ANSWCU 25 10 MAY 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BRUCE ROBERTSON
I will ask you Mr Robertson, where were you born and when?
BR: I was born in 1926 in Camperdown, Victoria.
Did you grow up there?
BR: Yes, it is a small country town in the Western District and I grew up there and in Melbourne where I went to school.
What do you remember of school?
BR: Well my home life was a very good one and I remember I have very good recollections and happy recollections of school.
What did you like and dislike?
BR: Well I liked a lot of sport and I disliked, I think I disliked school work like most people at that time. But it was a very happy time for me.
Were there any subjects you liked particularly?
BR: I think Classics and Latin particularly, English and that.
I hated Latin but it was the schoolmaster who was the trouble with me. What influence do you think you go from your father?
BR: Oh quite a lot. My father was a Minister of Religion and as such that sort of home is where I believe quite a number of your early beliefs are brought into focus and your life is put into focus a lot more. Quite a number of people who develop strong philosophical tendencies are sons of the Manse, including Bob Hawke himself.
As a child can you think what influence you got from your mother?
BR: A very strong person, a very strong personality. A people person. All our family were involved in community and involved in the lives of their friends. She was a very good organiser and ran things very well. Of course I did grow up in the Depression times when things were pretty tough in a country town. We did see quite a lot that was happening, particularly with the unemployed. They would always come to the Manse in order to get help. So I saw quite a lot that was pretty bad about the Depression times. It made quite an impression on me.
Did your father have any definite political views?
BR: No, to my knowledge he never ever belonged to a political party and neither have I as a result of that. But I do have political views. I think one of his views was that if a man wasn’t a Socialist before he was nineteen, he hadn’t thought. But I think he maintained the idea that if he was still a Socialist at the age of sixty it was fairly sad.
Not the same as a Christian.
BR: No, very strong.
So he couldn’t have had any industrial influences. What about his father? Did you know your grandfather?
BR: Yes, I knew him but he died when I was very young. He was a school teacher, a headmaster. That is part of the Scottish tradition in our family. You went into the Church, the army or the school. That was the sort of way it was. My father and his brother, one went into the army and one went into the Church. That is quite a common thing.
Was there any Socialist influence from your maternal grandfather at all?
BR: No, not at all.
It is sometimes an occasional thing and it sometimes goes with Presbyterians.
BR: Presbyterianism also has a very strong Calvinist trend which is that of personal responsibility. That you don’t blame society for what goes wrong with you, you accept it and you work against it. I think if I was to say what was the most important thing that I gained from my family, it would be the idea of personal responsibility. Don’t go kicking against the pricks and don’t complain, get in and do something about it. It is personal responsibility. I think I can easily say that is what appeals to me about credit unions. The person is doing themselves. They may be doing it in a collective fashion, but it is the personal responsibility of that person financially.
When you left school, when did you leave school?
BR: 1944, went straight into the navy. Joined up. Took half a day off from school and joined up. By that time we had moved to Sydney. I went to the Recruiting Office at Loftus Street and stood in a queue and when I returned to school they said, ‘Robertson where have you been?’ and I said, ‘Well actually I have just joined the navy.’ He said, ‘Well sit down and don’t forget to do your homework.’ So that was that. I was only away for about three years because the War ended fortunately about eighteen months later. So I was back home and I had my twenty-first birthday after I returned.
What happened to you in the navy?
BR: I served on the lower deck in the navy in corvettes.
Where did you do your initial training?
BR: Flinders Naval Depot for initial training and then I went from here to New Guinea then up to Marita, where the ship was there on convoy duty. Then I went to places around the Helma Heras and then was back home again.
Did you see action up in the Coral Sea area?
BR: No the Coral Sea battles and all those were a lot earlier. But on Marita of course there was only a perimeter taken, the Japanese were still inland.
So you didn’t have any involvement in that area?
BR: No. We were on convoy duty and our main concern was planes of course.
Were the convoys attacked often?
BR: Not very often. Because by this time Macarthur was really pushing on very hard. It was towards the end of the War and he was moving on to the landing in the Philippines.
Can you remember any occasion when the convoy was attacked?
BR: Only on one occasion and it wasn’t us.
You didn’t get hit?
BR: No.
You were lucky anyway.
BR: Yes, very lucky. I think that one of the things that I must admit is that I came out of the navy sound and with an experience that perhaps has flavoured my life in a number of ways. I think that most people who were in it would admit that it is the same for them. It is not the most important thing that happened in life but at that young age it is a very important thing in your life.
What was your job in the navy?
BR: I was in Anti Submarine Detection, ASDIC, and was known as an HSD.
Is that an operator?
BR: Yes.
Not a technician?
BR: No.
Yes I am familiar with that sort of situation too, to some extent. I was at sea myself. But I was merchant ships, but you get a bit of that.
BR: I was a seamen, not a technician.
I was down below. So when you came out what did you do then?
BR: I didn’t know quite what to do as a matter of fact. Some people are able to set their minds to a goal and know what they want to do with their lives. I must admit that I didn’t. I didn’t quite know what to do, so I decided that I’d join a bank. I joined the Rural Bank of New South Wales and as such I decided that I would do law. I did law for several years and couldn’t quite see that that was my future. As a matter of fact at that stage of my life, perhaps this is a bit personal, I was rather confused as to what I was doing. I was doing a lot of singing and I spent more of my time working on those sort of things in the area of opera, where I sang with the Sydney Opera Group for some years. There was rather a confused role in that I didn’t quite know what I was doing but I knew what I liked.
Did you study singing seriously?
BR: Yes. I studied under Harold Williams at the Conservatorium for some years.
Did you work in singing?
BR: Yes. I worked in singing, but I could never afford it. So that is why I kept the job because singing, particularly opera singing, is not what you would call financially remunerative at that stage. We didn’t have a national opera company or anything of that nature which you could progress to. It was a love and an interest.
So how did you go in work? Were you working in the same firm all the time?
BR: Working in the Rural Bank. I worked in the legal section. Indeed I worked as a Loans Officer at Daykin House Branch doing personal loans. This sort of ties in with when I got into the credit union movement. I had had a background of personal loans to railway workers and similar workers in which the Rural Bank was the first bank in Australia, I think, to give personal loans of this nature.
Which branch were you working in?
BR: Daykin House which is up at Rawson Place, right near the railways. Most of our, well many of our clients were railway people. There was no railways credit union and the Rural Bank opposite was the place where they went to get their finance.
Yes, several people have told me that the Rural Bank was the only place you could get money and not so easily there, either.
BR: That is part of my background. This is why it ties in with that. We used to take an order on their wages and that was the way we got repaid of course. We also were very keen to say to a person, ‘You are not to borrow from any other institution during the currency of the loan,’ and we insisted upon it. If we heard that a person had gone a borrowed money from elsewhere, we would call him in and say to him, ‘You have no right to do that.’ It was a different world from the world of today.
Were you introduced to credit unions at that particular time at the bank?
BR: No, not for some time later. Some years later when I joined Esso Australia. I joined there as a District Representative.
What made you do that?
BR: I had always had another interest which was motor cars. Technically I had been tinkering since I was twelve years of age. I had always worked on my own cars and I had quite a knowledge of it. I was a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers, as a matter of fact which was an interesting thing. A sort of catholicism of tastes. Music and motors cars don’t seem to provide a mix but they did in my particular case. So that was an area that I was very interested in and I had an offer to go with Atlantic Union Oil Company, as it was in those days. So I joined Atlantic Union Oil Company as a salesman.
How did you like that compared to the bank?
BR: I liked it very much. It was open air, it was to do with motor cars and it required certain selling skills and I believe I had them, communication skills. I was talking to dealers, talking to agents, talking to people and the communication skills that I got there were developed by the company. It is a very strong company and it likes to develop its personnel.
Everyone must have been aware of how enthusiastic you were about cars, anyway.
BR: Absolutely. It gave me an in to talk to dealers, people who are technical people. Usually when a salesman comes around he doesn’t know anything about motor vehicles so I did have a bit of an opportunity there to talk to them on their own level and understand their problems. I think that was important and I think it was important to the company too.
So when did you first hear about credit unions?
BR: Atlantic became Esso and of course we realised at that stage that instead of the small company we were in we happened to have joined the biggest multi-national in the world, which is Esso, Standard Oil of New Jersey as it was. Instead of being a small little company we were big time now. It was when I was working at Esso and I was in the Head Office that we decided to form a credit union. I had heard of them, I had heard a radio program some years before in relation to credit unions and I just made a mental note of that.
Do you remember what radio program it was and who was on it?
BR: No, I cannot.
It wasn’t Stan Arneil was it?
