11 FEBRUARY, 1992: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH RICHARD CROSBIE, PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR VCCA AND PRESIDENT AFCUL
Where were you born and when?
RC I was born Birchip in Victoria on 4 February 1939.
Did you grow up around there?
RC: Yes, I was on a wheat and sheep farm until I was about sixteen and then I went away to school. I go back regularly, my mother still lives up there. I haven’t really lived there for many many years but I have still got plenty of family there.
What sort of influences did you get from your parents do you think?
RC: I think I got more from my grandparents than my parents in way. They were very much a pioneering family. You had a pretty clear idea about work and life and what you got out of it and that sort of thing. At the time my grandparents were living on the farm but my father was working it and I seemed to cop a lot of the jobs of helping him out with milking cows and fruit and vegetables and confounded chooks and that sort of thing. So, I think they were of good Scottish-origin and a good Scottish work ethic is what I got from there.
Any religious or political influence?
RC: I went to a Presbyterian boarding school which certainly attempted to have an influence on me. I am not religiously involved now but certainly at the time it reinforced a lot of the values the parents and grandparents had had.
What about political skills, did you get them from either of your parents?
RC: Yes, but I probably reneged and they were very much Country Party people.
I didn’t really mean in a Party sense, I meant in a skills sense you know. Political in a wider sense, ability to work in a political sense.
RC: No, I don’t really think I did, not in Birchip, it was a very small environment. I think that came more from boarding school there. I had a lot of positions of responsibility. In those days prefects were almost on the staff and I think I was given a lot of help and encouragement by some of the teachers there.
So where was your first schooling?
RC: Well it was a tiny little school called Kinnabulla which had I think about eleven students most of the time, half of which were my brothers. I was lucky enough to go right through that school and the day I left they closed it down and they shifted to the big smoke where there were about ninety students in the next town. But I went into what was called higher elementary school in those days and went right through to Year 10, which was as far as the school went. I think the aspirations my family had at the time was that I would probably go and work in a bank. I was the second in the family, so the oldest was naturally the one who was expected to work the farm. I did reasonably well in Year 10 and some of the teachers at the school persuaded me, and more importantly my father, that I perhaps could do something with some education so whereas I thought I was leaving school one November, I was enrolled in a boarding school and off I went. I thoroughly enjoyed that actually and from there to Melbourne University.
You were active in other than the academic side of school?
RC: Yes I was very active in debating clubs and sport, I was one of those sport freaks at the time and being a prefect gave you an identity with the school rather than just being a student there and coming in at senior levels I was given a lot of responsibility there.
You built leadership skills?
RC: I think you were virtually forced too. Weekends and that sort of thing the prefects were virtually in charge. It was a fairly large boarding school and we were given a lot of responsibilities, supervision and this sort of thing. I think this had a big influence on what I subsequently did with my life.
So when you left school where did you go, straight to university?
RC: I still went to work in a bank.
You didn’t go to university.
RC: Not straight away. I think that was too much of a cultural shock for the family and probably for me at the time. So I did go to work in a bank and again some of my teachers said that I was perhaps selling myself short and I ought to head for university. This I did after two years. But I went back and worked in a bank again, this time in a professional economics department environment and I was there for nearly two years. Then I went to a place called Footscray Technical School which was a very underprivileged school in a very underprivileged area of Melbourne.
By choice?
RC: No, not by choice. In those days you went where you were told. One way or another I have stayed there for the rest of my life and it has been turned from a very small under privileged school to university status in the last years. So it has been quite exciting to see an organisation grow particularly given the sort of background of the students and lots of first generation migrant families grappling with education for the first time. I have found it very rewarding and have no intentions of leaving. Though it has changed a lot now that it is a university because it draws students from all over Melbourne and Victoria and Australia, for that matter, and it is steadily losing its western suburbs feel which I personally find very disappointing. But I guess rules are rules and university education is open to people with the best results irrespective of where they come from. I have been a bit disappointed that it has lost some of that particular character it had.
Where did you first hear about credit unions? When and where?
