19 JUNE 1995: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO PHILLIP (PHIL) NOKES
I will ask you first Mr Nokes, what is your full name?
PN: Phillip Ross Nokes.
Whereabouts were you born and when?
PN: I was born in Prospect, in South Australia, in 1945.
You grew up around there?
PN: No I grew up at a small country town called Dareton between Mildura and Wentworth on the Murray River.
Did you go to school there?
PN: I went to school at Dareton Primary School and then I went to Mildura High School.
So how did you get over this way?
PN: Well I actually joined the Rural Bank of New South Wales when I left school, after I had matriculated. I moved around the western area of New South Wales for nine and a half years. I had seven different branches in that time. I went to Deniliquin, Temora, Forbes, Molong, Broken Hill and Condobolin. When I was at Molong I met my wife there and I got a transfer back to the central-west region and ended up with a job with the credit union in 1974.
Did you answer an advertisement?
PN: Yes there was an advertisement for a Loans Officer. I happened to be on holidays from the bank at the time. My mother-in-law to be mentioned that there was a position going of Loans Officer with the credit union in Orange.
So you decided to leave the bank.
PN: Well I had been in the bank for nine and a half years and it was a very nomadic lifestyle. At that time even Branch Managers got transferred every two and a half years. So I felt that I didn’t want to have that sort of a lifestyle and decided to apply for this job.
When you got here did they give you any specialist training for credit unions?
PN: Yes. We went down to the Prince of Wales Hospital area, the New South Wales League in those days ran these special courses on weekends. I went to quite a number of those in the early days.
That was the School of Administration.
PN: Yes. We did the concept and philosophy courses for credit unions. I think they could do with a few of them today.
When you first came to the credit union where were the premises?
PN: Well I started on the day that they moved into their new premises, which were rented premises in Anson Street, in the MLC Building in Anson Street above what is now Woman’s World, a fashion shop.
Who was the Manager then?
PN: Well at that time Peter Collins was the Manager and Michael Brett was his Office Supervisor and Development Officer.
What was Peter Collins like as a Manager? How did you find him?
PN: Peter was a very outgoing sort of a guy. He was very entrepreneurial in a way. Perhaps his administration wasn’t quite up to the mark as it could have been, but he was very well-liked by all the members and he was a good PR man.
Was the credit union run in the same way as banks as far as loans were concerned?
PN: Well not in those days it wasn’t. I got the shock of my life when I joined the credit union and actually for about the first six to nine months I wondered what I had got into. Because having left the security of the Rural Bank of New South Wales which had a very flexible personal loan lending system, even in those days, I got to the credit union and found that we were lending up to $4,000 unsecured to people who lived in Housing Commission houses and who lived a day-by-day existence. It was something that I had really never seen in the bank. What I did find was that those people were very very appreciative of the fact that they had a place where they could go with some dignity and transact their financial affairs. That was what I really think was the strength of the credit union movement in those days, and probably still is today.
Secured, what was the maximum in those days?
PN: The maximum loan was $4,000 anyway. $2,000 unsecured and $2,000 with what we classified as a Bill of Sale which was just a signature on a document that said you had signed your car over to the organisation. Probably not worth the paper it was written on even in those days.
Did you have any unusual Bills of Sale?
PN: Well in actual fact we did do a loan, probably the most unusual one that I had struck, for a greyhound bath for a fellow who worked out at Email and had greyhounds. He needed to have this special bath for greyhounds. We actually lent him the money on the Bill of Sale over his car, but that was one of the most unusual ones. One other loan that I can remember was a loan for one of the people out there to take their daughter away for an abortion. Now whether the morality of that was correct or not, it was the thing that they wanted to do.
It was approved?
PN: It was approved yes.
Did any Catholics on the Board object?
PN: No, they didn’t. In those days it was always the character need and their ability to repay that were the prime reasons for lending somebody money. In actual fact a lot of times we were always perhaps looking more for ways of how can we lend them the money rather than not lend them the money. That was really what the credit union was about. We were there to help those people out as much as we could. In some respects they took advantage of us when we did that sort of thing. There was no doubt about it that we probably were not quite as guilty as finance companies of over-committing people, but we were probably guilty of it to some degree.
Did you see much of the former loan sharking and over-selling of products by Waltons and such like in your day, or had it all gone by that time?
PN: No it was still there. There was quite a deal of it. It was quite funny, every time someone filled in a loan application form you would ask them for their commitments and they would never put Waltons or Dickins and Carey. You would say to them, “Listen have you got Waltons?” “Oh yes, we have got that, but he comes around every fortnight and picks it up at the door.” “What about Dickins and Carey?” “Yes, we’ve got that too.” A lot of them got into the Norman Ross’ of the day and it was $8.60 a week for a television set and then you could buy a video for another sort of $6.50 a week and what these guys didn’t realise most of the weekly pay-packet was gone when they added it all up. That was one of the problems they had.
Was it your job to do counselling, or was that handed over to the Credit Committee?
PN: Well it became my job to do the counselling. That was part of the reason I was employed, because there was when I came a delinquency problem in the organisation and it had been due to the fact that lending had been just done willy-nilly, just done automatically and people didn’t question very much the people on their current financial standing. It was my role to come into the organisation and do that and it allowed the Manager of the day, Peter Collins, the time to be able to follow up then on the delinquency that was prevalent in the organisation at that time.