BR: I think it was Stan Arneil but I couldn’t positively identify it. I believe it was Stan Arneil but the name didn’t mean anything to me at the time and it is like listening to anything on the radio, if you don’t know the person it doesn’t click as to who it was. I believe it was Stan Arneil. But that is a tie back that I would just like to mention to you. Before the War a man came out from Japan and he stayed at our house and his name was Kagawa. Kagawa was a Japanese co-operator and a person who was responsible very much in the co-operative movement in Japan, and that had been quite an influence because my father had several of his books which I’d read. So I can say that that was a psychological or philosophical background of co-operation right back to the 1930s.
So you were the instigator of the credit union at Esso were you?
BR: No, not really. A chap called Jack Lindsay was the main instigator but I was one of his consorts. In order to get it through the company, it is an industrial credit union of course, we needed the co-operation of the company very strongly. Jack was in the Personnel Department and he was able to interest the company in letting us do this and explain to us what was going on.
Did you manage to get pay-roll deductions straight away?
BR: Pretty well straight away. The company was very supportive from the word go and they have always taken the attitude of helping without interfering. It is one thing that we as a company have been extremely lucky in that our relationship with the company has been very good.
When the credit union started did it start with the whole company employees, or was it only the staff in the first instance, salaried staff?
BR: Oh no it was for all employees to start off with. There was absolutely no differentiation between one and the other.
When did you have your inaugural meeting?
BR: 3 March 1969. I have this written down. The people present were, Ron Swanson, he was one who was present, but also there was Malcolm Samuels. No Malcolm was a Director of Gilbarco Credit Union and Gilbarco is actually an associated company of Esso. Because of that Gilbarco more or less sponsored us and led us in to it and Malcolm Samuels did quite a lot in relation to that.
Was there anybody from the Registry or from the League?
BR: Yes.
Ron Swanson from the League and who from the Registry?
BR: I can’t remember who from the Registry, but there was certainly somebody from the Registry that helped us out.
That was?
BR: 1969.
Well that was after Stan Arneil was at the Registry, he was well clear by that time.
BR: Yes, I think so.
Who was the first Chairman?
BR: The first Chairman was a chap called Frank Roach. He was one of the Chief Accountants and an appropriate person. He had the confidence not only of the people, but he also had the confidence of the company which was very important at that stage too.
Where did you have the first meeting?
BR: Well it was in the AMP Building at Circular Quay, our first meeting, and then up at the Travel Lodge building where we were. We hadn’t built Esso House at that stage where we are at the moment.
Can you remember whether you had all the material, and I suppose Malcolm Samuels would have provided you with quite a bit, from the Registrar’s Office and such like?
BR: Oh yes. Everything was done. The League at that time was set up to help credit unions to establish. It is a point that I may make at a later date, they are not now. We have strayed. We don’t form credit unions. We are out of that business entirely and I might mention a bit of this later on if I get an opportunity.
You certainly will. Had the Act actually come in at the time you started the credit union, or had was it just before the Act was promulgated? It was 1969 that the first Credit Union Act came in.
BR: I seem to feel that we were underway. We were incorporated in March 1969 and whether it was before or after I don’t know. Certainly we have always considered ourselves subject to the Act.
Did you have family and continuing membership right from the start?
BR: No. We didn’t have family membership. That was something that came a little later.
That was allowed by the Act.
BR: Yes, but at that stage we just felt it was for the employees and that is the way we set about that.
Was it all volunteers at first? Were you a Director straight away?
BR: No, I wasn’t a Director straight away. The Directors straight away were mainly people in the accounting field. There were a variety of men, and women indeed, as the original Directors and I wasn’t a Director to start off with. I went on to the Supervisory Committee very shortly afterwards and within a year or so I was on the Board.
So who talked you into going on the Supervisory Committee in the first instance?
BR: I think my friend, in inverted commas, Jack Lindsay who invited my interest, or knew of my interest in it, particularly in relation to the founding of it and I felt that was a job I could do.
So what did you do with the Supervisory Committee, what was actually done?
BR: The Supervisory Committee at that stage was a very physical committee. A committee which actually went through the dockets and the documents and made sure that they were being done according to the Minutes. We checked Minute Books to see what had happened. The loans, we would do individual spot-checks on loans, to see that in fact they were being let in the right way and to the right people and that there weren’t any funnies. It was a type of audit procedure and it was all laid down in the books about what a Supervisory Committee should do. The Supervisory Committee, of course, as all credit union people know, is responsible to the membership of the Annual General Meeting they are not responsible to the Board. The Supervisory Committee reports to the Annual General Meeting that the Board is OK, as well as the auditor. Now it is a thing that has fallen a bit by the wayside because very few credit unions these days have Supervisory Committees as such. The requirements of professional audit are so great, that the average volunteer couldn’t handle that sort of thing.
The argument is, of course, with computerisation that they can’t get in and do the job. Now do you think they should have Supervisory Committees still?
BR: That raises the question of volunteers, and it raises the question of time and skills. The use of a computerised audit program means skills that are above most members of credit unions. They are specialist skills that audit companies and have the software to do it. So the average credit union couldn’t handle that sort of thing.
Round about 1969, I think, there was a bit of a battle between the Supervisory Committee in the person of Dave Palmer, at the Association this is, the League, and the Board. He was actually doing his job and he criticised the Board’s running of meetings and there was an uproar about this.
BR: Well that was always the case and I can remember when I was on the Supervisory Committee making a report to the Board as to what was happening and the Board were very incensed that I should indeed have criticised them in any way. ‘We run the credit union.’ I said, ‘Yes you run the credit union, however, I am an elected person. Not elected by the Board, I am elected by the membership and it is my job to bring to your notice anything I think is inappropriate.’ I said, ‘If I don’t bring it to your notice I will wait until the Annual General Meeting and I will bring it to their notice.’ From then onwards we got on quite well. It was due to a lack of understanding by Boards as to what the role of the Supervisory Committee was. We weren’t specifically an audit, we were an audit appointed by the membership. I think it was a great thing at that stage. I would suggest that in the growing stages, in the initial stages of any new credit union a Supervisory Committee is absolutely mandatory.
On your Supervisory Committee, were you the Chairman of the Committee?
BR: Yes, I was.
How many nights did you meet, or did you meet once a week?
BR: Usually once a week.
Did you make a night of it?
BR: At Esso, all meetings are held outside of company times other than a lunch time meeting, which of course is the same sort of thing. It is a tradition we started in the first instance and it was something that we have always insisted upon. We don’t hold meetings during business times, our Board meetings are held at five o’clock in the evening and run through until whenever they finish.
Now when you became a Board member, how often did you hold meetings?
BR: Board meetings of course are held under the Act every month and that always happened. But there are usually sort of committee meetings of members of the Board that are held at other stages. One of the most important ones is the Loans Committee, which of course meets once or twice a week, quite regularly. In those days we didn’t give any authority to the Manager to give many of these loans, they had to be approved by the Loans Committee as such. The Loans Committee consisted of the Manager and two Directors.
How long was it before you got a Manager?
BR: We sort of had originally a part-time clerk and then we had a full-time clerk and then we had another clerk. Then I suppose about two years later we had a part-time Manager who like most of the people was a sort of an ex-accounting or banking person.
When you were operating as volunteers, what was the routine? The Directors operating the credit union, what was the routine, did you open in the lunch hour for business?
BR: Yes. We opened at the lunch hour and we had our meetings and things like that. We did the secretarial work after work hours.
You had an office?
BR: We were given a room by the company.
That used to open at lunch time and after work?
BR: Yes it did.
So you would have definite days for loan applications and that sort of thing?
BR: Oh yes and even at the first instance we had representatives who weren’t either members of the Board or of the Supervisory Committee, but they were representatives of places like our Botany Terminal. They kept a pile of papers, loan applications and rates and all that sort of thing, information that they handed out. The whole idea was to get as many members as possible. We were seeking membership.
Where did you get the idea of the representatives, can you remember?
BR: No, I really can’t, but it was just absolutely essential that we had representatives in these places because you couldn’t handle it any other way.
It seems to me that it started in Australia anyway in the Motor Transport.
BR: Yes that could be the case. We still have it, by the way, we have representatives everywhere. We have a representative’s handbook, because as a company more than half of our members are in Victoria because of the Bass Strait oil. As you can imagine Sale down in Gippsland in Victoria is where we have nearly two thousand members in that area working on the drilling off-shore and the oil and gas.
Yes I can see that you would have to do that. You cross interstate borders in that case.
BR: Very much so.
Was there any problem with that at any time?
BR: There wasn’t originally but there has been in the last few years. The problem isn’t our problem, it is somebody else’s problem. That is the part that rather annoys us. We don’t have a problem crossing the borders but the legalistic people have terrible problems about it and I think it has probably made our lawyers an awful lot of money. The problem is inherent with a Federal system such as we have now.
So you get different laws in different States and that sort of thing, credit union law as well. In 1969 there was only one State, and that was New South Wales, that had any credit union Act.
BR: Yes, we just went ahead and we didn’t really know the legal consequences in a lot of these cases. We did have of course Jack Lange, from Lange and Burke, who was a stalwart of the movement. Of course whenever was a little bit dicky we would ring up Jack and he did come down and talk to our Directors. It was really a friendly hands-on operation.