RC: Well there had been a very small credit union founded at Swinburne which was one of the colleges and they made a decision in the mid-1970s, early 1970s, that perhaps they had better extend it out to all the other ones. So one day I had a guy knock on the door and say that he was a Director of this credit union and they were looking for Directors from other colleges and somebody had given him my name. I said, ‘Oh yes, if its only once a month there is not much of an involvement,’ and I guess in one way or another it has consumed me ever since. So I was a Director of that credit union, still am a Director of that credit union. It is now a tertiary credit union, it was college and college staff.
Does it take in all of the universities?
RC: It takes in all of the universities with the exception of Melbourne and Latrobe, they have each got their own small credit unions. It takes in all of the post-secondary institutions in Victoria.
Where did you learn about credit unions, though, where did you learn the philosophy and I suppose the myth, if you like, the legend of credit unions?
RC: Well I had done a bit on co-operatives while I was at university.
From an economic or historical point of view?
RC: Both probably. I had an English Professor of Economics who had been tied up in the retail co-operatives and he gave us a section on co-operatives and what had gone wrong and why they had failed and all the rest of it. I guess his passion for it kind of left a mark; that is a good idea that went wrong and it was a pity and then when I got involved with Tertiary Credit Union, I started going to a few courses and AGMs and other things. But I must admit I probably found myself in these sorts of things before I had become fully conversant with the myth. My involvement here really happened quite suddenly and was unplanned. I had just finished a stint as Sub-Dean of the Faculty and that is a fairly heavy administrative job and I was looking for a lighter academic load and having my life back to myself. Again I was approached to come on to this Board.
1981, when six people came on? Who were you approached by?
RC: Well two people, Peter Timmons, who was the Chief Executive Officer of AFCUL, was one. It was three people actually. Laurie Watt who was from Murray and the other one was the Chairman who preceded me whose name momentarily escapes me.
Chris Tingeary?
RC: Chris Tingeary. They were the three. There was an AFCUL conference in Melbourne.
Did you know them all before that?
RC: No, I knew none of them.
So how did they come to you, do you know?
RC: No, I really don’t know. That is one of the things I’ve got to find out as to why. I suppose the fact that I lecture in banking and finance and that I had had by that stage ten years experience at Tertiary and they knew this place had a financial problem, I didn’t know at the time.
On Tertiary Credit Union you had Eileen West over there, did you approach her from the start?
RC: No, she has come more recently.
When she was on the Board here at VCCA was she at Tertiary in those days?
RC: No she was with the Professional Officers Credit Union and subsequently with the Taxation Statex(?). No she would have joined Tertiary probably five or six years ago and that was more that she had worked with the Manager, Mike Jolley, at Tertiary, being his Assistant Manager and when that vacancy cropped up he was only too happy to have back the tried and trust Eileen. So really, Eileen and I have got nothing running common, it was Mike and Eileen.
So you didn’t really have any interest in the job in the first instance until somebody asked you?
RC: That’s right. I had no knowledge that this job existed. Well I found to my horror that I was Chairman in a very few months. It became obvious, given the large number of people who came on at that stage, that there were some problems, that there was a general new broom going through the place and these three who had contacted me had had in mind that I was going to take over as Chairman which is what subsequently happened.
They didn’t enlighten you?
RC: No, they drip fed me all this news.
You hadn’t met Peter Timmons before?
RC: No. When you were Sub-Dean you are an administrator and I really was locked up in my job and I suppose was spending one afternoon/evening a month at Tertiary Credit Union and that was my credit union involvement.
Had you been involved in any of the Chapters, or anything like that?
RC: I have been to a couple of Chapter meetings, but I had done no formal courses. It was very much seat of the pants sort of stuff.
So you weren’t actually bound by any of the legends?
RC: No I wasn’t bound by the legend and I guess if I have been successful it was because I was plucked out of the air. I had no political baggage either and none of them had anything on me because nobody knew who I was. This was a big advantage in the very difficult times then.
I read an article you wrote in 1982 which was extremely deficient in any credit union legend.
RC: Was that Credit Unions Today was it?
Or reactionary.