Had there been a Loan Officer before you?
PN: No there hadn’t been. It had been done by the Manager and it had also been done by the Development Officer and the Credit Committee themselves.
So who was the Development Officer?
PN: The Development Officer was Mike Brett, who is now at ACT Hospitals in Canberra. Mike was sort of the second-in-charge. He was Development Officer, Office Supervisor, helped with the production of financial reports and things like that.
So did you have a limit to grant loans yourself, without the Credit Committee, or did it all have to go to the Credit Committee?
PN: Well in those days it all had to go to the Credit Committee.
How often did they meet?
PN: They used to meet every Tuesday night I think when I first came, so it was only a weekly approval.
How long was it before you got permission to grant loans?
PN: Well that was rather an amusing situation. Charles Wright, who followed Peter Collins as Manager of the organisation in 1974, when he came in he set up a lot of systems in the organisation and one of the things that he did was a submission to the Board that he be given the sole right to approve loans. In that situation, if that was given to him, he would ensure that there were going to be no bad debts in the organisation. As I said to him at the time, “Charles the day that you have got no debts is the day you haven’t lent any money, and if you haven’t lent any money you have gone out of business anyway.” But he put this submission to the Board, which they knocked back. That would have been about in probably early 1976. Charles left and went to Elcom Credit Union about mid-1976 and I was offered the position as Acting Manager for a three month period and after the three months was up the Board said if I wanted the job it was mine, which I took. They almost immediately gave me the delegation to approve loans. The delegation was fairly limited, because I can’t remember the specific amounts but it would have been probably something like $8,000, the delegation that I had in those days.
Do you remember why Charles Wright left?
PN: Well Charles left because he felt he needed a change. There was a little bit of a history behind that as well in that he was a complete opposite to Peter Collins. Peter Collins was an entrepreneurial type and his administration skills were probably a little bit on the down side, where as Charles Wright was very much a numbers man, a figures man. He wasn’t a PR person at all. He was a person who just did everything by the book, where it was written in the book. If it wasn’t written in the book he made it up and did it his way anyway. He got to loggerheads with the Board on a number of occasions and I think there was a bit of ill-feeling between Charles and the Board of the day. So a position became available at Elcom, which we didn’t know he had actually applied for. We went down to the Annual General Meeting of the New South Wales League in those days, at Kensington, and we were staying at the Gemini Motor Inn. The second-in-charge at the New South Wales League in those days was a fellow called Geoff Cambridge. Geoff spoke to our Chairman, Pat Egan. Now Pat Egan had been on the League Board for some five years, from 1969 through to 1974, and when he stood down they automatically put Charles Wright as a Director on the New South Wales League Board in Pat’s place. They filled the casual vacancy with Charles. So not only was he causing our Board a bit of heartache, he was also causing the New South Wales League Board a few problems as well. Geoff Cambridge had come up to Pat the night before the meeting and said, “Look I want to have a talk to you. I would like to talk to you about a confidential matter.” It turned out the confidential matter was that Charles had applied for this job. Pat said to Geoff Cambridge, “Is he on the short-list?” Geoff said, “He is number seven out of seven.” Pat said, “Number seven out of seven? How come he isn’t number one?” Geoff said, “There are other better people around.” It turned out that Pat sort of said to Geoff, “Well look if he gets this job he goes out of the western area, so therefore he can’t be Western Area Director on the New South Wales League Board, and we don’t have him as a Manager any longer.” Charles ended up with a job, but whether that had any influence on it I am not sure, but he ended up with the job. So he was off the League Board and gone from Orange Mutual.
Pat has a few different things to say and none of them are particularly complimentary.
PN: There was one other incident that we did find out after Charles had left. After some legal advice that I got from people at the New South Wales League, it was decided for the small amount that was involved, something like $99, not to pursue any matters any further than where we were. So that one was sort of left in abeyance.
When you took over as Manager did you instigate any new programs in the first instance?
PN: Not really. I guess I had the good fortune of working with one person who was very entrepreneurial and very PRish and working with another person who was very much administrative, not very much PR, so I tended to mix the two together and come up with what I felt was a fairly balanced system of management. There were no real great changes implemented because Charles had sort of fixed in place a number of systems for the follow-up of delinquency and the better production of pay-roll through the system. When I first came to the credit union even the Email pay-roll, which was a weekly pay-roll, ran a fortnight behind the date that it was actually due to be put on the members accounts.
How did you receive it?