When you started your credit union did you join the New South Wales League immediately? Did you join the Victorian League?
BR: We have never belonged to the Victorian League, for better or for worse. Certainly we joined the New South Wales League straight away because of all the help and assistance. They had been informing and they continued to be. We have never not been a member of the Association and we feel that we have had more than our money’s worth in this particular thing. The Association has been doing the worrying about lots of things while we get on with the business of running our credit union for our members.
When did you first become a member, take any office at all in the League itself?
BR: The first time that I did anything in relation to the League, and I haven’t got a date on it, but we had reports on the membership and the structure. That was many years ago and Helen McIntyre was on it at that stage. We looked into the ways that our membership was structured. That gave me quite an interest in it. That was a committee of the Board set up to examine the structure. It was like Project Renewal except it was very small bickies compared to it. A lot of people seem to think this Project Renewal idea is something brand new, whereas we have been restructuring over the years. The League is not the same League as it was. The Association is not the same Association. When people talk about the Association as it was fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a tiny little organisation with no central banking and nothing. It was just a trade association of members dealing with very small areas so naturally the organisation was that sort of organisation.
When did you first go to an annual conference, can you remember?
BR: It must have been twelve or fourteen years ago, or probably before then, that I represented at annual conferences.
Can you remember what was discussed?
BR: No, I can’t. I can’t remember that there was anything vital. It was more machinery. I wasn’t involved in any of the annual meetings where there was blood on the floor.
Metaphorically, I hope anyway.
End Tape 1A: 4767 Words: 1 hour 55 minutes.
ANSWCU25 10 MAY 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BRUCE ROBERTSON
Were you involved with a Chapter at all?
BR: No. I had not connection with a Chapter. I attended occasionally but I really didn’t have time to do that. This raises the point that volunteers naturally have limited time resources. If you are taking a strong interest in your own credit union and its growth and development and you’re taking an interest in bringing up your family and taking an interest in your career and all those other things when particularly you are a little younger, that takes a great amount of your time. You will find that the people who take an interest in these are past the bringing up children and their career stages. That is why we see in our organisation the greying of our members. We have a lot of older Directors because they have the time.
When did you get married?
BR: I married late in life, I was thirty-four when I was married, so I had a young family. Our youngest is now twenty-two, but that meant that my family was young while I was older than most of the people.
Were you working at Esso?
BR: Atlantic, yes.
What I am getting around to is the question of your own need for credit. Did you have any need for credit and did you have any trouble getting it?
BR: I was very fortunate in relation to a house in that being an ex-serviceman I was able to finance my house with a War Service Home Loan at three and three-quarter per cent. I haven’t paid this off yet and I don’t intend to pay it off at three and three-quarter per cent. I still have a small amount outstanding which I will never pay off. In relation to personal loans and that sort of thing, by the time I needed it we had established the credit union and so it was there as a back stop if ever I needed something of that nature. Like most people of my time, my wife wasn’t a worker when the children were growing up. We believed, she believed very strongly, that was the place where she ought to be at that time. We had three children and for the first twelve or fourteen years of bringing up the children, Barbara naturally spent more time in the home. So we were a one income family and it is amazing how well we did in the circumstances. But like most families when the needs of schooling and everything came on, Barbara returned to work and she has worked for the last twelve years. Now we are both retired.
What I was getting at was if you had any sort of personal need to form the credit union, or was it a philosophical thing, something that you thought was good?
BR: My personal needs didn’t come into the decision in relation to the credit union. My fear of a need for it did. I would say just because at the time I didn’t need any money, didn’t mean to say that I wasn’t looking down the track, that there would be every reason to think that it would be important to get it. There was a philosophical reason, yes, certainly. Not only the word philosophy, it seemed good sense to do this sort of thing.
Did you in your work ever see any abuses of the system? People who worked for you, under you or around you who were subject to loan sharks or very bad finance company arrangements or hire purchase agreements?
BR: Yes. Unfortunately though, like most things, the people themselves liked to keep this a bit of a secret. An industrial credit union has a bit of a problem at times where they don’t like to tell their fellow employees what fools they have made of themselves. In many cases it is the unwise use of credit that has led them into this terrible situation. As a matter of fact recently the Association has introduced a counselling system which is completely independent of the credit union. To me that solves a lot of the problems if we as Esso Employees Credit Union can say to one of our members, ‘Look you need counselling, now we know just the person to send you to and they can help you.’ They don’t have to pour out their hearts to fellow employees or even professional staff, they can go somewhere independently and do it. I believe that is a great step in the right direction. But we did hear of things, certainly, and we had cases that were quite heart-rending but we were able to solve many of them.
That idea that has recently been put into practice at the Association, whose idea was that?
BR: It came through the Association and I think a lot of credit should go to our Credit Department here. It was an idea of there’s that came through.
Who particularly there, do you know?
BR: I believe Jill Martin was the person involved. Jill is a very interesting type of collections person. She has certainly got a heart and she has done a tremendous amount for the Association, particularly in this area.
When you were involved at the credit union level, did you do much savings and loans counselling?
BR: No, not personally. I think it was not done as a member of the Board of the credit union, but people are likely to come to you in your office and say, ‘I was wondering if the credit union could help me?’ rather than going to the credit union and asking. They would come to people that they knew. This is one of the strengths of the credit union movement that the Directors are within the workforce, they are there and people can walk into your office and say, ‘Have you got a minute? I want to talk to you about this credit union place. Do you think it can help me?’
Once they realised it could they didn’t start ringing up at the weekend to buy a car or anything like that?
BR: No. But I have had calls at home because people would rather talk to me at home rather than at the credit union.
So you weren’t involved with a Chapter, but you must have attended some Schools yourself?
BR: Yes. We attended Schools on various topics. Financial Management. They were all run by the Association, or League as it was then.
I believe you were involved in the founding of the Institute of Credit Union Directors. What led you to that?
BR: Yes. Well that was as the result of a School. The School was up at the University of New England in 1978.
Was Professor Meredith there?
BR: Yes, it was Professor Meredith’s School. Now the way this came about was that Graham Humphries was, I understand, the co-ordinator for Education and Training for AFCUL at the time. He was also the President of AICUM, the Australian Institute of Credit Union Management, and he had organised with Geoff Meredith a series of classes for Managers. So they decided they would have classes for Directors. I think this may have been the first one, but I am not sure, that was in 1978 that we are talking about, June 1978. Now I went up to this residential workshop which was a very good one, and in fact that is the booklet which is slightly the worse for wear, but that is what it was all about.
By that time had Professor Meredith started the Small Business Agency to the State Government? He and a number of others actually started the Small Business Agency. Were you aware whether that was first?
BR: No, I am not really aware of it. I know that he had this Department of Accounting and Financial Management and he had also established this Financial Management Research Centre. It was a Research Centre that was sort of independent. That was the body that started developing all these statistics of the various industries and business and this was tied in with that. Sam Beasley was another person who was in that.
That puts it right. In actual fact I can bring it to mind. I was involved with Professor Meredith over the Research Centre back in my technical college days. So if it was in my technical college days it has to be before that.
BR: Well Geoff Meredith was personally doing a number of these tasks.
He did some of them at AFCUL, at seminars at AFCUL meetings too, didn’t he?
BR: Yes. He had quite an influence at that particular time, on Directors. It was quite a big course. There were well over fifty participants and they came from all over Australia. They came from all States rather interestingly, they weren’t just from New South Wales.
Who sort of said, ‘Well we should form a an Institute of Credit Union Directors’?
BR: Well it happened in an interesting way. We’d all been discussing the status and the role of Directors and we were seriously considering how we could improve, particularly the professional standing of Directors and the knowledge they needed. How the education program could be. This was just a start and we felt that we needed to go further with it. That was in the back of our minds when on the Sunday we got to Armidale Airport to find that we were covered in fog and the aeroplane we were supposed to catch was going round and round in circles up in the air and couldn’t get down. So we started sort of talking between ourselves while we were waiting and then they had to send a coach for us from Tamworth. We rode down the hill in the coach and the discussions were still going on. Then they had to find a pilot for a Fokker Friendship to fly us back from Tamworth. This subject was a subject that started in the fog and went all the way back to Sydney, why don’t we do something like that. The people involved in that were the people who were at that particular course. Graham Humphries naturally was there and he was a catalyst in relation to this because he said, ‘Well we as the credit union management have got an institute, why don’t you think of it?’. That came out. There was a girl from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission called Renata de Mille, and she was very keen on this sort of thing. I was keen on it. Elton Rae, who is the current President, he was there. Beresford Calverley was there as well, he had come to the course as well, and he had something to say on the matter too and he thought it was a good idea. So there were people from the Illawarra Credit Union, Tom Deagen. We all felt that this was a great idea. Now it is all very well to be sitting in a aeroplane and thinking it is a great idea, but you have got to do something about it. I think I have got to give credit to Renata de Mille who said, ‘OK, I will organise it. Who’ll come? I’ll call the meeting.’ So we had the first meeting.