RC: Yes. That was the first major thing I did. I became the Chairman in the September/October 1981, if my memory serves me correctly, and yes I gave that paper in Sydney and shocked a few people. Well again, I was probably fortuitous that at the time people were being very introspective and very warm and cuddly about co-operatives and somehow or another something or someone would come and save them that they really didn’t have to do anything to save themselves, whereas I tended to apply a more commercial approach and say you’ve got to do something or you’re going to disappear off the face of the earth. I think this in many ways set the scene for what went on in the next decade. Credit unions had to get themselves into some sort of, I think the term we kept using was get some financial vigour into themselves. Once you got that the philosophy can be applied later on. But I’m looking very much for the new ethic legislation which is imminent in 1 July 1992, as in one sense closing a chapter off. Credit unions will then have the legislative capacity to do what they want to do. They have got the financial strength. They really have to spend the next ten years, perhaps hopefully not as long as that, working out just what it is they want to do. To some extent it will be going back to what they used to do. But I suspect from what I hear around the traps it will be finding new social applications. I am not anti-co-operative, I just believe co-operatives have to be realistic and if they are not realistic they will go the way of lots of other co-operatives. They will either become bankrupt or they will become irrelevant. A very sad story the co-operative story if you read ????? Lots of things were launched by co-operatives but they never matured into anything.
I come from co-operative country in England, so it is still entrenched.
RC: Even in the retail?
They had to change of course. Just like you go into the big co-op store in town and it is the best store in town.
RC: I seem to remember that being very much the point that this Professor was making to me, that the co-operatives tended to believe that people would come to them because they were co-operatives and that they had dowdy stores.
And those ones failed.
RC: And old stock and that sort of thing, whereas the ones that said people want big variety and bright lights and all the rest of it. Well I think that is where the credit union was, that somehow or other very few applied commercial principles, it was heresy because it was contrary to philosophy. My view very much is that co-operative is just an alternative way of doing it, it is a third way, either commercial, government or the co-operative way. People have got the same expectations of a co-operative as they have got of any other organisation.
I think they really have. They want the glitz and all the rest of it.
RC: That’s right. So while I may have been a loose cannon so to speak, I think the different approach was relevant at the time. I like to think it was anyway.
David Denning, had been appointed when you first came on the Board?
RC: No, that was our first job. The Manager had gone just prior to me coming on the Board.
He was the stop-gap Manager wasn’t he, Phillip Allid?
RC: Phillip Allid was the stop-gap Manager, he was the Deputy Manager, he was Acting Manager in the interim. I mean I didn’t even know his predecessor.
Michael Hilderbrand.
RC: Michael Hilderbrand. No the first job of that new Board was to find a Manager and David Denning well he started at about the same time, a little bit before I became Chairman. I was Chairman with David right through that period.
So what were the problems you had to face first off?
RC: Well the organisation was bankrupt so I suppose that was the first one. I guess if I learnt co-operative principles and myths and other things, it was there because putting my commercial eyes across it you probably would have just rung for a Receiver Manager/Liquidator and it would have finished, whereas I had around me people who were saying, ‘No it is a co-operative, that can’t happen.’ These people were so insistent that co-operatives can’t fail that I started to listen to them.
Did they really mean that, co-operatives can’t fail, or they can’t be allowed to?
RC: I think they really believed they can’t, but if they didn’t believe the can’t they certainly felt they can’t be allowed to. We had a series of meetings with the members and I found this view that they can’t be allowed to anyway was shared by people and I thought well this will be interesting and are they prepared to put their money were their mouth is? So we sort of developed a program, it was a fairly painful financial program that said well if you want the organisation to survive it is going to cost you. To my surprise and delight they said ‘Fine.’ Not quite as simple as that, there was a fair bit of angst around, but certainly nothing that you would ever find of the floor of a meeting of shareholders, they would have folded the tent and gone. So I guess that was the first lesson I learnt, that if you have done the right thing by your members over a long period of time and they value the co-operative, they are prepared to do things that they wouldn’t do in a commercial sense. I have lots of other reinforcements of that where we have needed help, we have had meetings, we’ve outlined what’s needed and while you cop some abuse on many occasions, ‘Why didn’t you tell us before,’ this sort of thing, when the chips are down they deliver. I have learnt all that on the job. I certainly never came in with a view that this is a co-operative so therefore you can work wonders with it. I have never ceased to be amazed just how forthcoming supportive co-operators can be. But I have also seen how destructive they can be when they are of another mind. But by and large my experience has reinforced that the co-operative myth, or call it what you will, has got something going for it.