PN: We used to receive it on hard copy and we used to have to punch those in manually, of course in those days we had the old NCR accounting machines, along with all the other work that was there. The work generally ran anything up to a week or fortnight behind where it should have been. Charles came in and said it had to be better than this and as it turned out with a three to six month period Charles had everything being done daily. The end of month balance which used to take a fair while to go through and extract all the balances and get it to balance, all that sort of thing, he had that happening within a day and a half of the end of the month. Administration-wise he was very good. He had a number of faults, there is no doubt about it, he was to put it bluntly a pig of a man to talk to and a few of the members got the rough end of the pineapple at times. I can recall one day we had one of our members, a guy called Roy Gillespie, Roy was a fiery sort of a guy, red-headed guy and very fiery. I came back from lunch and the girls at the front counter said, “Look you had better go in there. This Roy Gillespie will kill Charlie if he is not careful.” When I went into his office Charles was sitting back in his chair with his arms folded with a big grin and having a bit of a chuckle. Roy Gillespie was on the other side of the desk actually frothing at the mouth. He had white froth on each side of his mouth. I just sort of knocked and Charles didn’t even sort of recognise that I was there. I just said to Roy, “What is the problem.” He said, “This mongrel so and so.” Apparently it had all occurred over the fact that Roy had missed a couple of payments and Charles had sent out some rather nasty letters and as usual I as the Loans Officer had to end up pacifying these people. But in this particular case, because I wasn’t there, this guy had demanded to see Charles. He was sitting back on the other side of the desk laughing at him. I just said to Roy, “Look we are getting nowhere with this at the moment. You are getting nowhere with it, I think you had better come for a walk with me.” So I took him out the back of the building into a back lane and we sat down for a while and I pacified him and cooled him down. But his blood pressure must have been something like 180 I reckon. He was really over the moon. So we had those sort of situations occur. I saw both sides of the way people operated and tended to take a middle road. I don’t think I am a dictatorial type person. When you worked with Pat Egan you couldn’t be anyway, because Pat was an autocratic Chairman. Always got done Pat’s way generally.
So how did he come across to you? Did you have to have everything ready for him?
PN: For Pat, yes. I found that if it was the Directors’ idea, and specifically if it was Pat’s idea, it got through the system. If it wasn’t it very often didn’t get through the system. So what you had to do with the Directors of those days was to work on sowing the seed and throwing a bit of fertiliser on it and eventually a Director would come out and say, “Oh look we should be doing so and so.” If it came out that way we would generally end up doing it. It was a fairly long process. The one thing that I did learn from Pat that I still treasure to this day was the fact that we should only ever do one thing at a time. Pat was very much a person who was very thorough in the way he researched and analysed anything new that we thought we would do. It is very difficult in this day and age because there are so many changes occurring. Back then if you had a change in something to do with the overall running of the organisation once every three or four months, or six months, that was about all you got. In this day and age we have got so many changes to legislation things are going on all the time. We would currently be working on anything up to about five or six things at the one time at the moment.
So how long was it before you got computerised?
PN: Well we computerised in 1979. That was another story again in that we had been on the old NCR accounting machines.
What type was that can you remember?
PN: 3200, or 32/10. I really can’t remember, but I know they were a clackety old thing that we had to lock up in a special room. We had one lass who actually still works with us today, Linda Ketiniya. Linda was the machine operator and she would just be punching buttons all day long. How she did it I have got no idea. She used to have a callous on her index finger of her left hand where she hit the keys all the time with this finger. About 1978 we started to investigate getting off the accounting machines. The number of transactions were just getting too great. We went to, and I think it had just changed from the New South Wales Credit Union League to the Association of New South Wales Credit Unions, or the New South Wales Association of Credit Unions, they had a couple of names around about that time, name changes. They were investigating computerisation for the credit union industry. We got sort of fobbed off for probably about six months and things were becoming quite desperate as far as we were concerned. We said we really had to do something. So we started to do our own investigation and I went down to PA Credit Union in Canberra. They had a system there that ran on a Data General Computer and it was the Teledate Credit Union Data On Line, CUDOL. It had been developed by BHP in Whyalla. So anyway we had a look at that and it was quite a good system actually. Everything was fairly automated. It had a good database on it. We went back to the Association and said we had had a look at this system in Canberra and we would be happy to buy it and PA wanted to sell their particular system at the time. We said we would buy that off them second-hand. I think from memory we would have paid about $75,000 for the system. Anyway, unbeknown to us at the time they had put a guy called Terry McManus as second-in-charge of the Association and Terry had been running around with another fellow called Malcom Mackellar. They were negotiating with a company called GCS in Western Australia to purchase the system. We didn’t know that. In actual fact we were dealing with a fellow called Ken Steele from Teledata in Victoria. Ken was quite open about everything that was happening. So we ended up signing an agreement with Ken Steele and on the Thursday night, we had a Board meeting on the Wednesday round about early 1979, probably February or March of 1979, we signed this agreement with them.
For the software was it?
PN: For the software. They were also handling the software and the hardware side of things. That was a combined effort.
You still bought the hardware from PA Consultants second-hand did you?
PN: No we bought it from PA Credit Union, which was a Canberra-based credit union. It folded and went with Canberra Civic Building Society, if I remember rightly, which was a rather unusual thing to happen in those days. Anyway we bought the hardware off PA and the software off Teledata, but Teledata also maintained the hardware as well. We agreed to the purchase of this at a Board meeting on a Wednesday night, signed the contracts on Thursday and on Monday morning I got an urgent phone call from Ken Miller who was the Chairman of the New South Wales Association at the time, “Phil, don’t sign anything. We have come to an agreement with GCS in Western Australia for a computer system.” Well that threw a real spanner in the works. So what we did we went back to Ken Steele and said, “Look I know we have signed a contract with you, my Board would like to review what GCS has got, what the Association has come up with.” He said, “Look I will be happy to do that and I would be happy to abide by the Board’s decision, but I am fairly confident that you will stay with us.” I said, “OK.” As probably I wasn’t an EDP expert, our firm of accountants who had evaluated computer systems for local government and the accountants are Alan Morse and Company from Bathurst, and now with an office in Orange but in those days they were Bathurst-based, one of the principals of the company, Michael Morse, had evaluated a lot of computer systems for local government. What we did was we asked Michael to come up and do an evaluation of the two systems. Ken Steele came up at one juncture and Michael interviewed him, Malcolm Mackellar came up and Michael interviewed him. As a result of his findings he felt that probably the GCS software might have been about 15 per cent better than the CUDOL software, but the hardware that we were going to use, the Data General, was considerably better than the AWA Reality machines that the GCS system ran on. So he recommended that we stayed with CUDOL, which is what we did. We went with CUDOL in 1979 and stayed with them until 1984. The reasons we changed in 1984, the CUDOL was going to try and do an update of their software to bring it more in line with the GCS software and as it turned out, they had spent something like $750,000 on this software development in Canada and still only had it 85 per cent complete, so we ended up switching to FCS.