Where?
BR: That was in Esso House. I used my office quite a bit. So we developed a Steering Committee. That Steering Committee had about five meetings in which we sat ourselves down to do something about forming this institute.
Had you been overseas to America and seen what was done over there?
BR: No.
Were you aware of the two sort of strands of the AICUM arrangement? One would come through the Australian Institute of Management and the other one that came via America?
BR: No.
One was sort of from the Australian Institute of Management, John McIntyre’s baby. The other one had come the other way.
BR: No, I wasn’t aware of the politics in that particular area.
I was not aware that ICUD came after AICUM, I thought it was the other way around.
BR: No, it came after it. I think it was the success of AICUM that enabled us to make a start to the ICUD.
So when did you have your first meeting as a organisation, apart from the Steering Committee?
BR: Yes, well the inaugural meeting was held on October 10, 1979. Seventy-nine people attended, I have got the records here. Amongst other things we had to get permission from the Registry because under the Act you can’t use the word ‘Credit Union’ or anything related to credit unions, without permission of the Registry. David Horton was the Registrar and he was there on that occasion. He spoke that night of his hope that the Institute would raise the standard of Directorship within New South Wales.
Now the Reserve Board and the Reserve Fund had actually been founded by that time, set up, they were set up in 1978.
BR: Yes, but we had the Savings Protection Fund, which everybody is aware of, going for some time and the Reserve Board was really a nothing at that stage.
Were you involved at all on the Savings Protection Fund Committee?
BR: No.
You were not involved as a member of the Credit Union Advisory Committee.
BR: Not at that stage. I have been a member of the Credit Union Advisory Committee but that was recently.
How recently, what years?
BR: Four years ago.
For one year?
BR: Yes.
Were you an appointee of the Government?
BR: Yes.
You have never been on the Reserve Board?
BR: No.
So when this was set up, where did you have your first School, or your first meeting of ICUD?
BR: Well that was the first meeting in October 1978, the Annual General Meeting. I was appointed President and I remained President for three years.
You held seminars and various things?
BR: Yes we held seminars. Most of the early ones were at Esso House because it was the cheapest place we could get. Our management lent us the cafeteria and we were able to use that free of charge. All we had to do was pay for what we ate and those sort of things. It was a fairly small one with great ideas. Naturally during the first year we had to set up by-laws and a constitution and that sort of thing, which we made as simple as possible a one page constitution. It has since been amended on a number of occasions as the thing has got better. We were a fairly small organisation because Directors’ time is small.
When did you hold your first country meeting, shall we say, or area meeting?
BR: Well, we didn’t have any money for holding area meetings, that was one of the problems. Nor did we have the time. So in the first few years we had to say to country members, ‘If you are coming down, be there.’ So when the Association, or League, Annual General Meetings were on we hold a meeting about that time to give country people an opportunity to come down. At that stage we were not over-ambitious to serve everybody in the State.
You didn’t tie in at all with the Armidale seminars, or the AFCUL seminars?
BR: They kept on going on and they were available, but we didn’t see it as our task to conduct those because Geoff Meredith was doing a good job at that particular time. In fact there were follow-up ones to these. I don’t really know what happened in that particular case, but somehow or other the University of New England dropped out of favour and this whole idea didn’t seem to work to the same degree as it did before. I wasn’t as involved with it at that particular stage because of a stage in my own life with a bit of ill-health and that sort of thing. After I had my three years as President and things were going quite nicely, but we only had about one hundred and ten, or one hundred and twenty members, out of a possible fifteen or sixteen hundred, and I am not really aware what happened at that particular stage.
What happened when John Gormley came in? How did that come about?
BR: Well after I had been there for three years, Ted Mackness took over as President. Ted had a different style and he held meetings in various places and had a committee that helped him. John Gormley was President for two years. The most important thing that happened during those years was that they took a decision which was an absolute correct one to put on a permanent part-time secretary. You had to get the right person of course and the management to do that first off, and that is Joan Birch. Now by putting Joan on they got more than their money’s worth. Joan was able to pull this whole thing together. It meant that the fees went up dramatically, but the credit union movement carried it, they wore it, they considered it quite appropriate. During that time, in 1986 I think there were two hundred members, so in all those years we had been going we were between one hundred and ten and two hundred members. We were about one hundred, in 1986 I am talking about, and four years later in 1990 there are five hundred members. So it has been an exponential growth based on the fact that we have had a strong secretariat. Now John Gormley made a specific contribution in that he worked very hard to get the Institutes established in other States. During the years we had people doing a bit and they had one meeting or two meetings, but they never really got off their butts, if I may say so, but John did a particularly good job in that area.
What about Ron Birch, how has he been involved?
BR: Well, he got in for free. You see when we got Joan we got Ron and Ron has done a tremendous job. Ron is an enthusiast to say the least. Ron and Joan together have created quite a tremendous impact on the organisational level to be able handle these sort of things. Elton Rae of course has been Chairman for three years. There have only been four in the twelve years we have been going now, only four Presidents.
Now coming back to the Association, were you aware of the split over insurance back in 1973, 1974?
BR: Yes I was aware of it and I was aware of the bad feeling. I have been aware of it ever since because we have never recovered from that situation. I have hopes at the moment that perhaps we are getting somewhere on that particular matter. There are a number of initiatives being taken to see if we can get over that. But I wasn’t involved in any of that.
Was your credit union involved at all?
BR: No, it really didn’t affect us.
You had your insurance through the League and it stayed that way?
BR: Yes. We are very loyal. We are loyal for two reasons. First of all, we believe that the assistance that was given to us in forming our credit union and the assistance that has been given us ought to be supported. Secondly, pragmatically, we get a pretty good deal.
Have you been involved with AFCUL at all?
BR: Only by attending the AFCUL conventions and taking part in the AFCUL conventions as a speaker.
Were you aware of 1974?
BR: In what way?
The National Board was taken over as the Executive. Previously there had been a very, very tight Executive and there was a National Board and Dermot Ryan was then retired as Executive Officer and all the business related to that.
BR: No, the politics of AFCUL has always been a closed book to me and I don’t understand it. I think one of the biggest problems with AFCUL is the way that people are elected and the way that they are sitting there. The AFCUL Board to me is a denial of democracy if there ever was one. I can understand that under Project Renewal the frustration of any organisation trying to run that way with the tremendous inequalities of what is happening. I will be quite candid, I believe that New South Wales has been the leader in credit unions throughout the whole of Australia. Unfortunately, when we think about State rights and that sort of thing, the Association in New South Wales is looked upon as a bit of a big brother, although most of the initiatives have come from New South Wales.
Yet they have had some remarkable people in other States too.
BR: Yes but I am not aware of what they do or what they did. I have been a New South Wales person and I haven’t been involved on the AFCUL Board, I haven’t been a member of the AFCUL Board. As a member of the ANSWCU Board all I get is reports from whoever our representative on the AFCUL Board is. That is all that I can say.
Have you been involved in the Project Renewal?
BR: Yes.
Well, I suppose we are not that far yet are we. When you first became a Director, is that where we should go next do you think? Whose idea was it that you put up for it, Director of the Association?
BR: Well it was my own idea. I had taken an interest in a number of committees, Board committees.
Which ones?
BR: The Government one that I was talking about earlier was one that gave me a great interest in it.
Well you haven’t talked about that on tape, have you?
BR: Yes the early one that was some years ago. But as for who mentioned it to me, a number of the Directors and the members of ICUD had spoken to me and said, ‘Why don’t you stand?’ Now to be quite specific about it, this is one of biggest problems of the credit union movement and the problems of democracy in that while I was employed at Esso and was doing my credit union work in addition to that outside that time and bringing up my family and looking for my career and doing all these things and if the company said, ‘You will be in Western Australia on Monday,’ I said, ‘Yes’ and that went. While I was doing that, it is very difficult to take on any other responsibilities because if you do that you may in fact disadvantage your family and your career and that is absolutely wrong in my book. I have absolutely no time for the credit union widow, anymore than I do for the golf widow. I think that people must accept their responsibilities but do them within their context of their families and society as a whole. So personally I didn’t have time for anything else. But I was coming up towards retirement. They don’t keep people long in the organisation when you are coming up towards sixty, actually retirement is fifty-five now and lots of people are going out at fifty-five and between fifty-five and sixty. However, I was still there but I was coming up for retirement and I felt that this was some way I could make some contribution and have the time to do it, which so many people lacked. People who were talking to me would say, ‘But Bruce you will have the time to do something about this,’ and I think that was important in my mind. It is not just something to do in your retirement, but something that you really wanted to do but hadn’t had time to do it. You had to feel that you were going to make a contribution. Rather interestingly I had been in the area of communications and computer sciences and that’s the one area that I have done nothing on for the Association Board. I have never been invited to take any part in it at all and it was one of the prime reasons why I came on to the Board because I felt I could make a contribution in that area.
