I was an Accountant I could have some input which was of benefit to them. Reports used to come to the League and we used to have discussions on an impromptu basis and I think this was beneficial to all. Other Directors might have taken the same opportunity. It gave us an opportunity to hear some of the problems that the Reserve Board and they in turn to be able to bounce off with the experiences that we might be able to give them.
I asked you about the problems that Ken Byrne had and why he left Earlwood. I asked you who could put the opposing point of view and you mentioned Pat Lloyd. Why do you think he would be the one to put the opposing point of view?
BM: Pat was always one who seemed to have a pair of scales in his mind. He always weighed A and B. He never sort of jumped in and made an irrational sort of decision, or one that was emotional. He always seemed to be a very balanced level-headed sort of person and I think he would be, of any of the Directors who are left over there, and the fact that he was on the Savings Reserve part of the credit union movement, through the League, well able to give another side of the story. A balanced comment on it.
Right. Other issues while you was on the League Board?
BM: How many more tapes have we got. Most of the day-to-day stuff that came up, or month-to-month, had been resolved. They would come in and they would go out. Issues such as mutuality, tax, fees, should be per capita should there be a ceiling on it? What happens to credit unions who go under stabilisation and control, should they go in to the one big mutual fund operated by the Credit Union League or should they be still independent credit unions? What happens when the fund that we had, had to go over to the State Government to form the Reserve Board? That was money that we had collected over a period of time. What about contributions from the credit unions to a Development Fund within the movement? How do you decide the levels of development money now, realising that it is of a long-term nature, should the people of today have to pay heavily for future people to have the benefits of it? Or should it be a reasonable sort of rate that allows development to be built up over a period of time and as needs be funds taken for that development? All those sort of issues were constantly coming up. I suppose for every argument you have for a particular thing, you would have another argument against. There was good healthy discussion on the Board.
Was the Board divided on those issues?
BM: Some of them they were.
Which ones?
BM: Obviously on the fee structure, as to whether we should have per capita, or should we have per credit union based on size. I mean you look at Universal Credit Union, or the Railways Credit Union. Could you imagine Tom Kelly, coming from his credit union he might be instructed by his Board to say we want a ceiling of x-number of dollars, well Tom may or may not agree with that personally but at the League level he has got to vote as a League Director so he could have that conflicting sort of situation, knowing that his Board is opposed to a certain thing but from a Board point of view he has got to balance that decision at the Board level.
You had that position between you and Earlwood didn’t you?
BM: Yes we had the same sort of situation. It is not an easy task.
What did happen in the end? We weren’t talking on tape at the time you told me, I don’t think.
BM: Well I was a Director of Earlwood Credit Union and also a Director of the League and we came to the stage where I found that to be able to devote time to both the Earlwood and to the League and attend to the family matters that I had, it was becoming impossible. You can devote x-amount of time, but then you divide yourself into x-number of pieces and you couldn’t get enough glue to put them all together again. So eventually we decided, with the concurrence of the League, that I would remain an appointed representative from Earlwood Credit Union to the League, as a Director on the League, and I didn’t have to perform the Directorship responsibilities at Earlwood. This went on for a year, or a year and a half. This was a fairly good arrangement. I used to go back and report directly at the Earlwood Credit Union. Timing became difficult. Some of the meetings we had to attend at the League were clashing at times with what was happening at Earlwood, and we had this bit of a difficulty. So we overcome that by putting that structure in.
So what other issues do you think there were during the time you were on there? There was one thing I know was going during that time and that was the Savings Protection Fund that ended up as the Reserve, trying to set that up. What were the issues there?
BM: Well was it to be a State-controlled Fund, or a credit union managed fund. The credit union set up its own fund initially, but its fund could only cover those members affiliated with the League, what happened to others who were outside the League. Of course the State Government said we couldn’t get our act together so they would do it for us.
What about the Kurri one?
BM: Yes. I think the League picked that up in the end, or were going to. We didn’t. We dropped it. We were going to.
The only one that lost money apparently, apart from SDA.
BM: Yes they were going to pick it up. But that is the argument, what happens if a credit union is in the League and contributions are made to a Stabilisation Fund, and if a credit union outside the League was to have troubles and that fund was to be used to pay for that credit union who had no participation or no support of that fund at any time, that is a very vexed question, a very hard question. Yet the movement could have been upset no end by any number of credit unions requiring assistance, but they couldn’t have given it. So it became an issue that the Government either had to come in and create a fund and that had to apply to all credit unions, irrespective of their affiliation or otherwise. Of course a lot of outside credit unions didn’t like that idea. They though this was an issue by the League throwing its responsibilities away to its members and asking the Government to pick them up and they had to start supporting credit unions perhaps even the League itself. But eventually the Government formed the Reserve Board and the Stabilisation Funds went across.
You weren’t even a Director of the League at that time.
BM: No this came afterwards.
1978, only a year after, yes.
BM: The discussions were on for years before that finalisation came, the funds went across. But there was a lot of discussions as to what would happen. That Reserve Board didn’t happen overnight, or within six months. There were a lot of reports coming out as to what they should or shouldn’t do with it.
Well actually the Savings Stabilisation Fund, the Committee started in 1973, but I believe it was going before that.
BM: Well the League had a Stabilisation Fund up and running before the Reserve Board. That was the forerunner of the Reserve Board.
1978 the Reserve Board happened, but in 1973 the Protection Fund Committee. Do you remember who did the original report when they came back from America. I know, but I don’t want to prompt you. It was Dermot Ryan, anyway in 1967. He and Ken Miller came back and they divvyed up who was going to do the reports and Dermot did the one on the Stabilisation Fund.