End Tape 1A: 4170 Words: 1 hour 20 minutes.
19 JUNE 1995: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO PHILLIP (PHIL) NOKES
Now when did you realise that you would have to change? The Teledata people were going to go out of business were they?
PN: Well what actually happened, because of the re-write of the software costing them so much money they were having quite a few difficulties. We believe that FCS saw Teledata as a threat to their system if the re-write did come to fruition. It looked like it was going to be quite a good system, but because of the lack of finance that Teledata had FCS bought into them. It became GCS-Teledata actually for a little while and then finally FCS bought them out totally. So the move then changing from the Teledata CUDOL system to FCS in 1984 turned out to be the right decision for us to make anyway because we would have eventually had to have gone over, as did the Victorian credit unions.
You were on line with CUDOL?
PN: Yes. We had an in-house system in our own office and it was on-line, right up to the minute processing. We did have a few problems actually with the hardware and that was another reason I guess to some degree why we changed from Teledata. For two and a half years the system ran faultlessly and we had no problems at all with it. We lost a disc-drive on Melbourne Cup Day, I think about 1982 or 1983. Spare parts were almost impossible to get so we were having to look at a major upgrade in hardware. Must have been 1983 because we went over in September 1984. We managed to survive another twelve months on a re-jigged system that was running the wrong size disc capacity and everything else, but it worked. We then changed to one of the Dec Ultimate machines, a machine called the 20:20, which was one of the small computers, in those days they were a micro-computer.
Who made that?
PN: It was actually a company called Ultimate. It was a Dec machine. The computer company Ultimate actually bought these machines of Dec and reconfigured them to be able to handle the Pic operating system. So it was a Dec Ultimate 20:20. I am not sure that these Dec machines necessarily always worked on the Pic operating system, I think they probably also operated on Unix and a few of the other communication systems as well.
Did they work all right with the FCS software, or did you have to get rid of it?
PN: No, that worked fine. One of the things that we have been very critical of over the years is that you have a company called Financial Computing Services, with experts to assist credit unions with their EDP systems and you rely on them for information as to whether you are buying the right kind of hardware and all those sorts of things. Now when we bought this machine in 1984 we were contemplating going on to AFS, which was the Automated Teller system, it was Automated Financial Services. We had said to them, “Will this 20:20 run an automatic teller?” They said yes, we would have no problems with it, it would run an automatic teller. It did run the automatic teller, but it impacted some 25 per cent on the power of the system, because an automatic teller has a constant polling arrangement and that impacted it to some degree. It was quite soon after the implementation of the Automatic Teller system in 1985 that we then had to do an upgrade to our next computer system. We had to get some added power put into this 20:20. That managed to do us until 1987, when we bought a Honeywell machine.
You are on Honeywell now?
PN: No. When we moved into our building here that we are currently in at Sommer Street, in 1987, we set the Honeywell up in the computer room and it went for six and a half years, so we were looking at about 1993 and we then moved over to CFP, which was one of the IDPC groups in Sydney. It was managed by Shared Enterprises, but it was a separate company which now has about fifty-six credit unions hanging off it.
So how many computers does it take to run that lot?
PN: Well it has got a fairly large Sequoia, but even that is having difficulty running the fifty-six credit unions on it. We experience a lot more down-time now that we are on CFP than what we had when we had our own in-house system. The reason that we had to go to CFP, really was more to do with direct entry and a single link with the various other financial institutions, the banks and everybody else with direct entry. We probably could have survived on our in-house system, but eventually the Reserve Bank and the rest of them only want one place to deposit credit union moneys and that would be with CUFSAL, they don’t want to have to do it direct to individual credit unions all over the State and all over the country. We felt it was the right move to make to go to a single computer in Sydney. Then we had to run the direct links ourselves to the single computer to our office, rather than the Reserve Bank running links out to every individual credit union, which was going to be very difficult to achieve.
Wasn’t that achievable under Ausnet?
PN: Yes. We were doing the Automatic Teller network through Ausnet, but it would have been far too expensive to have run all our direct entry, I think, down through the Ausnet network back into our individual host computers. I think that was possibly an option that could have been used, however we went the way we did and I think the expense has been about the same anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered too much. I think it would have cost us just as much either way. CFP really hasn’t been a cost-cutting exercise.
Of course the people who started it, I think it was a few credit unions only that started it?
PN: Well Shared Enterprises was started up by a few of the major credit unions in Sydney. As a matter of fact I think they might still only have about thirteen credit unions on their particular computer. I know there was Endeavour Credit Union, SGE, Community First, Metropolitan, Bankstown I think is on that one, in Sydney. They are on Shared Enterprises and they reckoned they had enough people on their system and they pulled the pin on anybody else joining, which was probably the right decision, no doubt the right decision when you see what has happened with CFP and they have now got fifty-six credit unions on it, it is definitely overloaded.