Where did you get involved in computers, computer sciences?
BR: At Esso.
Well you moved from being a representative to that area straight away?
BR: Oh no, that was a gradual thing. I came into a management position and the area that I was in was involved, amongst other things, with data lines that were becoming popular. If you take your mind back we didn’t have any computers, they were big boxes somewhere or other, but we needed to have data lines. So I was into data lines and telephones and I then grew into one of the boxes on the end of them and how we communicated. Within the area of telecommunications I had a management position. Then that area came through and it was a sort of a self-learnt situation in which I was a doer. I had to get things done in relation to something that is now a big industry. I wouldn’t get the job now because I don’t have the technical qualifications, but at that stage nobody had the technical qualifications and we were moving. It was more a planning, a long-term planning. Where are we going to be, where are we going, how can we get this help from Telecom and how can we do these things? So that was the area into which I moved. Prior to that though I went into training and I spent some years as the Marketing Training Manager in Australia. So from selling to training and then to telecommunications. I was Communications Manager at Esso.
End Tape 1B: 4344 Words: 1 hour 50 minutes
ANSWCU 26 10 MAY 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BRUCE ROBERTSON
Now perhaps we should start straight into the area where you were actually a Director. What do you remember of your first Board meeting? Who was President at the time? What sort of style of meetings?
BR: Well it wasn’t all that long ago. There was Bill Howe and then there was Steve Birt. Of course Bill has gone on to his World Council things and Bill has been a member but he has been coming and going a lot. But he has a tremendous amount of influence and background. So I have really been associated with Steve Birt more. I suppose if I was to say what happened, I think I probably didn’t get a proposition for the first six months, being voted eight to one against in most cases, until I realised that perhaps my methodology was wrong and that I had to get a few people on-side before I put a proposal up. In other words the political nuances were unknown to me. I though I was coming into an independent area which was rather naive of me. I think I was very naive when I came into this organisation. I still claim to be politically naive and I think it is not a bad fault.
You still claim to be? I like that, I really do. It’s just what I was thinking about when you did come in, the re-amalgamations had already virtually gone through.
BR: That’s right Richard, that had already happened.
They had worked very hard at that. Did you have any involvement in that at all?
BR: No, just good will as far as that was concerned. I wasn’t involved in it.
By that time you had Board members who were from Wollongong and Newcastle.
BR: Yes, Bill Prince was from Newcastle and Bill Griffith was from Wollongong.
You also had Ken Byrne, didn’t you?
BR: Ken, well he represented the country area for some time, yes.
So you say that you were sort of just one and the rest.
BR: But you learn quickly about these sort of things. Perhaps the things that I brought up were not particularly relevant to what was appropriate at the time, that’s all. When you join an organisation such as this which has a long history and where people have been sitting on that Board for some years, as an outsider you see things slightly differently. Perhaps it is not my method, my method is when I see something I go for it, but I have learnt that you have to take things fairly slowly and do your politicking outside the Board room.
As far as that particular time, they were just starting to consolidate, when you came on in 1985. Just starting to consolidate the ATMs and the point of sale and all that sort of thing.
BR: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the most important things was what has happened with the ATMs. Indeed as a result of what has happened to those ATMs with the fact that there are private ones as well under the system, that has caused us a lot of grief. It was a necessary part of history and there have been a lot of misunderstandings about it and there has been a lot of words spoken about unfairness and lack of equity which we should try and avoid within the credit union movement. I do think that is something that must be solved within the credit union movement.
I think you must remember, or you must know, that the Queensland Teachers tried to get the ATM in 1977. Did you try and join it at that time?
BR: No, not at that stage.
You stuck with the League?
BR: Yes, we stuck. As I said we have been loyalists all the way through. The other thing is because of the way that we are situated with the majority of our members in two separate places, access wasn’t the problem that it is now. Remember that the Credit Union Association, or credit unions, almost pioneering ATMs. There was a time when we also wouldn’t give our members cheque books. The word cheque book was a no no. But we soon realised that the word access is more important than the method by which you do it. We in the credit union movement, as we have grown, have found it extremely necessary to provide access to our members and we have had to go to cheque books and we have had to go to ATMs. The banks told us years ago that cheque books were on the way out. In fact that just is not the case, they are very suitable to credit union usage.
But you have also got the situation which since the electronic banking has gone through that people can hand their paying of regular of bills over to the banks, over to the credit unions and so there you go.
BR: We could do that twenty years ago too, but we did it manually. We were always in the bill paying business. From when we formed our credit union a member could go up to the counter or post a letter in and say, ‘Would you please pay these bills,’ enclose the bills and a girl would sit down and write the cheques out and put them in the mail for you. It is only a method of doing it. We haven’t changed to doing it, we did it before the banks were even thinking about it.
What about the other side of it, the differential accounts. The savings accounts which pay different rates of interest, they were fairly late with that idea.
BR: Oh yes. I think that we have had to become competitive in a lot of areas and that is the way it is. Let’s face it we used to pay five per cent on savings and six per cent on loans. Those days have gone.
Do you think that therefore credit unions have abrogated their principles?
BR: Richard, that is probably the most difficult question that you would ask. I think they try very hard to keep within the principles but what we have changed is what I call maturation. In any organisation it has a maturity level. Even if you look at it as a bell curve you have new members or new credit unions coming in, you have other credit unions that are just at a stage of first established, you have other credit unions that are fairly mature and you have other ones that sometimes have finished their purpose, they don’t have any purpose at all and they disappear. We have got plenty of those who are disappearing, we have got plenty of those who are maturing, and plenty of those that are growing but we have had no infants. How an organisation that doesn’t have new credit unions and new members and new Directors and new ideas, how a movement that doesn’t do that can go on, I really don’t know. This is where I consider there is one of the big problems, we have reached the middle of this and all our credit unions are mature. The small ones, we think of them as a bit of a nuisance and I am sure the Savings Reserve Board does too because they have real problems with little credit unions. There is a term that they use, little ‘crappies’ they call them. Now to me it is an abrogation of our philosophic responsibility. How long is it since we had a credit union formed in New South Wales, somebody told me eight years. We had one form this year and it was formed against the wishes of most of the members of the credit union. Now we have ceased to be missionaries in relation to credit unions. What we say is, ‘Here we are. If you want to join a credit union, you join one of our credit unions. We will find one that has a bond that will suit you.’ But we don’t encourage people to form their own credit unions. We don’t encourage people to think about the philosophical basis of credit unions. We don’t educate our members as to how it is. We don’t want to. We have become part of the establishment. Our Directors and our Managers are pinstripe suiters now. They think of themselves as part of the banking system and all this sort of thing. Once they think of themselves as part of the establishment, we are in real trouble.
You’re name isn’t Arneil is it?
BR: No. I have never heard Stan Arneil talk on the subject. It is absolutely my belief that the one thing that we haven’t been doing is encouraging new credit unions. There are lots of reasons why we shouldn’t if we are going to be a hundred per cent pragmatic. But the credit union movement in its hundred and odd years has never been pragmatic. The credit union movement has always been philosophic and has tried to do its best to develop it along philosophical lines.
There was a time a little while ago when there were a few credit unions actually starting to have differential accounts the other way round. In other words now they were paying higher interest but at one stage they moved to paying no interest, so pensioners who didn’t want to get interest on their money could put their money in there. So you could lend it out at a lower interest than that.
BR: I really am opposed to lurks and I am opposed to the credit union taking part in lurks. I don’t think that that was morally the sort of thing that a credit union ought to be. We have discovered now, after all these years that sometimes it may be better for a person on a pension to admit that they have income, to pay their tax and still get their pension. But this idea that you had to hide everything in someway is something that I don’t think was a good thing.
How about this one then. This is a company that is being set up at the present moment, mainly in fairly affluent societies, or maybe people who have a comparatively limited number of earning years but they earn a lot of money during that time. They are setting up companies in order to lend to their children at low rates of interest. Now credit unions haven’t started on that line, but people are setting up companies to do that.
BR: They will get caught in the long run. I am a great believer in people paying their tax. I believe that taxation is the cost of living within a society and that although one should do what one can to reduce the incidence of taxation within the confines of the Act, the bottom of the harbour things, and that sounds like one of those, should be unacceptable to credit unions.
But this lending at a low rate of interest. People who are prepared to invest at a low rate of interest to lend on at a low rate of interest, isn’t that philosophically.
BR: Yes, absolutely, if it is done for that purpose and not for avoiding taxation. There are credit unions, such as Macauley in Victoria, that is a credit union established to help the poorer people, people who are on welfare, people who are on low incomes, it is established to help them. They charge a very low rate of interest and it is a differential interest. The more you borrow the higher the interest rate. So that people who want just a small amount get it at a low interest rate because their need is greatest. Macauley is a very interesting credit union that we ought to look more at. We started looking at Macauley and similar ones, Maleny up in Queensland, we started looking there in Adelaide about three or four years ago, but we stopped looking because it is too hard.