So what specifically did you do, I mean, with the various problems? Jubilee Lake what happened to that? Tell us what happened and how did you go about restructuring the organisation to cover the deficit?
RC: Well to a certain extent we did behave like Receiver Managers. We looked at what they had on their plate and clearly some of the things were beyond redemption. So the very first job I had was at that October Annual General Meeting, at which I later became Chairman, was to stand up and tell them that Jubilee Lake was finished and we were closing it down and that those who had money in there had lost it. That was a nice introduction to there. Teledata we kept on the go for a short period of time, but it was pretty evident that it wasn’t going to survive either. We finally merged that with a company called General Computing Services and later on there was a total merge and FCS as exists today is really the product of Teledata and the original GCS. So we ended up getting out of the Teledata hole a lot better than what we thought. The fact that we had a lot of credit union users meant that it had a commercial asset and we were able to sell that. While we lost money on the whole deal, it wasn’t the monumental loss that it looked as if it was going to be at some stage. This then got us down to the VCCA itself, where essentially we got people to contribute no interest bonds. So everybody deposited money, they got no income on it, and we used the income from that to originally repay the debts of the organisation.
That’s the principle of the first non-interest credit union, the one that is still going in Queensland.
RC: Well we certainly got it going down here and it went on for five years, the infamous deficit recovery thing. On top of that we had to charge them dues for the ongoing. So really it wasn’t a very pleasant period.
The Christian credit unions that are still going still do that, they charge an annual fee for administration and they use the members’ money, which is invested, and they get the interest back and that supports the credit union.
RC: Well, I haven’t often felt that if people were less selfish that is the way all credit unions ought to operate, but people unfortunately want maximum rate on their deposits. That five year deficit recovery program worked. I think it bonded a lot of people together.
You do?
RC: Yes, well I guess I was feeling this is crazy, people aren’t going to buy this. It took a lot of work, we had to have a lot of general meetings. Dave and I together, Dave and I separately visited virtually every credit union in the State, some more than once. We went to their Board meetings, talked to them about what the problems had been, where we wanted to go. So I got maximum exposure to credit unions by really going around and hawking this unpleasant message that I had for them.
I suppose they also got maximum exposure to you?
RC: Oh yes. I went from not being known at all to being very well known within a very short period of time. I was fortunate that being in a university environment we get Sabbatical and I was long overdue for Sabbatical so in 1982 I actually took a year’s Sabbatical which enabled me to put a lot of time in on the ground. I never ever got involved in the day-to-day management, but it enabled me to travel around the State to visit Boards. I went to the World Conference in that year and suddenly saw co-operation on a world plane.
Was that 1982?
RC: That was 1982 in Toronto.
Was Ken Miller there?
RC: No, he wasn’t at that one. I really wasn’t impressed with the Toronto Conference, though in retrospect it was a very important one. Up until then WOCCU was dominated by the United States, it really was a United States organisation, and Toronto was a process whereby the United States let go of the control and opened it up. It required enormous changes to the by-laws and a lot of the sessions were in fact changing the by-laws to enable the organisation to be nationalised. So you really didn’t get too much in the way of co-operative from there. But I have been to every World Council Conference since then. Of course I was heavily involved in the Melbourne 1988 one, which we were the host to.
Whose initiative was that?
RC: I think you would have to say David Denning. The VCCA had planned to do it but when they hit these troubles in the early 1980s it really wasn’t feasible for them to do it. But David’s view was the plans’ going well, we should be out of that, this could be a good signal to us and the rest of the world and everyone else that we are back on deck. So it almost was taken on in one sense as a demonstration of just what we could achieve and the symbolism of going from the bottom of the pile to the top. But it took a fair few people a lot of years to actually win it in the first place, to win the right to do it. And of course a lot of years to organise it as well. But I think it is still generally regarded as the best one the Council had. We probably went a bit over the top in some ways, you know set a standard that others perhaps would find difficult to match and in many ways shouldn’t need to match. If the co-operative thing is working properly the spirit of the conference should keep it going without all the bells and the whistles.
End Tape 1A: 4082 Words: 1 hour 35 minutes.