Shared Enterprises are managing it for them?
PN: They are managing it for CFP, yes.
All right let’s go off that subject. Branches and premises. When you first came you had just moved into Anson Street. What building was that?
PN That was the MLC Building, I think 206 Anson Street was the address. Then in 1976 we purchased 225 at Lords Place.
I don’t have the right address for that first one.
PN: The first one was in Lords Place with the O’Malley-Parker Building. It was just a rented couple of rooms upstairs in this particular building, the O’Malley-Parker Building.
This was 1976 here?
PN: Yes Lords Place was 1976.
Was that the building you converted yourself?
PN: Yes. When we moved in to it there were about six tenants in it.
What was it called then?
PN: It was Calare Reality. It was actually owned by a member of the credit union and we purchased the building off him, a guy called Dick Clarke, I think his member number was 172. He owned a few properties in Orange in the commercial area. So we bought the building off him. As tenants we had Thornes Jewellers downstairs, the Western District Racing Association upstairs in the back of the building and Dunne and Bradstreet were in the front part of the building upstairs. We actually took over about I think at the time in total floor area of the place around about one-third, a little bit better than one-third of the floor area downstairs. Upstairs we had nothing except our staff room.
What made you move to Sommer Street, did it get too small?
PN: Yes it got too small. Actually we stayed in Lords Place until 1987 so the building did us for eleven years in Lords Place. In that time we did two renovations of that building. We completely gutted it once, the downstairs area, and took over the full downstairs area and half the upstairs area. That was in 1983. The only tenant that we had left was Dunne and Bradstreet at that particular time. Then about 1985 we did another renovation and Dunne and Bradstreet actually closed their office in Orange altogether and we took over the whole building. So we had the full downstairs, upstairs area. By 1987 we just ran out of room altogether. We moved over to what was the old Waltons furniture store in 1987. We purchased the building itself, and it is about an 8,200 square feet in area, for $220,000, which was a bargain, and spent around about $450,000 doing it up. That was air-conditioning it and setting it up as fairly modern premises. So around for $670,000 we ended up with an excellent facility. We have since renovated the counter area, we did that in 1994, only last year.
What about other offices?
PN: Well we have an office out at Email. The credit union originated in the Email factory and Email have always provided us with an office out there. When I started here in 1974 we actually still had most of our staff working out in the Email office. I think I was staff member number seven, six or seven. At that time we still had four or five staff working in the office out at Email. It was open four and a half hours a day at that particular point. Now very soon after I started those hours were reduced back to one and a half a day at the Email plant, because we had more room down in the MLC Building. So the whole function then moved out of the Email plant, all the accounting and administration and all that was then set up in the MLC Building, where that had previously been out at Email.
What about the Hospital’s office?
PN: The Hospital Credit Union merged with the Orange Mutual Credit Union in 1972 and we never ever had a facility up there.
In 1972, I thought it was when you had the Mutual, 1973? It was a transfer of engagements was it?
PN: Yes. I thought we actually went Mutual in 1972.
Well I had a look at the Register in Sydney before I left and we have a date here for the registration. The registration date, the name change, was 16 May 1973.
PN: I think you will find that what happened was, it was actually done at the Annual General Meeting in 1972, in September, but probably took that long for it to get registered through the Registrar.
So in actual fact it was the Hospital transfer of engagements?
PN: There was a credit union at the Hospital.
I know, but there was more than that came in when they went Mutual?
PN: When they went Mutual they also then took in other pay-roll groups, but not other credit unions. At that time the only credit union that came in was the Base Hospital Credit Union, but they also had the abattoirs, Rogers Abattoir’s, and they had Central-West Linen Service, the Orange Ex-Services Club, they all joined up as pay-roll groups when we went Mutual.
The date you registered as Mutual was 16 May 1973. I will check out what happened in the Minutes now, there is a question mark on that. The Australian Historical Co-operative have got a copy of the Register, I always check up to see what it says.
PN: It is just that Keith Roach, who was a Director on the Board, came from the Orange Base Hospital Credit Union and he came on the Board in 1972. So I take it that was the date it happened.
Keith Roach, well he was Deputy Chairman in 1978.
PN: Keith Roach was 1972 to 1982. He came on as part of the Orange Base Hospital transfer. I mean I have always taken it as being the transfer of engagements in 1972. As I said the Registrar might well not have registered it until 1973, May 1973. I don’t know how good they were in those days.
Do you remember any difficulty in going Mutual here?
PN: I don’t believe so. I wasn’t here at the time. That was something that was done by Peter Collins. There was one Director I think, from memory, out at Email. One of the things that was an interesting situation, when we were the Email Employees’ Credit Union of course all the Directors worked at Email. The Chairman of the day was Pat Egan, who was the Production Manager at Email, so everyone who was a Director actually somewhere along the line worked under Pat Egan. I think the running of the credit union was very much along the lines of the running of the plant, so whatever Pat said was going to happen, happened. I know there was one Director.
It was Brian Wright, he was in yesterday. He had it recorded in the Minutes that he objected.