BM: I would have been wrong, because I was going to bring Ken in. I recollected Ken.
Yes well Dermot was out of it shortly afterwards, in 1970 when he went to AFCUL.
BM: I suppose the confusion comes with Ken coming in as Chairman of the League. When did he become Chairman of the League? 1970, I think.
No, 1967.
BM: Well I came in November 1970. A lot of reports would come back from Ken directly to the Board from meetings he had with AFCUL or whoever. The Executive would have their meetings and they would be reported both verbally and in writing to the Board. To ask whether it came directly from Dermot or whether it came from Ken.
I asked Ken. Dermot died before I could record him. He said that they did three reports that year, but generally Dermot did that one. Ken did the other two, one of which was the matter of the League Collection Service and the I can’t think what the other one was. The reports were written, all three of them. That was in 1967 when they went over the first time together. They caused strife that year overseas and the following year Dermot didn’t go, but Ken did. So the Savings Reserve Fund was established in 1978. So it was all your period that the battling was going on.
BM: A lot of discussion was going on. A lot of pros and cons. There were a lot of questions to be answered and they were valid questions too. How do you say that we support an outsider and how do you say if you are not in the group you can’t get the benefits. It is like a holding a gun at somebody’s head and saying you won’t get the petrol unless you let me shoot the gun sort of thing.
Any other issues that were involved with on the Board before I go through the check list as to what other issues we might talk about? Beresford Calverley, what about him? How did you get on with him?
BM: I found him a very nice guy, Beresford. A very sincere sort of a guy. Not always accepted by everybody. His ideas were on occasions pushed aside.
Which ideas were pushed aside?
BM: Well he might bring up and Dermot would say, “Oh we don’t want to hear about that,” or whatever. They would tend to push him off. He would discuss a per capita or a per membership, or a stabilised strata level of fees structure and so on. In some cases he would be before his time. He had foresight. He was a strong believer in the credit union movement, its philosophy and understanding and he devoted his life to it really. It is like when people create things, people put a lot into things and there are always knockers. Edison, when he created the electric light, or Graham Bell when he did the telephone, they didn’t have an easy life did they. I suppose if people devote their life to it, there are going to be issues at times that aren’t going to be accepted by other parties, some of the others will be accepted very readily. He put a lot of contribution into this building, he was on the Building Committee to get this building done. He put a lot into that, Beresford.
Was there a feeling towards the end that he had had his day?
BM: In some cases, some people would have felt that too, yes.
He felt he was pushed aside didn’t he?
BM: Yes he felt that. I suppose that is very hard. The human body tells you that you are slowing down, but the mind never tells you you are aging. I suppose that is human nature. Maybe that was what the situation really was. He was on the Board some couple of years after I was there, I think from memory.
He was on for years.
BM: Yes he would have been on about three or four years after I was. As a matter of fact he did become a Board member of George’s River Credit Union after leaving the League, that would probably be 1978 or something like that. So he still continued his activities at the Director level for some time.
It has been said to me, though not on tape, that him being pushed aside there broke his heart.
BM: Probably would have too. Could well have. He was dedicated. His life, the capacity of living singly, he devoted his life to the credit union movement. It probably did have an affect on him. I never went into great discussions with Beresford on that. I saw him, and had a few words with him, when he was Director of Earlwood, 1978 or 1979, whenever that period was. No I never went into great detail as to whether it broke his heart, but I would say it would have had an influence on him.
Any other personalities? Jack Coyne, for instance, how did you get on with him?
BM: Big Jack. Jack and I would have our sessions of for and against various things. Jack was a progressive sort of a person who would want to push something through, put it through because it was an idea and it was good. I would speak up and say I would liked to think about it, what were the financial implications here. I remember Jack saying at one stage something about, “Ruddy hell, can’t we forget about the financial side, look at that secondary.” It sort of put me down, but at the same time I said, “Well if it is a good thing, we will have a look at it later on on the financial side.” I think that was what we needed on the Board. He was prepared to push and say, “Let’s have a look at it this way.” Very nice sort of chap to deal with. Always very concerned about the role he played on the Board. I liked Jack.
What about any of the others, Tom Kelly?
BM: I had a lot of time for Tom. He was a very, very nice chap. He came from Universal which was a community-based credit union. I think the real philosophy is in that type of credit union. I think that is where it started and I think it has developed from there. If you have really got an understanding of what credit unions are about it is very hard to lose it once you have got the philosophy and understanding from community-type credit unions.
A few pay-roll deductions on the side?
BM: No. That is when the whole thing changes. The pure and absolute philosophy of a credit union is mutual self-help for the members to serve the members. You look at a community-type where you must have a person come in and pay money into a savings account, or pay off a loan.
What if they haven’t got the will power?
BM: That is self-help. That is motivation, that is community credit unionism. If it is the matter of a pay-roll deduction whereby all of their pay goes in and they can withdraw that pay in part or in total at their own whim, it is purely a clearing house. The philosophy and understanding that my savings put in are being used for some other person to satisfy a need, whether it be a very big need or a selfish need but to satisfy a need, my pooled savings with other people are being lent out to somebody to satisfy their need. Now that person who has borrowed that money also has to come up and physically pay the debt, because it is not a pay-roll deduction automatically to pay off a loan. In other words once it is established through a pay-roll deduction authority, the savings go in, the loan payment is automatically taken out, so you mightn’t worry about the credit union for three years after that, because it is automatically done, all been catered for and cared for. Until you want the credit union again you don’t have to go and see it, you don’t have to worry about it. The other way, the community-type, you are part of the community you do have to go to that credit union, you do have to be involved and you do know why your money was put there and why it has gone out to somebody else.