11 FEBRUARY 1992: INTERVIEWER RICHARD RAXWORTHY: TALKING WITH RICHARD CROSBIE
What about Brisbane and the Expo there and Lloyd Horgans and the Brisbane Teachers putting on something up at the Expo. Was there any sort of sense of rivalry between the VCCA and the World Council Meeting in Melbourne?
RC: There was a lot of rivalry between the VCCA and the Queensland League. Garth ?????? was the Manager and clearly wanted it in Brisbane and in the end there had to be a formal competition between Melbourne and Brisbane where we had to speak in front of an independent panel and that panel made up its mind as to which one got it. There was some bad blood when Melbourne got it. Certainly in Garth’s eyes there was some bad blood, because he felt that it really would have locked in with Expo and given the credit union involvement. Now whether the failure to win gave Lloyd the idea for Queensland teachers involvement, I really don’t know. I guess the good thing that came out of Lloyd’s involvement was that as a corporate sponsor he was designated a day which he chose to give over to credit unions and so there was Credit Union Day at Expo and each day they opened Expo with that sponsor giving some sort of a presentation on their product and then the flag was raised and the rest of it. I actually went up and did the opening of Expo because Lloyd made it Credit Union Day, not just Queensland Day. I think we manned every gate at Expo and people had stickers on their lapels as they went in and seeing tens of thousands of people walking around with credit union stickers on, most of them didn’t know it was there or what it was about, but nevertheless it looked good. That gave credit unions a lot of exposure because on that day you got prominence with flags and displays and that sort of thing. But we weren’t paying the bill so I guess we can say that it was good.
I think everybody agreed that it was good, but Lloyd got the blame when there was a terrific bill to pay.
RC: I think it is probably a pity that it hadn’t been recognised as a loss item and that the loss couldn’t have been more responsibly spread over a greater base rather than the members of Queensland Teachers having to carry the can for the whole lot. But from my involvement, I have fond memories of that day.
What about AFCUL? I think you joined AFCUL pretty well straight away with a delegate, with David Denning when you first came on the Board. No not straight away.
RC: It was about a year and a bit.
1983 for yourself and 1984 for David Denning. 1984 was when you became Chairman anyway. How did that come about?
RC: Well getting on there in the first place, originally I said, ‘Well there is enough work in Victoria, I don’t want to go on it,’ but the people who were on it.
Who? From New South Wales?
RC: No, the Victorians who were on it. You are stretching my memory. Laurie Watt was the main representative.
Yes, he was just coming out of it at that time. There is Wally Winter, Weston, Davidge, Smith.
RC: No, I think it was Laurie Watt and Christen Geary were going. Well AFCUL then made a decision that, I guess in a way anticipated where we are in 1992, that there were going to be a lot of demands made on credit unions that couldn’t be satisfied from State associations and that we had to co-operate on a national level and get some standardised products and standardised legislation. Now that wasn’t well received. It was seen as a Federal take-over and egocentric patterns of behaviour and this sort of thing. What was happening was that people at the AFCUL Board table would adopt a position, usually in support of what was going to happen, but then when they got back to their States they either forgot all about it or their States stamped on it. You tended to find that you went ahead and then at the next meeting everybody had retreated back again. So as a matter of policy they adopted that the delegates to AFCUL ought to be the Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer of the State association, which is why I think I preceded David by a few months. But that happened right throughout. Now again that was really part of trying to lock people into a commitment. If you can’t give a commitment at the table say so, but don’t give a commitment and then go away and recant.
What about your standing as President against Bill Howe?
RC: No that was quite amicable. There was no great problem there.
Were there negotiations or was it a suggestion?
RC: I actually stood unsuccessfully the year before but with a purpose. The difficulty of what was happening then was that Reg Elliot had gone from Chief Executive Officer of ANSWCU into Chief Executive Officer of AFCUL and the New South Wales League were prepared to let a number of the functions go over as well. There was a blurring as to just where Bill stood. He was Chairman of ANSWCU and he was Chairman of AFCUL and it was necessary for a lot of negotiations to take place between ANSWCU and AFCUL.
There were a few people in New South Wales who didn’t like that, him being in both positions.