PN: I actually thought Noel Green was another one who objected. Noel was taken into Pat’s office and spoken to as to why he would object to it, because Pat wanted 100 per cent agreement on this move.
Then of course you must remember then the transfer of the Commonwealth Employees’ Credit Union, which had been the Postel one hadn’t it?
PN: Yes. It was Commonwealth Employees’, it was members of the Department of Social Security, Department of Finance that worked in Orange, Telecom and Australia Post. The two Directors that came over with the credit union at that time were John Jones and Dave Pitman. We had a Board of eleven for a twelve month period and then they had to throw their hat in the ring for re-election at the next meeting and both of them actually missed out, which would have been in 1983. Then John Jones took on a casual vacancy when I think it was either Keith Roach or Ken Meile left the Board, might have been Ken Meile. He then came back on to the Board in 1983. It was when Ken Meile left.
Who was the other one? John Jones and?
PN: John Jones and Dave Pitman. They both came over for a twelve month period. Then the Board, in 1983, went back to being nine Directors again.
Do you know why there were nine Directors rather than seven?
PN: No, I don’t. It has always been nine. There have been many occasions when I have recommended that we cut it back to seven and every time I have been chopped down in flames by Directors saying, “Well if you have got nine interested Directors, you are better off having nine than you are having seven interested Directors.” I don’t know if that is really true. There is not a major problem with it. There is a little bit of added expense to some degree with it. It is very hard, I think, to keep nine Directors fully interested in the organisation. They like to be involved in Credit Committees, Promotion Committees, Finance Committees or whatever other committees you have got, and they tend to want to do a little bit too much of the management role rather than the directing role. But we have survived it.
I notice that Keith Mannix has gone into that situation down at Select, or Sydney Electricity. Very hands-on people those.
PN: He will probably find that very difficult because he has been in quite a different role over many years, but that is another story.
Yes he knows the score, I have been talking to him. Have you still got an office at the Hospital?
PN: No, we have only got the office at Email. We never had an office at the Hospital. When the credit union transferred across to our credit union the actual office that they ran there closed down and everything was done from our Anson Street office in those days.
You had no agencies?
PN: No agencies. We did put an agency in out at the Molong Newsagency around about five or six years ago that we set up. It is still there. We still run an agency at the Molong Newsagency. There is around about 450 to 500 members out in that town. Something like 180 to 200 people probably use that on a monthly basis.
Are they on-line?
PN: No they are not on-line, it is all done manually. Looking at going on-line is something we may have to do as a result of confidentiality and all that sort of business. Sending out hardcopy lists of members’ balances is probably not the best way to do it.
I have been talking to the Northern Territory people and they are doing theirs over the phone, their oral history, and they run on on-line agencies all over the place.
PN: We will probably look into that this year.
They couldn’t do it any other way because they have got the big distances, unless they wanted to set up Branches. Now what about education and promotion and development? Have you got a Development Officer here?
PN: We have now. Over the years the development and promotion was done by the Development and Promotion Committee of about three Directors. We have always had this Committee, it has always run. In 1990, I got a new secretary, a Lisa Bourke. Lisa came to work for us as my personal assistant and she then took over a lot of the marketing and promotional activities of the organisation. Prior to that it had been done by myself in conjunction with the Promotion Committee, so it was done by myself and the Promotion Committee that did it prior to Lisa coming along. Then it was Lisa and the Promotion Committee that did it. So we have always had a Promotion Committee. That tends to hold things up a fair bit. We have had a bit more autonomy over the last few years in that area. I now do have a full-time Development Training and Marketing Officer and she has only been with us for about the last four or five months. So we have now got that situation.
Now we haven’t discussed going on ATMs and all that sort of thing?
PN: Well in 1984 we started to look at it. Up until then banks would not allow credit unions to go into member chequeing. Member chequeing came in about 1983, 1984.
We have got a launch in 1985.
PN: Right. We knew that it was coming up, that we would be able to do it and a lot of credit unions were going for member chequeing. I personally felt at the time that because electronics was the way of the future, the Automatic Teller network which came in about the same time.
The Automatic Teller system was actually established in 1984. The Redicard was up and in position in 1983, in actual fact. So the ATM was started in 1983 but it wasn’t available all over the place I don’t think.
PN: We were looking at which way we would go and the Board at that time agreed that I was probably right in that electronics was the way of the future and so we put our own Automatic Teller machine in our front window in Lords Place in 1985. I think it was about August 1985. That was after negotiations with AFS about going into the network there and buying shares in AFS. They said we could buy our shares with them, but they wouldn’t guarantee an ATM in our window, they were only going to put them around the Sydney metropolitan area, they weren’t going to put them out in the bush. So because there was another couple of credit unions interested in doing a similar thing, they then suggested that instead of paying about $18 or $19 a share to be a member of AFS, part of AFS, we could go in as a secondary shareholder on about $1 or $3 a share, I can’t remember the exact figure.
End Tape 1B: 3500 Words: 1 hour 10 minutes
19 JUNE 1995: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO PHILLIP (PHIL) NOKES
The ATMs. Did you get your own ATM?
PN: Yes we did. We installed in August 1985, the Automatic Teller. As it turned out the Automatic Teller usage by our own members in particular, not so much by other credit union members, was astronomical. It always ran about the second or third highest in the whole network and it was a tremendous success.
Did it actually pay for itself?