Do you think that is part of what is wrong with the credit union movement? Or do you think there is anything wrong with the credit union movement?
BM: I think there are a number of issues that the credit union movement should be facing, and facing very seriously. Yes I do. I think there has been an update and I think the credit union movement has had, and I will use the modern term, ‘yuppies’ come in and we have had to have more sophisticated management people and so on. I think all these have contributed to a development of the credit union to an up-market type of operation and I think the philosophy of the credit union movement has been lost. I have discussed this with a number of people. I have been quite surprised at the reaction I get. They say, “Well you can’t be what we had before, the in-house cottage discussions about what a credit union is about.” I said, “No we can’t, but we can certainly tell people what credit unions are.” I meet people who I have known in my time, about my age bracket, who were members of credit unions about the time I was, back in the 1960s or so. Their children will now be in their twenties, some of their children. If I talk to their children I am quite surprised that their parents did put them in as members, but the children really haven’t bothered to find out what the credit union is about. Their membership may be eight to ten years old but they haven’t done anything with it because they are out to finance companies, out to banks, they have got key cards and Visa cards all over the place. It is a convenience factor. They don’t even understand what a credit union is. Now a credit union, what is its future? It is like the future of Australia, it is the youth. If you don’t get to understand what a credit union is, if the youth of today don’t understand what a credit union is, how are they going to be able to support the youth of tomorrow? They will become the aged ones later on. A lot of the oldies are moving out. They are not moving out necessarily because of wanting to, it is maybe age, maybe retirement, death, it is all sorts of things. I think some of the history of the credit union movement management has not been what I would call the most brilliant because of academic controls at the top. I am not saying it is a failure, it has probably been good in some aspects, but I think the philosophy and the understanding of what a credit union is about is very vital. It is important and I think the credit union movement has tended to lose it. You, yourself, you are a man of this world and I will ask you why aren’t you in a credit union?
I am peculiar, I don’t borrow money.
BM: You don’t have to. There is a person out there who needs to borrow money. Maybe a hundred dollars put in by you might help a family stay together because that hundred dollar pays for something that just keeps that family going.
It is not quite true, when I wanted to borrow money nobody would lend it to me because I wasn’t a good risk, and they were right.
BM: Why? You didn’t try a credit union did you?
No, I didn’t.
BM: Well why say nobody would lend to you. You see you make a carte blanche statement, but you don’t know, you didn’t try the credit union.
Well my attitude was I shouldn’t borrow money because I had no hope of paying it back.
BM: Well that might be true, but that wasn’t what you said, you said that nobody would lend it to you.
Well the only times I have ever wanted to borrow money were the times when nobody should lend it to me.
BM: That is different to what you said. Now getting back to the philosophy. How about if I put it this way, the credit union movement in Australia, and we will talk about Australia, is the only body I know that is and can be truly national. It is a non-profit organisation, it makes surpluses and you can call them profits and they go into reserves and so on, but it is a non-profit organisation. It should never, ever get out there and compete against itself, against another credit unions. It should be, and must be complementary to other credit unions.
End Tape 2B: 4468 Words 1 hour 25 minutes
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
You were saying about the differences.
BM: Yes I said that banks and building societies and so on can’t really claim to be really national because they are in a competitive field, they must compete against each other, they are owned individually by different shareholders, they are public entities. Building societies might be owned by their members but they are not a co-ordinated body like the credit union movement is. They are all vying for that slice of the action out there. This is were the credit union moment is a philosophy on its own. It should really be proud of those grass-roots and it should capitalise on those grass-roots. If they don’t promote it and keep it to the fore and let generations come on understand what it is about, what its philosophies and ideals are, how can they expect those future generations to carry on and really have it working in the direction is should be working in.
You can’t go back surely?
BM: No, you can’t go back. I am not saying go back to the cottage style of operations.
You can’t even go back to the early start of the credit union can you? You have got to have differential interest rates and all that sort of thing to compete?
BM: That is on the money market, but the process of purpose of what a credit union is as a self-help group of people with a pool of funds made available for the benefit of other members, and it is owned by its members. On a national basis the benefits that can come to the movement are great. You have got your insurance to start with, you have got your computerisation, you have got your service facilities, you have got your interest rate factors, the mobility of funds, services from one area can be used to another, disaster relief situations like Newcastle. How can people up there, if they haven’t income, where they are vastly cut in their income, credit unions up there would have a great deal of difficulty surviving let alone progressing. Now the movement in its total concept can do a lot to help those sort of situations. That is when the credit unions are to the fore, they are the ones. You take an average person going to buy a home now, or a major expense, run a family that is like running a business, it is terribly expensive. I don’t think you will find banks and building societies are going to be the support factors for keeping that family together. You go in and buy your house, you get your washing machine, you get the things that you have to buy, not just the great big richness of this life. But how do you know your washing machine is going to last for five or six years, after two years it blows up you have got to replace it. Then you find suddenly at the same time your car has hit a rock or something and the motor blew up and there is another $2,000 there. You go to the bank and you say, “I am committed to a $90,000 debt, my wife has had one child and we have got a second child coming. She is on six months maternity leave. She will go back to work after another twelve months.” The bank will say, “Well I am sorry Charlie.” You say, “Well I can’t get to work I haven’t got my car.” The credit union will support the family regime. Now if the family and its existence as such is not paramount in Australia heaven help our future generations. We have got to support the family. If you get married and have a family it has got to be supported.