RC: True. I copped that later when I was Chairman of both from here. But I would say Bill’s position had been undermined a great deal because he was wearing two hats at a time and my purpose in standing, as I explained to Bill, was to clear the air. Either they were prepared to support him as someone who could be the President of AFCUL and go through these things, or they couldn’t, and I think in the short policy speech I gave at the time I indicated that I really didn’t want to win but I felt it was necessary for the Board of AFCUL to indicate to Bill that he did in fact have the support, that he wasn’t in fact just becoming President because no-one else nominated and to put the sort of stuff that was happening to rest. Because should we have had a schism at that time we would have been in great trouble. Well Bill then acquiring a great interest in the World Council and he actually moved up a notch, I forget which the notch was at the time, and he then indicated to me that he had a real interest in becoming the President of the World Council. Their preference was for ex-national Chairman/Presidents rather than currently serving ones. So the position became vacant. Bill never gave me any Presidential nod or tap on the shoulder or anything else, but he certainly let me know that he was vacating the position. Then there was in fact a contest as I recall it and I think from memory John Fiethom was the other candidate. Anyway I became President and there I have stayed. You have probably got a better idea of when it was than me.
It just seems ages.
RC: Yes it does, and that is one of the things I am very conscious of and have to take into account, that I have been President of AFCUL now since 1984.
As a matter of fact I was looking for other people to slot in here or there, but I couldn’t find any and wondering whether I was right.
RC: No, you are right. But I do think and I do talk to a few people about how long is enough. I have just been re-elected like a few weeks ago for another year.
Has anybody challenged you at all?
RC: No, at no stage.
Bill’s not thinking of attempting to come back?
RC: No, well Bill was on the Board, but Bill resigned from the Board to take up some other interest. I think he is becoming more involved and I certainly support him in becoming more involved, particularly in the development education program foundation. He has got a wealth of experience from that World Council and it is just madness to let it go to waste. But I would be very surprised if he was interested in taking on this sort of position again.
Now as far as the VCCA is concerned, since you’ve been elected there what have been the main problems? I mean after you solved the problems, the financial problems, as a Board and with a Manager of your choice in those days, you managed to solve the financial problems of the VCCA, what directions have you been taking?
RC: Well the problems and the directions are the same thing. I firmly believe that the credit union movement support system has had to be nationalised. If you are going into financial products that are delivered by plastic or electronic means to do it six times over is an act of madness. The members really have got no affinity with the card as long as it works, they really don’t care about the nuts and bolts. I think the problem we had when we started coming out of our own financial problems was that there were a fair few people in Victoria who wanted to get Victoria right back on top and beat New South Wales in particular and Queensland and South Australia were probably the targets. There was a tendency for a lot of people to say, ‘Let’s do our own thing, let’s set up our own localised chequing, our own localised plastic.’ Some people even wanted to go back to our own localised computer company. Now I suppose leading people through the debate and getting them to see that a single national approach was better than competing with one another at a State level.
There was a place, and still is a place, for joint facilities in computers and things like that wasn’t there? I mean that is still operating in other places effectively. They are using the same system I know, but jointly using a computer.
RC: Oh sharing around. What worried me was that people weren’t prepared to practice one of the principles of co-operatives co-operating with co-operatives and wanted to install their own computers, their own software without any question of compatibility and without really looking down the track and saying, ‘What if.’ For instance, we have just come under the State Credit Act on 1 February this year, now that has been horrendous and we have had to rewrite all of the computer software to generate the loan documentation. The penalties for breaching that Act are horrendous. Now if we had all done our own thing, that would have broken the credit union movement because it has cost thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in man hours to develop that software. But because we can drop it in to 95 per cent of the credit unions it is a one-off cost we have all shared. If we’d all been on separate things we would have all had to go to our own consultants and we might each have been facing tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to get our own system right.
Have the different associations, they have split up at various times, have they all joined together on this?