Dermot Ryan had one of those going a little while ago, oh it would be a long while ago since he hasn’t been in the credit union, the business of having the differential rates of interest but reversed. Now as far as the issues that were at the Association during the years you were a Director, can you remember the first ones that you addressed during the consolidation of the electronic banking, so to speak? Was there restructuring going on at that time? I think there was wasn’t there.
BR: Yes, but I think the problems have only emerged in the last year or so. It was a matter of doing things when I got on the Board, getting things done to help our members. One of the things that is inclined to bug me a little bit that instead of spending our energies and out efforts involved in getting things done on behalf of our members, we are involved in all sorts of political problems and side-line issues. We have here at the Association a very excellent group of Managers, an excellent staff. We have got about one hundred and ten people here and they are all doing a good job to help management to help members. We as the Board should be doing everything we can to help them to do that job. Sometimes we get so mixed up with the letters and correspondence and all these other things that we perhaps lose sight of our main purpose. Helping members and helping people, getting back to my old thing, helping people found credit unions and trying to get back onto the right track sometimes doesn’t take the priority that it should.
Do you think that there should be more? Do you think they should provide more co-operative services for credit unions?
BR: Now that is interesting. If I am talking about the necessity of starting new credit unions to suit the needs of members elsewhere and to provide the benefits of credit unions to people throughout New South Wales, some of them will be by their very nature savings and loans and nothing else. They wont need many of the outside services, they will just be sort of basic credit unions. Now the sophisticates will always need sophisticated areas of services, they will need sophisticated services. But we are almost killing our non-sophisticated ones because they don’t need all these services. This is one of the ideas in Project Renewal, that our trade association is kept separately and everyone belongs to that and those that use the services, control the services and run the services and if you don’t use the services you don’t contribute to them. The services are run on a profitability basis. This to me is a big plus in Project Renewal.
Are the investment advisory services run on a profit basis?
BR: Are you talking about Bridges and Edvest? Well they are all user pays. The big problem that I have with Bridges is that I believe that it is something that ought to have been done on a national basis but like many of the things I have noticed that if New South Wales doesn’t do it, nobody does. The unfortunate and unpalatable situation is that the only reason that AFCUL is interested in Bridges at all is because New South Wales let them. Actually New South Wales took the decision to go into investment advisory because we had two reasons. One was a strategic reason which was terribly important because all the other advisory services were being lapped up or were associated with banks or other institutions. The second one was we believed they would be profitable. Now they will only be profitable if they are supported by the credit unions of course. But like most areas we have people who don’t use Bridges and it is like doing business with your enemies.
Well you can say that, but they are only providing a service for their own members aren’t they? I know a lot of credit unions use the Norwich Insurance based scheme but doesn’t sell immediately to Norwich by any means. It is just a software package.
BR: It is quite appropriate that all our members have a choice of who they should go to. That is quite essential. But the only way that you will maintain that a choice is there is by having a strategically placed one so that you know you have that choice and everyone else knows that you have that choice. You have got to have some strength.
Generally speaking they are really only software programs of advice aren’t they?
BR: I haven’t found them that way. As a retiree, that is not quite so.
Ideally that should be so, I should think, to fit in with the credit union ideas?
BR: No, I don’t believe that at all. I think the most important person is the member. Each member has different ideas, different marital situations, different ages, different family situations. An investment adviser in order to do his job properly must know what the situation is of the member, his expectations, his wife’s expectations, the children’s expectations. He has to know that person personally. You cannot do it with a program. It is a personal thing, particularly in relation to risk. Let me give you an example, Richard. In relation to risk I might be prepared to put a greater component of risk in my investments than you might. You might say, ‘Look, I have worked all my life for this money and I don’t want to have any investment in which there is risk. I want to be able to sleep at night, I don’t want to worry about it.’ I might say, ‘I want return. I have worked all my life for this money and now I want it to work for me.’ They are two entirely different profiles and the investment adviser has got to be extremely alert to the requirements of the particular member. It is not just a case of running a program.
But the better ones are interactive programs, software.
BR: Yes, but they are back-up not decision-making tools.
But they give you a number of options. They say do you want this rather than that, or that rather than that, so that you eventually come down to what you want. Mind you that is always a problem, people say certain things but they don’t necessarily really mean that. But that is the way they work, the better ones. I am talking about Norwich actually, in fact it is not even Norwich it is FPS I believe. I have never used it of course.
BR: I have never used it and I don’t think I would like it as a decision-making tool. I think I would like to make my own decisions without flicking through. If you are just talking about a tick, tick business, I can do that myself. I don’t need to go to an investment adviser to do that. But if I am talking about my life and my lifestyle, how I propose to live it, how I propose to make the best use of the next ten or fifteen years, then I am not talking about a tick, tick software program.
As I am an outsider. I am an historian who is an outsider, I am not part of the credit union movement, I am not a credit union person, from my observation of the credit union movement it seems to be generally for people who are in stable employment who could get loans from banks without any difficulty and generally speaking they will end up with a whole lot of superannuation and they will be all right. What about the rest of the people?
BR: You are right, and that is the maturation that I was talking about. Not only have the credit unions matured but the individuals have matured. We are all getting older and we haven’t got the younger people coming in from below. We were the people who were the workers. We were the battlers, we were the salesmen, we were the public servants on lower levels. We were all those things and to us it was very very necessary that we have this almost a mantle of safety as a credit union behind us. But have a look at us now. We are middle class, we are doing well. Look at the money that is pouring into the credit unions. It is pouring in because the people have got money, the people we are dealing with have got money. It is the battlers that we were that we are not giving any thought to. We haven’t even got a housing product, Richard, a specific housing product for the whole of Australia. We have never developed one. One would think that housing was a primary aim but we haven’t got round to it. But we are getting round to it. So I agree with you very much in that particular area. But I think that will have to happen, we need to be talking to these people who have needs because we have all grown older and our needs are less. The majority of our senior people wont be borrowing money. Our retirees, for example, there will be very few examples of retirees who retired from the public service who will need assistance. Most of our public service people, who are a strong part, our teachers and all our public servants and people from industrial things like myself, they have a superannuation scheme. We are part of the twenty-five per cent who are superannuated. A big percentage of our people are in that category.
What about the rest of us. People who aren’t superannuated, never have been, who don’t believe in borrowing money, who don’t owe anything and don’t have anything?
BR: We need to address you. We do. That is the point that I was making. Our credit unions don’t specifically provide for you.
Well I don’t believe in borrowing money, so you can’t provide for me.
BR: Oh no, but you believe in saving. You have got to remember that just because we are credit unions, our prime job is not credit our prime job is saving.
Well that is the way I have always banked. If I wanted something I battened down the hatches and saved for it.
BR: This indeed was our original thing. We were encouraging the wise use of money. We were encouraging a word that you don’t hear at the moment and that is thrift. Credit unions were thrift organisations. What I am suggesting to you is that we still are to a number of our members, we still are, but we don’t seem to sell that one as much. I believe in the 1990s savings are going to become an important part. Everybody geared up, you bought as much as you could, because with inflation and wages going up you would pay it off and everything would be fine. Within society and indeed within companies, economically so and I understand and I am speaking from a recent article of Don Stammer at Bain and Company, the chief economist, he said we are now reaching a stage that during the 1990s people will be de-gearing. That means they will be getting out of loans, paying their loans back as quickly as possible, they will want to save. Now this is where the credit union movement ought to be going, it ought to be talking to the people who want to save for a specific purpose. We often think of ourselves on the loans side only and that isn’t our prime endeavour. Our prime endeavour is to increase the quality of life for our members by the good use of their money.
Well you are still doing that surely?
BR: Not to the degree I think we should. Some credit unions are, some credit unions are not. I mean the thought of budgets, Richard, the average person doesn’t run a budget. We have been talking budgets for years and years in the credit union movement. We have forms for budgets, we provide budget information to members, we do all that. How many of them use a budget? How many of them really run on a budget? Very few. But I believe that is what will be coming in in the next ten years and Don Stammer thinks that is the way things will go.
You might be right too. Thinking about my family and such like. They run on my budget, but I don’t run one. They seem to know when the money is there you know.
BR: I will let you have the form and you can fill it in. You might be shocked because I can assure you that on retirement we all had to sit down and sort of assess our situations and realise that you have received your last salary cheque. What you’ve got is all you’ve got and that is a real brick wall to come up against.
My heart bleeds. I haven’t had a salary cheque for fifteen years.
BR: Personal choice, personal responsibility.
No, it wasn’t personal choice. I was forced into it. However, I am happy with it now.
BR: You seem very happy in your job Richard.