So what is wrong with the credit union movement in that sense?
BM: There is nothing wrong with the credit union movement, provided they don’t lose the philosophy and the understanding of what credit union idealism should be. I think they have to promote back through youth. I think youth is the future of Australia, it is the future of anywhere. I don’t from the ads and various things I see I don’t see enough progression of this back through the youth. There seems to be an attitude of you can belong to a credit union yes if you are a saver, you get interest on your money. If the interest rate comes down there is a squeal as to why my interest rate is dropping, so I pull my money out and go somewhere else, so you put it in a very competitive market. On the borrowing side there seems to be an attitude of, I want it for this and I want it for that and when I have paid up my loan, I couldn’t care about a credit union. I don’t have to save money with it, I can get as good a rate with the Commonwealth Bank or somewhere else, so I will leave all my money there. I have paid my loan off, what are you squibbing about. I have done my part, I have paid my loan, I have kept my commitments. There should be an undertaking or an understanding with people that righto they borrow the money and when they have repaid that, or if they can put a bit more into savings while they are repaying their loans, their savings are going to help somebody else who needs the money at that time. I think this is the thing were the credit union movement had, when it was first created many years ago, a need and it was created to meet that need and that need is still there today.
I am not a credit union person, but there is one thing that would make me put money into credit unions. If somebody said to me, “Look you put your money in to the Commonwealth Bank there and you have it in the chequeing account and you don’t give a darn, it is in there and you don’t get any interest on it but it is convenient for your accounting purposes. Now if you it put into the credit union movement here, it will still be handy for accounting purposes, they will keep track and do everything for you in that way, but it would go towards low cost loans for other people rather than going at the regular rate.” I would be in it. Why don’t they do that?
BM: Well why don’t they?
Well they don’t.
BM: Well maybe they should. It is coming back to the very thing that I am talking about isn’t it? The self-help, being able to make that money do the things it should be doing, the best services at the most economical rates.
In order to get it in to use it at economical rates, if I lent to the credit union, put it in the credit union now, it goes out at ordinary rates, high interest rates to other people. I am not interested in lending to anybody at high interest rates. I would rather have it lent to people at low interest rates.
BM: I quite agree. Why doesn’t that occur? Why do we have this high interest rate? Is it because of the attitude of modern day management. Should their attitude be changed. Should it be if the banks are running at 22 per cent for say unsecured loans, or top sort of lending rates, and down to 17.5 per cent for housing, should the credit union be 1 per cent above the banks all the time or 1 per cent below.
I reckon that is what they should be marketing. I tell them but nobody takes any notice of me. I say there is a lot of people out there who don’t care a darn about the interest they are getting, but if they could do some good with their money they would be in it, especially if it cost them nothing either.
BM: I quite agree.
They are not marketing it right.
BM: That’s right. I agree.
You are the first person who has. Generally what they say is, “Ah but you can’t do that because you wouldn’t get any money in.”
BM: Why wouldn’t you?
I think you would.
BM: If you have got a interest rate, you have to be in the market to pay an interest rate.
They say also, “You can’t do that because the Registrar won’t allow you.”
BM: Has he said that publicly?
I don’t think so actually. What is more if Dermot heard that he would say, “Well get the law changed.”
BM: Maybe he was right. Maybe he is speaking from the grave. I have never heard the Registrar say that. Who runs the credit union movement?
I should ask that. Who runs the credit union movement?
BM: It should be the members. Is it run by the Registrar who dictates what we should or shouldn’t do. He should issue guidelines on controls, but are we allowing the credit union movement to be stifled, are we allowing that sort of effect? I put a question to a very, very senior Minister of the Government’s Financial Department, I will put it to you and see what sort of answer you might give. They say there is a limited amount of money in Australia, and that is true. X-amount of money is produced and it is available for use. So much of it is in what we call the financial side, the market side, and so much is in the industrial side, or the manufacturing. Make those as two divisions. Do you think that level of money that is in both changes from year to year? If it was x-number of millions in one and x-number of millions in the other, do you thing those figures would change from year to year? If so, what factors could make those change?
I wouldn’t have a clue.
BM: The answer I was given by this very senior Minister was that there is no change, that the volume of money stays exactly the same. I thought that was fascinating. If for instance a manufacturer has $10 million worth of stock, $10 million worth of debtors, then his net return is 15 per cent, but he has got to carry those debtors. If he was to halve his stock by $5 million and put that $5 million on the money market and collect $5 million of his debtors and put that on the money market, he has got $10 million that might earn 24 per cent rather than his 15 per cent. He has moved money from the manufacturing or production side on to the money market.
I see that as well, because I come from a manufacturing sort family and I have a manufacturing sort of mind. I think one of the main things that has happened to Australia is the fact of this churning over of the money isn’t doing anything at all. They are constantly looking around for something productive, but they never do anything productive.
BM: So what happens is we end up with what we call paper profits. That company in the end ends up with a much higher profit. It has to pay tax on that profit, so it has to reduce its investments in those investments and it pays its tax. Then if interest rates drop on those investments and as productivity levels pick up it has got to start buying stock at a higher rate than what it sold its reduced stock level at. It has got to start funding its debtors again, so it is going to go back to its lower level of return, which is 15 per cent and probably much less than 15 per cent. So we are killing the Australian incentive of manufacturing. This is getting perhaps into economics, but it is also an area that banks, building societies, credit unions and so on should be putting their influences into. I mean credit unions have got to survive in this market and they are subject to a lot of pressures from a lot of other sources. I think the credit union movement, if it can get its act together on a national basis, can do a lot of things to try and help the economy of Australia and help itself.