RC: Well as it stands at the moment, Project Renewal which you have probably heard a fair bit about in previous interviews, really is about the nationalisation of the support systems of credit unions but it is not about the nationalisation of credit unions. The concept we’ve got at the moment is that credit unions must maintain their independence, their autonomy. It’s that that makes them local and relevant and responsive are the terms I keep using in relation to it, which is what members are interested in. The members are not interested in the back office. How did you do that? Where did that go? Did that transaction go electronically via Darwin or Sydney, or whatever? As long as they get what they want down the other end. So what we are really about is making the back offices efficient so that the credit unions themselves can spend all of their time developing the relevant warm and cuddly, call it what you like, front office situation. That has been a difficult message to sell. People immediately say you are centralising, therefore credit unions must by necessity become branches of Sydney or whatever. That’s not what the intention is. Now Project Renewal in a formal sense has been around for about three and a bit years, but in an informal sense it’s really been developing for six or seven years. Increasingly the Federal Government has introduced legislation that applies to all financial institutions. Now the fact that we are registered under a State Act does not make us exempt from Cash Transaction Reporting Act and Privacy Act and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, etc. The difficulty we were facing was that the Federal Government wouldn’t want to introduce the legislation, so they would send seven letters, one to each of the States, well they would send more than that because they would send one to the Northern Territory and one to the ACT and one to AFCUL, so in reality there were nine letters saying, we want your response to what we are proposing to do with bankruptcy or restrictive trade or whatever. Now the difficulty was they very often got nine different responses and so their immediate reaction was we don’t have to worry about credit unions, they are so divided and all over the place, we are not getting a cohesive answer. Now I guess the first shots in getting a nationalised approach was to say we are better to employ someone who can address this on a national approach with a single issue. Graham Lockland is the guy who is currently in that job and he is known and hated and feared and all sorts of things, but at least the governments know that when Graham Loughlan is talking he is talking with some authority on that particular issue, rather than speaking with nine voices. I mean this place still interfaces with the Victorian Government on Victorian Government issues. So it has been a delicate balancing act to get the credit unions more efficient, to get them the legislation they need, which we are very hopeful is going to go through on 1 July. So again they have got the legislative environment they need, they’ve got financial strength, now they are back saying what do we want to do with it all.
The legislation, where is this legislation?
RC: Well at the moment it is in the Queensland Parliament. This is what is known as the AFIC, The Australian Financial Institutions Corporation, I think though it might be Commission, which is being enacted via what they call template legislation, identical legislation is being passed in all of the States and Territories so that we in fact will have identical uniform legislation for credit unions, even though the Federal Government hasn’t passed any legislation. It is unique path-breaking sort of stuff for the States to have done.
I get the impression in Queensland that there is quite a lot of people working against it up there. Within the Movement.
RC: It depends how recently you have been talking to people in Queensland.
Only a matter of a few months ago.
RC: Well certainly Queensland has been against Project Renewal and their State Association has not joined. They are the only ones who haven’t. They certainly have been opposed to a lot of the things that AFIC was doing. But there has been some pretty heavy action I guess in the last three months to the point that you will be hearing a different message from Queensland in the next few weeks. There have been quite dramatic changes. But that is getting very current.
And very controversial and it’s not really history yet.
RC: If I say too much I will be history.
All right, well we will leave that. We will have to get into more controversial country like you were a Chairman and then we were not and now you are Chairman again. How did this happen? Did somebody stand against you or did you resign?
RC: Oh, I think it is what you said about Bill Howe, before, was one element of it. The World Council in Melbourne in 1988 highlighted very clearly to a lot of people that I was Chairman of the VCCA and Chairman of AFCUL and the same sort of resentments I guess started to crop up. But also Project Renewal was starting and I think quite rightly people questioned whether or not I could as Chairman of AFCUL and Chairman of the VCCA ensure that the interests of the VCCA were properly and independently looked after.
Were there two factions, were there any sort of negotiations? What exactly happened?
RC: No, I was aware of the feelings. Certainly we had discussions. It was an organised transition. Gavin took over as Chairman.
You didn’t resign?
RC: Oh no, I resigned. It wasn’t a coup in that sense. I think if I had dug my heels in Bob Hawke fashion, I might very well have found that the majority would have preferred an independent VCCA Chairman. But I had just got onto the steering committee of Project Renewal and I certainly felt a lot more comfortable going around the country selling the recommendations of Project Renewal with my AFCUL hat on. Now that Project Renewal is almost entirely implemented, the VCCA is almost a branch, it is not legally, but in operation terms it is almost a branch and so it is a turning of the wheel. The view now is that since there is no longer a potential conflict between AFCUL and the VCCA, this place works hand in glove with that, the most appropriate thing now is for the same person to be Chairperson of both.
Did Gavin Cook resign or did you stand against him and were there any negotiations?