Sometimes you think where is the next one coming from, or what is happening next, or whatever, it does start the candle off.
BR: What we are saying to our people, by the way, in this planning, you have got to start your retirement planning when you are in your forties.
Well I have started my retirement planning just now. I am not planning to retire.
BR: Well said. Well retirement for many people is not retirement from life. We are not for the rocking chair yet.
Do something else.
BR: Yes, that’s right and you can do the thing of your choice.
Yes, I suppose for the first time in my life over the last few years, I am doing something which I really like doing. Now where do we go next? You were involved for a number of years on the Commercial Tribunal. I for one am not at all familiar with that. How did you get on it and what is it?
BR: The Commercial Tribunal is set up under a separate Act of Parliament and the members are appointed by the Minister, by the Government. The job of the Commercial Tribunal is to ensure that certain Acts, such as the Credit Act in our case, the requirements are provided for. Now the interesting thing is that credit unions don’t come under the Credit Act at the moment. We are exempted from the Credit Act because we are under the Credit Union Act, our own Act. However, as no doubt you will discover, the new Credit Act will, in my view, apply to all credit unions in time. So credit unions will have to comply with that. But right at the moment in New South Wales we don’t come under the Credit Act. But other financial institutions do and the Commercial Tribunal was set up to ensure fair play, to give people who were dealing with, shall we say, loan sharks or people who were not loan sharks but acting like them a punishment in some way. If they breached the Act then recourse could be had to the Commercial Tribunal who would deny them any interest on the loan and indeed fine them and look after the interests of the consumer. It is set up under the Business and Consumer Affairs umbrella and it is part of the business and consumer interest that the New South Wales Government has had for many years, starting with Sid Einfeld.
Have you found it satisfying working on that?
BR: I found it horrifying in some of the things that people do. When we realised that outside of the mainstream of lending there are still the finance companies and lending money at very high rates of interest, but as they claim there are still people who can’t get money through the normal ways and it is high risk stuff, so high risk we have got to charge high interest. But I have found it quite satisfying and I think that the job of the Commercial Tribunal will be increased and the value of it will be increased when credit unions become subject to the Credit Act. The Commercial Tribunal does other areas such as registration of builders, but I don’t sit on those because it is not my area of expertise.
End Tape 2A: 4820 Words: 1 hour 40 minutes.
ANSWCU26 10 MAY 1990: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO BRUCE ROBERTSON
Have you been on any overseas trips on behalf of the credit union movement?
BR: Yes, I have been overseas involved in credit union matters on three occasions. The first one was in June 1987. It was not on behalf of the credit union movement, but I made it a special task when I was in England to look at the United Kingdom movement and particularly to go to Rochdale which is the home of co-operatives and to have a look at where the co-operative business started. It is almost like a visit to Mecca to me because of my involvement in it. The other trips that I have made is I went on a South-East Asia Study Tour in relation to the Foundation, I am a member of the New South Wales Foundation Committee. That was in November 1987 and we went to Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines to see exactly what was happening and particularly to see where money was that raised for the Foundation within Australia was being spent. For example to see in Thailand a computer a set up and on the front was a little label saying ‘Presented by the Australian Foundation for International Credit Union Development’. It is there, we have seen it and we see that it is being put to good use. So our social conscience area was brought to light and we were able to see things that gave us an insight into what was really necessary. How the credit union movement which here is something equivalent to a financial institution, over there is a social institution as well. The credit union is a way that the local people can mobilise their money to use it for their own purposes. It was a wonderful insight I felt. The different ways they do it. The credit union system can be changed and adapted to all situations but the basic principles remain.
Who was involved with you on that visit? Was Dave Lawler there?
BR: Yes Dave was there. There was a goodly selection. A couple of Trustees went and the rest of us were people who had an interest in it.
Are you aware of the start of the Foundation at all? Did you have anything to do with people like Dermot Ryan and people like that?
BR: No. Dermot Ryan was no longer involved in any of the politics by the time I came in to it. Dermot Ryan was just a voice from the past as far as I was concerned. I found out more about Dermot Ryan in the last few years due to his association with the Historical Association than I ever knew before, because that aspect is interesting from an historical viewpoint. It is terribly important that we make records of history, but we mustn’t allow history to become a dead hand. The views that were held in the past were appropriate at that particular time and I think it is important that they be recorded and be assessed and that we do recognise the tremendous contribution that a number of these people made at that particular time.
Dermot was saying, just before he died, about the credit union movement some of the things that you have been saying. He was saying we had to get back to tors.
BR: Yes, but his getting back to tors was entirely different from mine. His getting back to tors was he wanted to turn back the clock and that can’t happen.
You were talking about lending at reverse rates and that was one of the things he was talking about.
BR: It is quite appropriate, but when you come to the nitty-gritty we were talking about two entirely different things. I think Dermot was a man of the past and that was exactly the situation and I think we have got to be men of the future. By men of the future I mean that we have got be considering where we are moving, not going back. We can’t go back, we just can’t go back in history.
Were you aware of the last thing that Dermot did re the Foundation? Did you hear anything about that?
BR: No.
Well he and Vince Martin went round the traps, so to speak, setting up the arrangement whereby the Government would fund proportionally to what the credit union movement funded in certain areas. They were setting up the connections so to speak. He had a trip after he retired with Vince Martin who is still around, he lives up on the central coast. Vince Martin was the Member of Parliament at the time. That was one of the things from the past. That was the last thing he did when he had been sort of forcibly retired, to check round that they would be all right or at least better off than they were before. That still applies, the nexus still applies that if the aid is channelled so that the Government puts a proportion with the money that the credit union movement puts?
BR: That is arranged with the Federal Government and AIDAB.
But one of my points is that is where that started, that is where that arrangement started.
BR: I know that he had something to do with the original taxation. I wasn’t aware of this.
Now are there any areas that we haven’t covered that I should have covered?
BR: One that I would like to mention is, last year with Bill Howe and John Newsome we went to Madison, Wisconsin on what is known as the Development Education Program. It was there that the three of us in an ex-convent spent a week in thinking about development issues and working towards the aims of the Development Education Program which is running so successfully in America. The Development Educators are people who go out into the community and to credit unions and tell them about development issues in other countries and how relevant credit unions are to people in not only the third world countries but particularly at the moment in the Eastern European countries. Tremendous interest is now being shown in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Hungry, towards the development of credit unions. But Bill and John and I went to this program and it is our hope to introduce this program to Australia within the next twelve months. Because of Project Renewal and other reasons, we really wanted to get on with it this year, but I think it is going to be a very important part of our education system within Australia. To explain to people the uniqueness of the credit union movement, ??????? without the credit union movement. It is part of the education program.
Have you had any further involvement in the World Council?
BR: No.
What about Project Renewal?
BR: I was a member of the New South Wales Systems and Government Review Committee and that was set up as the result of the Annual General Meeting and Helen McIntyre was the Chairperson of the New South Wales Systems and Government Review Committee. That Committee has been used as a sounding board by Project Renewal in many cases to answer certain questions, to provide certain input to Project Renewal. I have had a membership of that and in addition I have had a membership of the Board of ANSWCU, so Project Renewal has been coming to me in two separate directions so that has been my involvement in it.
Where does the restructuring stand now? What is the position now?
BR: The position is that within New South Wales at the Special General Meeting that we held, there was ‘in principle’ motion, that I had the pleasure of moving, was passed one hundred and ninety-five to twenty-four.
What was that motion?
BR: That motion was that the credit unions within New South Wales agree to the principles of the restructuring as set up in Project Renewal. That was the first motion. So you have got to agree the ‘in principle’ motion is the first one you have got to get over. The second one is how you are going to do it and the third one is by when and what we have got to do. We are up to stage two now, in which the individual credit unions having said, ‘Yes we agree in principle,’ have now got to put their money where there mouth is and sign up and say, ‘Not only did I say I was going to do it, but here it is.’
Exactly in what way is the restructuring taking place?
BR: Nothing has happened in restructuring.
So what have they agreed to?
BR: Well we have agreed that the Associations disappear. To put it in its simplest terms, the State Associations go out of business and we have one peak body elected directly from the membership from within each State and they form two bodies, one being a Council and the other one being a Board of Directors. The Board of Directors running the services, all the services. Instead of the thirty or so separate Boards of Directors all the way around Australia we would have one Board of Directors controlling as many of those as practicable and a Council which will set the agenda, the long-term planning and overlook the interests of members. So it is a very, very vital thing. The biggest problem that we have at the moment is that Queensland has decided not to support it at the moment, Western Australia I am not quite sure of but that looks reasonably negative and part of Victoria is reasonably negative too. So whether we ever go ahead with it will depend on looking very carefully at who we have got in favour and who we haven’t got in favour. If I can diversify just for a minute, Richard, I have thoughts in relation to the development of the Uniting Church within Australia. When the Presbyterian congregation and Methodists decided to unite it wasn’t favoured sufficiently by the Presbyterians but some of them did and some of them didn’t, so the ones that didn’t remained with their own Presbyterian church and the ones that did formed part of the Uniting Church, the ones that didn’t want to become Methodist went somewhere else. So instead of having your Uniting Church and all the others go out of business, we ended up with five different churches all running their own business which wasn’t the intention. So I don’t think the idea of uniting those churches was a wrong thing, but timing was bad. People persevered and went ahead with it because they thought it was a good idea when there were so many people who still had problems. I think they should have waited. What I am really saying is that I hope we don’t rush into this. If there are too many outside it will fragment the movement again. So we will have to have some big decisions to be made in the next month or so.