Incidentally, isn’t the credit union movement actually fuelling that thing, because all they invest in is the money market? They are just churning the money around, they are not actually investing practically in anything productive.
BM: Maybe you are right. Is that the right way to go?
I think not.
BM: Well why doesn’t somebody in the movement have a very strong look at it and get back to grass-roots?
When I get Reg in your chair and Stuart Gillies I shall have another go.
BM: You want me to be hung do you? No I speak with my own voice now.
I have been looking for questions which seem to me to be worth asking and you have just given me a couple there.
BM: I will have to charge you how much an hour? I will put a fee on you, where do I send it to.
Well we had better get on with it. You haven’t been involved with a Chapter, the Institute of Credit Union Directors were you involved with that?
BM: No.
The Institute of Credit Union Management?
BM: No.
Other Leagues?
BM: No. Only when I talked to various Directors of other Leagues through meetings of AFCUL or on occasions have to meet them on a social basis, but no direct managerial or other involvement.
AFCUL? Have you been involved in that at all, even as a delegate?
BM: I was alternative delegate from the League one year. I attended with other League Directors at every AFCUL meeting that was on during my Directorship. We travelled to Victoria, to Hobart, to Adelaide, wherever it was. I attended all the AFCUL Annual Meetings.
How many years were you doing that?
BM: Probably about six.
What happened during that period? What significant things can you tell me about during that period?
BM: To be successful there you needed to know a hell of a lot about politics, you needed to be a numbers man really. A lot of the issues were canvassed before things were put to votes. Possibly this is the way to do it. You iron out a lot of the negatives, or some of the minor points that could take a lot of time at an national Annual Meeting. At the same time, it probably leads some people who have got a very, very good method of pushing a barrow gives them an opportunity to push a barrow.
Were you ever on the Executive at all of AFCUL? Never on the Board?
BM: No. I am not a numbers man.
So you only saw it from the outside then?
BM: That’s right. As an observer and a visitor to the AFCUL meetings.
How much did you know before you went to the meeting? Who briefed you?
BM: We would be briefed at our League meetings by Ken Miller.
You were a Director all the time?
BM: Yes.
How would he brief you? He would tell you the state of play, the numbers?
BM: Not necessarily. No. We would get the papers, the agenda that was coming through from AFCUL. We would, as a Board, look at the issues on that AFCUL paper and if we decided that we should be supporting or not supporting a particular issue put up by another State or by individual credit unions, or AFCUL itself, we would discuss that at Board level. Our delegates would be requested that when they went to AFCUL they should be voting in the direction that the Board, the League Board of New South Wales had decided. Well of course if the issue changed in the sense that other factors had come out and there had to be another decision, well the Committee who were elected to represent views from the League could make a valued decision based on what had come up to change their opinion. We as a League used to go through all these agendas and sort out what our thinking was before we went to the meeting. I think in many cases that had to be, that was probably a good thing, but it also meant that support for a particular issue had to be a majority support and I think if it was a good issue, a strong issue it had to be sold to other people. That is what I mean by numbers, you had to have people up there who could promote and sell that particular thing that is being put up on the agenda. You had to have the ability to be able to put that strongly.
So who was Chief Executive Officer of AFCUL at the time you first went, Dermot or Kevin Murray?
BM: Dermot. The whole time I was there Dermot was.
Kevin Murray took over from Dermot in 1974. Your involvement on the Board was 1970 to 1977. I don’t know anything else.
BM: 1974 Dermot went out?
In 1975 they gave him his farewell at the AFCUL meeting in Canberra, March.
BM: Yes that was at the Lakeside, yes. Kevin Murray took over after. He was the Chief Executive on the administration side of it. I will bow to your correcting my knowledge on that.
That is from the records you understand.
BM: Yes, I know Dermot did retire about two years before I resigned out of it. I would not have gone to the 1977, the last year of my term there I did not get to that AFCUL meeting. I was out before that last AFCUL meeting. So it would be one meeting that Murray would have been the Chairman.
He wasn’t the Chairman, he was only the Chief Executive Officer. Incidentally the President of AFCUL when you first were there was that Graham Benson of Victoria?
BM: Graham Benson?
For instance were you an alternate delegate and did you attend the meetings right from the start when you were a Director of the League in 1970?
BM: I went to the AFCUL meetings in Canberra, Tasmania.
Canberra was 1975. Tasmania was 1974, that was when they announced the tax exemption, Frank Crean, do you remember that?
BM: Yes Frank Crean, I remember that one. That was at Wrest Point. We went to South Australia.
That might have been the one before that, 1973.
BM: Then the old Melbourne in Melbourne.
I think that was 1970 or 1971. 1972 was the Berkeley in Wollongong.
BM: I never got to the one at Lennin’s in Queensland. The Lennin’s one was before I came in that would 1970.
What about after the Canberra one? 1976 or was it 1975 the last one.
BM: What year was one held in Sydney?
Well I haven’t got a list of them here, I was really going from memory.
BM: I think 1977 it was to be held in Perth I think. I am just trying to recollect what happened with 1976. I would have to look at the records, but I got most of the others but 1976.
Unfortunately the sort of research that is required for that sort of thing I haven’t really got round to, unless someone pays me I am not going to.
BM: I can’t answer 1976, I can’t remember.
So you were there for all of the ones that Dermot was Chief Executive Officer and his retirement?