RC: Oh no, there was another Chairman in between all of this.
I missed him totally. I didn’t have any of the modern Annual Reports up there in New South Wales at all.
RC: No, well Gavin in fact was replaced by Phillip Doughty, who was the Manager of the Education Credit Union, Edcred as it is known. Yes there was a contest, and yes Phil Doughy won. Phil served for one year and my feeling was that Phil would probably remain as Chairman until such time as we formally wound the organisation up. He somewhat shocked me following the AGM last year by saying that ‘The thing is substantially there, I can’t see the sense in waiting, I resign in your favour.’ So it was quite a shock to me to do it. But it’s what has happened with almost all of the other State Associations. If you look at the number of organisations I’m Chairman of at the moment it’s a bit horrifying. I think it is thirteen.
Was that last week?
RC: That’s last week, yes. But in reality every State Association that’s been legally capable of doing it, has virtually wound up its State Association. In some cases they have wound them up entirely at an operational level. But until the AFIC legislation goes through we are required to keep a company there, to service the company, so I’m the Chairman of the ACT and the three branches of South Australia and the three in Western Australia and Tasmania.
Incidentally what about doing the ACT’s history? Are you wondering who to ask?
RC: Actually there is someone. I would have to dig their name out, but somebody has written a book.
Stuart Wall. That was about his own credit union.
RC: No, the fact I’m Chairman of the ACT does not mean I can write the history of it.
I don’t mean that, I mean there are some people who need recording.
RC: Well we can probably come up with some names.
Well there is Jack White who is somewhere in Melbourne, if I can find him.
RC: I don’t know him.
Yes, he was much involved with AFCUL in the days of Dermot Ryan.
RC: No, I know a few of them from there, but I am sure we can provide you with some names. Certainly other people who have been on AFCUL over the last twenty years.
So what have we not covered yet? Have you been involved with ICUD at all?
RC: Not as a member. I think there was a few tensions when ICUD was established in terms of it wanting to be seen as being very independent. I went to its formation meetings. There was a bit of tension about whether the Chairman of VCCA and Chairman of AFCUL should become a member of that. In fact its office bearers by and large in Victoria anyway have come from outside of the VCCA. I certainly had some involvement with them and I have been to some of their conferences. In fact I was a presenter at one of their conferences. I am not at war with them in fact of having an Institute of Credit Union Directors is probably even more important than having an Institute of Credit Union Managers. There probably are other organisations around where Managers can get some of the comfort they need, whereas the Directors can’t really find anywhere else. But I guest the simple answer is I am not heavily involved but I am very supportive of what they are doing and this year went to great pains to make sure that the whole of the National Board went to their function in Surfers Paradise and that sort of thing.
It is not regularly known that Ron Birch was one of the leading lights behind the foundation of the Newport Conferences when he was on the Chapter Committee in those early days and he has been involved right the way through.
RC: Well I certainly wasn’t around in the Newport days, but Ron Birch was.
So was Stan Arneil.
RC: Yes, I am very aware of Stan Arneil, but I have never met him. It is one of those things that distresses me a bit about credit unions, the way that people fall out of favour and how far they fall out of favour and how they can go from being totally involved to being excluded. And Stan Arneil was one of those who has excluded himself and has been excluded and both sides being unhappy about it, which I think is a great pity. I certainly know the name and I certainly have had some anecdotes told to me, but I have never met him.
Well, as a final question should I ask you, I mean you put a lot of time as a volunteer into this job, how have you been able to do that and do you think people will be able to do as much as you have in the time? Will you be the last of the volunteers?
RC: Well I have been able to do it because I have got an employer at the university who is very keen for us to dirty our hands so to speak by being involved in the real world. But it is a worry that I have got that the demands on credit union Directors are going to exceed what volunteers are capable of offering and I think the movement is going to have to deliberately cater for volunteers otherwise it just becomes a tool of management which I think will enable it, or cause it to lose a lot of the dimensions it has had in the past. So it is one of my big worries that the volunteers may not be able to continue their involvement.
That is on a central basis or are you thinking of individual credit unions, some of them are getting very big?
RC: Well I think that it is starting to happen at the individual credit union.
End Tape 1B: 4094 Words: 1 hour 35 minutes.