PN: In effect it hasn’t paid for itself in the way that a lot of credit unions have. When you have got other credit union members or other bank customers using your Automatic Teller that generates a revenue stream for you. Ours probably doesn’t do that because it is our own members using it. What it has done is alleviated the number of transactions going through the actual Branch itself. So much so that we ended up, after we had moved here in 1987, in early 1988 we put a second Automatic Teller in the front window. So we have got two Automatic Tellers which currently today are doing something like twenty-six thousand valid transactions per month and something like forty-odd thousand transactions with enquiries and transfers, so it is doing a tremendous number of transactions.
I was out here yesterday morning, I didn’t know how to get in early and I was waiting outside and there were an awful lot of people using it in the early morning.
PN: Yes. Tuesday afternoons there is terrific usage because Email gets paid on Tuesday afternoon. What they do, they knock off work at 3.30 p.m. and if we haven’t actually got their pay on they line up in the street and every know and then one will walk over and put their card in. As soon as someone gets money everybody lines up at the Automatic Teller then. You can have anything up to twenty or thirty people standing on the street waiting to use the Automatic Teller, they won’t come into the Branch they wait for the Automatic Teller.
I was told by one of the others, I think it was Brian Wright, that they used to draw money through the ATMs before it had gone in. That was during your period?
PN: They could do that. In the early days of the Automatic Teller it wasn’t on-line. We were told the Automatic Teller was going to be on-line from day one, but for about four months the Automatic Teller worked in an off-line mode, which meant they could draw money, up to a $200 a day limit whether they had the money or they didn’t. We ended up with a few bad accounts out of that particular situation. But as soon as it went live, it went on-line, they couldn’t do that, they could only draw the money they actually had in their account. They are all lurk merchants, I suppose you could call them, if they know it is off-line they will get in there and they will try to get as much money out of the system as they can. We have caught up with them a bit now. The ones that do those sort of things to us we give them an off-line limit of nil and they can’t draw any money anyway when it is not on-line. So you can catch up with them.
How would you have gone with the Queensland Teachers’ system where the whole thing was off-line?
PN: Well that would have been a disaster as far we were concerned. Some of the people here, I think they thought they were paying poker machines when they were getting pay-outs as they did. They knew they didn’t have the money, they were just getting the pay-out, I think that is the way they work.
I suppose they needed the money.
PN: Oh they needed the money and some of them thought that they didn’t have an obligation to pay it back too, so we had a few problems in those three or four months when that first happened. That was another thing that sort of annoyed us a little bit about the way the New South Wales Association and consequently CUSCAL do things. They promise certain things and they don’t always happen on time and it creates a few headaches.
What about the member chequeing, you didn’t take that when it was first available?
PN: No. As I said we opted to go with the Electronic Funds Transfer Systems rather than the member chequeing. We have a rather unique situation in that this is a one Branch Office. Head Office is the only office that we have got, apart from having this small office out at Email which now only operates half an hour day, four lunch times a week. All of our members, 91 per cent of our members, actually live within the boundaries of the Orange City Council. So no one is more that around about ten minutes drive from the actual office. If you put a pin into the centre of Orange, that is where our office is situated. With the railway line breaking the town up in two, it runs north to south through the town, you have got East Orange and West Orange, Email factory is in the East Orange area, a lot of people live in the West Orange area, so they have got to travel past our office generally speaking to get across the railway line to go to work and to come back. The Housing Commission area which is East Orange, those people to do their shopping, which is in West Orange, have got to drive past our office to do their shopping. Just about everybody drives right past our office so they can drop in and pick up their cheques and do all those sort of things. We were writing over at the front counter something between sixty and eighty thousand cheques a year. I might add that in 1992, when we finally did agree to put in member chequeing, that number hasn’t dropped, counter cheques haven’t increased as much but we are still writing out about eighty thousand a cheques every year. That hasn’t changed. Member chequeing has proven to be a fairly popular product, but it has caused us a few headaches with overdrawn accounts and a few people getting a bit nasty about being charged dishonour fees and things like that.
While talking about member chequeing what about your membership?
PN: Well our members were very much working-class people and because of the close proximity, as I said earlier, to the credit union where they could get cheques over the counter, it was a much better system for them than to have a cheque book. With a cheque book they don’t know what the balance of their account is until after the cheque has been presented. Whereas, running their account the way we had them set up they always knew when they walked out with the cheque in their hand, how much money they had left in their account. We have had situations occur where those with a cheque book have gone to the Automatic Teller, they have drawn out some money and the balance shows $200 in their account. They go home and they want to buy something so they pay for it with a cheque and they might write a cheque out for $150, leaving $50 in their account, then they go back to the Automatic Teller a couple of days later and draw out $200 and when the cheque hits they are going to be overdrawn $100. That was the problem with our members using cheque books. We have of course got some people who are very conversant with the way chequeing accounts are to be used and they are not a problem, but the majority of our working-class type members and those on pensions don’t really know how to use a cheque book in the correct manner.
Incidentally, you didn’t get around to member chequeing until very, very late, 1992. Now in the old days if you had had member chequeing from when it started in 1986, there wasn’t all those bank charges so you could reconcile your cheque book without any difficulty. You got your cheque butts and you tallied it all up and it reconciled. Personally I am not a great financial whiz by any means, but you could reconcile your bank account every month when you got your statement. But now, with all the different government charges, FID and all the rest of it, there is no way you can reconcile your bank account without great difficulty.