BM: Yes. When he went through the business of the tax exemption. Good times to get that tax exemption.
Well that has been very interesting too. The Australian Foundation, were you anything to do with that?
BM: No, not directly.
This is your first involvement with the Australian Credit Union Historical Co-operative?
BM: Yes. I knew it was going. I had spoken to Tom Kelly many years ago and knew he had been involved and was trying to get it together, but this is the first time other than when you spoke to me on the phone. Rather floored me with the idea that we were going to tape something.
CUNA in America, have you ever done any overseas trips?
BM: No.
How about CUNA International?
BM: No.
You didn’t go to the 1979 one here?
BM: I was out.
That was the World Council.
BM: I wasn’t a Director then.
What about the South Pacific?
BM: No. They kept me in the back room, they didn’t want me to stir up too much.
Well maybe they have been treating you like a number, ever thought about that?
BM: Yes. Don’t like numbers.
Any more personalities that you should mention that you don’t think you have mentioned? Nothing to say? Anybody else that you know in the movement who stood out for one reason or another, that you either clashed with or were very friendly with?
BM: I used to relate to all of them as best I could. I always felt I had a job to do and they had a job to do. We would have discussions over a cup of coffee or after a meeting and you might have had pretty hefty words at a meeting regarding particular issues, but you can sit down and have a cup of coffee and talk it over and discuss why you went one way, why they went one way and come to a balanced respect for each other. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye, particularly with Frank Richards and that seemed to be strange because we were two accounting people.
Stan Arneil was an Accountant too.
BM: Yes I know, but he wasn’t operating in the accounting field, he was operating more in the management side of it. I was in the Public Practice days then and of course Frank Richards was also doing Public Practice work. He was doing this consultancy work for the League and of course we mentioned previously the deficit budgeting. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with the way that Frank would like to pull things up. I think it was healthy discussion because we bounced off each other. The great thing of that was we got to one stage one night of throwing things around on a purely professional basis and I think it was either Ken Miller or Kevin Bain who came up and said, “Any chance we can come into this discussion. Any books that you can give us to read up on.” I think we got a bit technical and even Les was quite prepared to let it go at that stage. We tried to keep those things right out, but when it did happen they would come back with, “Is there a book we can read to bring us up to date?” It is like going to a doctor, I suppose he can say you have got appendicitis or something, but if there are half a dozen doctors there they will put on turns and you will say, “What have I got doc, do I need a carriage to Rokewood or what?” Talk in simple English.
Mind you I would ask them if there was a book I could read as well. They look at you rather funny when you go in the medical library at Sydney University as well, if you are an outsider, but they don’t kick you out.
BM: What do they do, give you a book to read?
If you go up and say, “I want something on this, can you help me?” They say, “Are you a medical student?” I say, “No.” But they help you, but they are very taken aback by it.
BM: I don’t think the accounting profession is that bad.
There is another one at Rozelle. Central Banking, we have covered that.
BM: Yes. Well that was a good thing. I think that was excellent and is still working very well.
Supply and other services, yes. The travel services. Do you think the services they are providing, the co-operative services they are providing for other credit unions and their members are a good idea? Do you think they should provide more services?
BM: I think they are a good idea if they are cost-effective services.
Well travel isn’t cost-effective, it is merely keeping people in the credit union.
BM: Well could be made cost-effective.
That’s a thought. Nobody has said that to me before.
BM: Why can’t it?
I don’t know. They say the only reason they have that service is that their members would go elsewhere, maybe to some other organisation and they might lose them as a customer completely.
BM: CUNA and CUMIS had a pool of funds didn’t they, rebate systems. That became cost-effective didn’t it. Leave it at that. Seriously, I think you have always got to look at what ever service you provide being a worthwhile service, it has got to be cost-effective in the long run. In other words it has got to be a service that is worthwhile putting in. To give you a simple example, you can go to a club somewhere and you can pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee served by somebody behind a counter. You can go to another club down the road and it will have a coffee machine there that you don’t have to pay anything for a cup of coffee. Now honestly the cost of having somebody serve that coffee behind the counter with everything involved with it, washing cups and so on, has to be recovered, whereas to have a machine there that just gurgles out some press buttons and throw-away cups, probably makes it a little bit more cost-effective. The coffee is still supplied. Maybe we should look at the method of the way the credit unions are doing these services. There may well be a way to make it more cost efficient, or cost-effective. But services must be given, after one has evaluated the worth of that to the movement and to the member, and the cost-effectiveness of it. I think some of our services on ATM and electronic transfer funding and so on, it is done different to banking and the credit unions have carried the cost of it. In some cases it has been a heavy cost which has been of benefit to the users of that system within the credit union, but those in the credit union who haven’t used the system have really paid the cost of those that have used it. I think the same comes on the travel side.
Generally speaking they try to break even on the travel.
BM: Well that is better than losing.
They aren’t allowed to lose I don’t think.
BM: Well it is still better than losing, as I said, if they break even. If they don’t make a profit well it’s something we have got to wear. But I think they should look at that, keep an open mind on it all the time. I think the biggest thing with the credit union movement is that it has got to be openly national.
End Tape 3A: 4530 Words: 1 hour 30 minutes
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO ROBERT (BOB) MONAGHAN
We were just talking there about cost-effectiveness of the co-operative services that are running in credit unions. I must admit it is a barrow I have been pushing for a while. In America they have got a lot into things like financing co-operative housing. Now the schemes that the government has got going in this country are already going that way and I can’t help thinking there would be a terrific market out there with the price of housing at the moment. The only one organisation that has gone in with the government on this is the St George Building Society. It has done it at full market rates and all the rest of it. Don’t you think the credit union should get into things like that, the coming co-operative things?