Of course when they set up AFCUL they set it up with two States in the first instance.
BR: Well that is always used as an example of success, but has AFCUL been a success? If it was all that successful why are we restructuring it? Why is it necessary to restructure it? Why is it that AFCUL has had so many frustrations that would lead it to take these conclusions? So I wouldn’t think of that as the real answer.
So why?
BR: So why are they doing it?
You asked the question, now answer it.
BR: I believe that from a really practical, pragmatic viewpoint a centralised approach is the most suitable for the credit union movement at this time. But a centralist approach would be completely impractical in a government sense if the Federal Government took a centralist approach and Queensland and Western Australia and somewhere else decided not to join the centralist system, it would be a disaster. But there are very many things that we still could do. We could certainly get similar legislation in every State. A lot of people say you will never get that until the Federal Government imposes it on them. I don’t think the Federal Government will ever do that, either, so neither case is correct. If Project Renewal does not go ahead I don’t think it is the end of the world, we will just have to find another way round it. I hope sincerely it does go ahead.
Now have we got any more sections that we haven’t covered?
BR: Well one of the questions that you had here was about credit unions and the way they are going and their principles and have we gone the wrong way, or something like that.
Well we have already done that to some extent.
BR: Yes, but it is a question of emphasis and that is in the role of the volunteer. As I said, my involvement in the higher levels of credit union management and direction were only possible as I had the time available to put to them. It is no use doing a job unless you have got the time available. That is one of the big problems that we are getting in life at the moment in all organisations. Rotary Clubs and churches and all sorts of places are having difficulty in getting people who have got the time, everybody’s time seems taken up, time is of the essence. The role of the volunteer is becoming so difficult that it is sometimes impossible. I haven’t got a quick answer on this one, but I do think we have got to review this situation. How on earth could we have a volunteer on this Board of Directors on the Project Renewal when he is required to spend two days a week full-time running thirty different companies. You might say the volunteer isn’t appropriate to this sort of job, but there are many people quite appropriate to that sort of job working in industry who in their day to day work are doing similar sort of work, but they just haven’t got the time to do it for the credit union movement on a voluntary capacity. So how we solve this, I really don’t know. If the Council becomes something that we just put on at times to have volunteer input, it just becomes a talk fest and I wouldn’t like to see that happen. So we have just got to look at the role of a volunteer and we have got to look very carefully at it and see what we can do to really make the volunteer Director an important part and that he maintains an important role within the movement itself. As I said, I don’t have a slick answer after twenty years of thinking about it, but I do know that sometimes people get on Boards and they stay on it for twenty years. It is not supposed to be a sort of permanent job. We were talking to some Singaporians last week who were out here, and they said, ‘Why do you do it? You are a volunteer, you don’t get paid, why do you do this? You believe philosophically it is the right way?’ ‘Yes, I do, I think it is a great thing.’ ‘Then what keeps you going on this? Shouldn’t you perhaps get a share, a sort of profit share, that if the Association makes a profit of four million dollars or four hundred thousand dollars, shouldn’t the Directors get a share of this over and above budget?’ I said, no, but that is the way they have been looking at it. So that is looked at from a pragmatic view from another country.
It has been fairly easy in Australia. I don’t know how they do it in America for instance, but in Australia they have done it. A lot of the people who are involved in credit unions have been public servants and the ones that aren’t have been working for large companies. The companies or the government departments or authorities have allowed people time off to work for the credit unions because they believe they are a good thing.
BR: Sounds great, but I can assure you that my company wouldn’t have taken that approach at all. Your main job is to do your job and if you have an interest in Rotary or credit unions or some other organisation, or the football club, you are expected to do that in your own time. It just wouldn’t work in an industrial credit union. I know you mentioned the public service and I hope that isn’t the case.
It is. I think for instance the City Council were fairly accommodating in that area.
BR: Well, they may have to change because the City Council is in real trouble financially. But when I was over in America one of the things that I did notice is that the people who are carrying the philosophy, who are carrying the democratic banner, carrying the whole ideas are the young professionals. These are not the top managers that we are talking about, they are entrenched, they are establishment. These are the young people who work within the credit union movement and really believe it. They believe it because they are talking about it day-to-day and face-to-face with the members. We were fascinated there at the group we met in Madison, they were young professionals, they weren’t volunteers. They believe that it is their job to carry the philosophy through. Maybe that is the way we have to go in Australia. Maybe we have to have the volunteers as well, but the credit union philosophy has got to be strongly pushed by the credit union management and the young mangers, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with the ideas and ideals, they are the ones that we have got to get hold of.
When Reg Elliott was brought in from the banking industry to the credit union movement, did you agree with this?
BR: Yes. At that stage we needed technical skills. We needed to know what was going on elsewhere. I agreed with Reg’s coming in. Well Timmons was before him and he is an ex-banker too. So yes we needed to get those particular skills. We couldn’t develop them inside. We can’t develop them internally.
I understand that Mr Elliott has had a conversion, so to speak, and he is one of the biggest proponents of credit unions.
BR: Oh absolutely. I think if a person is involved in credit unions it becomes a missionary situation.
He is not exactly the young executive, but he certainly behaves in the same way.
BR: Yes, I agree. I agree that that is the case. But at credit union level I think there are far less Managers who share the same drive and zeal of the philosophy that they had twenty-five years ago. They are involved very strongly in the pragmatic side. What we have done we have had a bit of a cycle in this. We were all for the philosophy and the theory, then we became all the pragmatics and I believe we are on the way back. The other area I think we have got to do something about is in relation to environmental issues. Indeed, ethical lending and that sort of thing, which is going to be a big part of lending throughout the world. People are not only saying, ‘Where shall I put my money?’ They say, ‘How is going to be used?’ When you put the money in the bank you don’t know how it is going to be used, it could be lent for any purpose at all. But you put your money in a credit union and you know where it is going to be used. We have a big opportunity there to say to people, ‘We are people and we lend to people. We lend to people to help them in their way of life and help them advance themselves and their families. It is people helping people.’ We have got an almost home and hosed situation on these ethical and environmental situations and that is where we ought to be going.
Well you have answered one of the questions that I was just about to ask, so there you go. Now what do you think are the challenges for the future?
BR: Well that is where I think the challenges lie. The challenges are first of all if the emphasis goes off credit and on to savings, we have got to be there and we have got to provide that. The challenges are in relation to our volunteers. The challenges are into our philosophical approach. And the challenges are that shall I say the strategy in my view is the development of new credit unions with new people taking an interest in it. Over in Europe it rather opened my eyes reading the reports on Poland. You see they have been living under a State banking system. They had no confidence in a State banking system run by bureaucrats, they kept their money in mattresses. They don’t like the idea of banking tooth and claw. They don’t like the idea of central banks, the Rothchilds of this world don’t have a good name in central Europe. They don’t want those particularly. But the co-operative style is right in the middle, it suits their purpose. After forty years they don’t want either the left or the right, they want something that they can take a part in government and credit unions are seen by them to be the middle road, the road which has personal responsibility yet you have a name in it. Now if they can see it, why can’t more Australians see it in exactly the same terms? Because we are selling a different story and what is the story we are selling? We are as good as the banks, that is what we are selling. We are not selling the true rationale. If we are only as good as the banks, and our whole rationale is only as good as the banks, we might as well all go home and close down. We have got to have a reason for being and the co-operative sector provides that reason. It is the third sector of society. You have got capitalism on one side, you’ve got the government on the other side and you’ve got co-operatives in the middle. And that is where we ought to be, we ought to keep that aim and we should keep it firmly. It is no use talking about it we’ve got to do something about it.
Well that is a suitable note to end, but I should ask you one thing of course before we finish. Have you got anything you can donate to the project at all in the way of memorabilia or whatever?
BR: Very little. The University of England Directors Workshop, the first Directors Workshop that was held in 1978, there is a copy of everything that went on. I can certainly donate that which has a certificate to say I attended. Also it has a list of the people who attended which may be of some use in the future to people as to who went there.
Are you happy to have that put into the Australian Credit Unions Historical Co-operative?
BR: Yes. It has got a few personal things in it that I would like to take out first, that’s all.
Well thank you very much Mr Bruce Robertson.
End Tape 2B: 3963 Words: 1 hour 30 minutes.