BM: I don’t know that necessarily they should. The cost of housing is extremely high in Sydney, but that is where it stops. You can buy a house over in Perth, for instance, and your contribution towards a house is far less than it is in Sydney, yet your rate of income can be very close to what it is in Sydney over in Perth. Now Queensland is cheaper, Tasmania. South Australia gets up a bit, Victoria is a bit closer. But we are relating that to Sydney. Now we have been talking about a national type of credit union movement. Now if we are looking at national we would be looking at something that is going to be effective to Australia as Australia. It would need a lot of research for somebody to say we are going to go into this co-operative housing venture. What does it mean? It means that the credit union would virtually own the home, wouldn’t it?
Not generally speaking. The ones that I have seen operating is the co-operative that owns it, you lend to the co-operative. Individuals own shares in a co-operative instead of a whole house, they don’t own a whole building. Some of the people that have shares in it they can actually own large shares in the co-operative, or alternatively they can own and own, or they can own and rent, or they can do it anyway they like. You could do it just as a financial thing.
BM: OK the co-operative would be a body on its own set up to own that particular group of housing, or block or whatever it might be. Manage, or rent it out, whatever the situation is. The building societies have gone into that. They have also got into another type of co-operative situation to, whereby they pool resources of we will say estate agents and solicitors. Like a solicitor might have a client that has got x-number of thousands of dollars. That may not be big enough to lend out to somebody to borrow money, but he can go along and invest it in say the building society and that building society can arrange funds to be made available from that building society to the solicitor’s client, because that solicitor has pooled a number of his smaller clients into one fund through the building society to arrange a loan to go out to another person. It is another form of mutuality or co-operative venture being undertaken. But I think you have got to look very seriously at what the credit union is about, it has not been up until now, and I don’t think it necessarily should get involved, in a lot of lending long and borrowing short situations. Now you would look at a co-operative whereby the lending could be over twenty, twenty-five years, or fifteen years plus. Now if the credit union movement gets into that, it has got to change and have a different attitude towards it reserving, its funding availability for people who may wish to have their funds mobile, to be able to take out on short-term notice. You are just getting more into the building society realm of things. You can perhaps assist in this field, but I think it would need a lot of looking at and very serious discussions and thought put into it before it really gets into that field.
But it could be a field where the credit unions could do something productive rather than churning their money round.
BM: Maybe the money we are putting into the short money market now may best be put into a co-operative situation which is of a longer term and fully secured by real estate.
Very high rates of interest.
BM: No. We may say if we are getting 22, 23 per cent on the money market, it may drop down to, as a figure, 19 per cent on the other side on a co-operative basis. But if it is serving the members and it is doing what the credit union movement is setting out to do that would be a few per cent under the other element and it may still work very well for the movement. It may well be something to look at.
What I get off my savings bank, 6 per cent?
BM: I don’t know. Do you have a savings account?
I have a savings account at the Commonwealth Bank.
BM: Well that is silly, it should be in the credit union, you get more.
You tell me that and I don’t want more. I really want it in some place where it is doing a bit of good. As far as I am concerned the only people I ever had a housing loan off was the Commonwealth Bank and I got it off the Commonwealth Savings Bank. Now I put my money in there and I hope other people get their loan and what have you. I suppose I should come along to the credit union and put it in there instead, but they don’t lend it out cheaply.
BM: I disagree. The credit union will lend unsecured moneys. Now that has a cost factor. It is probably in the 20 per cent plus range at the present time.
Surely that is not so. Surely it is just competing for the market?
BM: But is still unsecured money.
But they are not marketing their product in order to get money in at lower rates of interest so they can lend it out again at lower rates of interest. I reckon they should do that as well.
BM: Well that comes back again to the philosophy of credit unions. You get it right. If you are to put the pure philosophy of credit unions as it was from the original start, the low interest loans and virtually no interest on savings, but we are mutually helping each other, co-operative helping, we are going to find in the market as it is today we would have trouble perhaps attracting money into the savings side of it. This is a reality of life at the present time. Now it is an argument put up that is very, very right.
Well Tom Kelly said to me on one occasion, he started some accounts, pensioners started to come to him saying they didn’t want any interest, just put it in the account. So Tom started little accounts for this purpose and he was pulled up.
BM: Well that is fair enough.
Tax people reckoned it was a tax dodge and the Registrar reckoned he shouldn’t be doing it.
BM: I quite agree.
Well why not? Why not have low interest accounts where they can lend out
BM: You said no interest.
Well in this case it was true, it was no interest.
BM: That is a lot different to low interest. It is no interest.
I understand that they can’t even keep it low.
BM: The Government will come back with what they call a notional interest. If you are going to put your money in somewhere for no return, in an investment account, and get a pension and get benefits from the Government to keep your assets or your income down to enable you to get all those pensions, they can by law put a notional interest on that or income on that money. That is reasonable.
Well suppose they went to the Government and said, how about making this a tax deductable arrangement, we are lending out on this amount, these particular accounts could be run in that way?
BM: How about we got the Government to say there is no tax on investment income, interest earned on income under a certain figure, $20,000. Say under $20,000 maximum money. Anybody earning interest over that well then they pay tax, but under $20,000 that would mean that most societies, be they credit unions, banks, building societies and so on, could reduce the interest paid on savings, reduce the interest charged on loans and people would have the same amount of money available, because they are not paying the tax on it. I don’t think the Government would miss out neither. The development of Australia would go ahead. But I am not a politician.
Well you have just given me another idea, however I shouldn’t be taking up the tape with these ideas. Why don’t you ask the Government, I say, if there is no tax on money that is invested less than 6 per cent that is put out at a low rate of interest shall we say.
BM: No, I couldn’t agree. That is creating a society situation whereby some people may need the income from that investment to survive. Those who don’t need the income can keep all their investments at 6 per cent and by getting the effective tax benefit, it can be up to about 9 per cent or 10 per cent yield. It is the same as somebody investing at 10 per cent and paying their tax which brings it down to 6 per cent.
Couldn’t that be worked out by some sort of fair figure to get people in these brackets to invest in those sort of accounts, isn’t that a sort of possibility, not banks, credit unions should be looking at?
BM: I don’t think it would occur. I think it is only the big investors, those who have got the money that would be attracted to that. There are thousands upon thousands of people out there that have got to rely upon their investment income to survive. Whether they get a pension otherwise is immaterial. They must get income.
You are talking to one of them.
BM: Interest from investments I am talking about.
That is exactly the way I operate. I have virtually finished. There are only questions like as the credit union involvement had any bad affect on your health or family life during the time you spent on credit union matters?
BM: I think it took a lot out of the family life. I was trying to raise a young family at the time I was in the League. There were a lot of meetings, a lot of documents to go through, papers, Minutes, etc., etc. Attending Earlwood Credit Union at the time as Director, it took a lot of time. I don’t regret it because I am firm believer you are not put on this world just to take. I think you should give more than you take and you have got to give of yourself and your time and effort, it can’t always be financial. It can be of time in many cases and I only hope the contribution I made was of benefit to others. I know of cases where I have helped people who wouldn’t have their home today. It is through talking and using the credit union movement and arranging loans and so they have moved out of absolute desolation into home life. I know that some marriages have survived and the family units have been very good purely because of my involvement of being able to say, “Rearrange your structures, get yourself organised, do this, do that.” When I was at Earlwood I have knocked back loans for cars and superficial things and say, “Look I will guarantee them, I will give them to you but I don’t think it is right. I want to see you in a house, I want to see you do something else. I want to see you consolidate.” That to me is value in life. I have no regrets from that point of view and I think my family are all credit union supporters, they all have either loans and savings. Most of them do have loans with the credit union and they can see the benefit that the credit union has. The one thing that they find difficult to understand, and I can’t get it through to them, is why should a credit union have such a high rate of interest on a loan. It is a question that is asked quite often. Where they had loans structured at one stage which was just one rate for all loans, how different is it now. You have got a secured loan rate, you have got a short-term loan rate, you have got an unsecured loan rate, you have got risk loan rates. They can range from 16 per cent to 24 per cent in one credit union. Now how do I promote a credit union, or membership to anybody and say, “Look why don’t you buy your car through that credit union?” and the credit union equates that guy to be a 24 per cent risk factor, so they charge him 24 per cent. His next door neighbour I can say the same thing and because he is a little bit more stable, or he has got less commitments or something, they rate him as a 20 per cent risk. Why is one distinguishable against another. You haven’t given the chap at 24 per cent a chance to get ahead anyhow. These are questions that I keep asking of credit union Managers. They are up-to-date and more sophisticated and it is the way it has got to be. Maybe the movement is not doing itself a service by being in this realm. It should perhaps come back to saying, “Where are we going and what are we going to do? What is our niche in life? Where should we be putting our efforts?” They get bad debts. Now to me they have got a great chance of getting a bad debt at 24 per cent, a much greater chance, than say at 16 per cent.
I agree. You have got to be pretty desperate to take a 24 per cent loan.
BM: Now if people are going to take it at 24 per cent, maybe the credit union should be charging them 60 per cent, because they have got a good chance of going to have to write a lot of it off. Now should they give the loan in the first place. These are very valid questions. Maybe it is better not to lend it to at 24 per cent no matter what the situation, unless it is a matter of life and death. I am talking about support of the family, to be able to pay a small debt because of illness or something that has happened. But to lend it just to buy a motor car, to update a refrigerator, to update something that really is not necessary at this point of time could be very damaging to the family in the long run. But the credit unions’ attitude is I think is, if they don’t lend it somebody else will. Well should they adopt that attitude? Is that real solid sensible management approach?
You are asking a lot of questions and I am supposed to be asking them and you are supposed to be answering them. Well I think we should let you off the hook now. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think we should?
BM: No. I will just say I am still a great supporter of the credit union movement. I think it has got a need today just as it had when it started x-number of years ago. Maybe there are changes, or there have been changes that have put them in different directions, I don’t say they are all bad by any means. Too much good has come to too many people for too long to make it a bad thing. I would like to see it promoted very, very strongly amongst the youth of today. I would like to see it get into the schools and let the schools know what is going on. I would like to see more emphasis placed on any advertising that is done to go to the family environment rather than, “We do lend money, we do pay good money on savings.” I would like to see the creation of the family unit because it is a family environment that gets the benefits out of credit unions. It is the family environment that will be for the benefit of Australia. It is the family environment that makes this world go on. Without a family you and I wouldn’t be here. If our children don’t have families and don’t have some sort of security and some sort of hope that their marriage and family will have a chance of going on and developing, what the heck, we haven’t got much of a future have we? The credit union movement can play a tremendous important role in there, and I think they must do it.
Thank you very much Mr Bob Monaghan.
End Tape 3B: 2910 Words: 1 hour