PN: Well in our case they wouldn’t have that difficulty because we don’t charge them any fees anyway.
Not even the government charges?
PN: Not even the government charges, we absorb those as well. So really for our members it was more the fact that the account that they operated on in the credit union itself, and see we don’t have a remote membership our membership is all very close to the credit union, made if very easy for them to know what they had in their account. When we put the cheque books that was when the problem started with cheques in transit. They didn’t know how to reconcile their cheque book properly. They drew out of the Automatic Teller, they drew over the counter and then they drew a cheque, and the next thing you know there was no money, so it was a bit of a problem.
I found that you used to be able to reconcile every month, whereas I am darned if I can now.
PN: No that would be difficult with the number of charges the bank lay anyway.
And the credit unions too. Some credit unions levy those charges. They don’t have any other main charges, but they have that one, FID.
PN: FID and VAD, right.
Now what about some of the other services and when you started them? What about travellers’ cheques and all that sort of thing?
PN: Well travellers’ cheques have probably been running ever since I have been here, almost twenty years. What we had was an arrangement with the ANZ Bank originally when the Central Bank was with the ANZ Bank years ago. We used to send our members round to the ANZ Bank to pick up their travellers’ cheques and we paid all the fees on those. We have always had those.
Have you got Visa?
PN: Yes we have had Visa for probably about the last twelve years anyway, probably about 1984. We have really had Visa since 1984. What we did with that, that was not a wholesale thing, everybody could get a Visa Card. What we did, if you were travelling we would let you apply for a Visa Card. When you came back you could keep the Visa Card, it wasn’t necessary to chop the card up when you got back you could keep it. The reason that we didn’t go into the Visa Card strongly is, as I have said our members were very much working class, if you gave them a card they would quite possibly run it up to its limit and keep it at its limit and not really pay it back, whereas with a loan they knew they were paying back so much a week, we knew they couldn’t draw down on it any more, they had fully drawn it, and that way we were sort of able to keep them together with their finances and they weren’t running around with a whole heap of debt that they couldn’t afford to pay.
What about insurance? You stayed with the League, did you, all the way?
PN: No not all the way. If you are talking general insurance we started off with the CIC Value Pack. That was back in about 1986, that is our members’ general insurance. We changed from that to CUMIS in 1992, I think, mainly because we were not necessarily happy with the way that CIC was going with being listed on the stock market and people like Michael Marr buying into it and a whole heap of others things. Norwich took them over and the service actually dropped off a bit. We still have some members who do renew their insurance with CIC. We don’t actively sell it now we only actively sell CUMIS, and my Insurance Officer finds that the service that we get from the people at Pennant Hills in CUMIS is ten times better than the service we get from CIC. Their follow-up on claims and changes to addresses and things on policies is a lot better with CUMIS than it is with CIC. As far as our credit union insurance, as far as the bond and package is concerned, we started out when I came here of course we were with the New South Wales League, and then the New South Wales Association. We stayed with them for many years until about 1985, 1986. We actually didn’t change until after Pat Egan resigned as Chairman of the credit union, because Pat was around at the time the big kafuffle occurred in about 1969 with CUNA America and there was no way that we were going to have any CUNA products in this credit union while ever he was here. It wasn’t until about 1985, 1986, eighteen months to two years after he left, that we actually found that we could get our bond and package insurance for $1,500 a year cheaper from CUNA than we could get it with the Association. I think in those days it was partly with Swan. CIC was something to do with it and also Zurich and Shield, another one. We changed to CUNA and immediately the insurance people at the Association got back to us and said, “Look we can match that.” I said, “Well you can match it, but I am not going to change back for matching. I will change back if you can give me a better deal. If you are only going to match I am staying where I am.” We have been extremely happy actually with CUNA since then. Not that we have had to make any claims against them, so they are probably extremely happy as well.
Well now CUFSAL has gone back to them.
PN: Yes, well they have come back into the fold of course. A lot of it revolved around personalities of the day of course. Old memories die hard in this system.
Yet there is quite a number of people who have fond memories of Stan Arneil. For instance, Tony Siemer, he doesn’t associate him with insurance at all.
PN: Yes but that would be because Tony wasn’t around when the problem occurred with CUNA. Tony always speaks very fondly of Stan, mainly because Stan was very instrumental, he and John Porter I think it was, had a lot to do with the establishment of this credit union.
Tony Siemer says that John Porter didn’t come up for the foundation meeting but Stan Arneil did, though it is not mentioned in the Minute Book.
PN: Should have been mentioned in the Minute Book.
It isn’t. In fact what is mentioned in the Minute Book is just the motion, the fact that there was a meeting and the motion to start a credit union. There is nothing else mentioned.
PN: Well Tony signed off the Minutes.
He tried apparently to start it in the community before. He had a meeting at the Town Hall in August. A number of people attended, but nothing happened after that apparently.
PN: His involvement with the Good Neighbour Council and that Council apparently did not want to get involved in the politics of one migrant group against another migrant group. Whereas at Email it was a little bit easier to do it because it was the Email Credit Union rather than say the German versus the White Russian group, or whatever it was, that we had in this city at the time with the migrants.
Tony says that they used to call it the Toolmakers Credit Union.
PN: That would be right. Well the toolmakers sort of felt they had ownership of it for a long, long time. As a matter of fact there are still a few around, the old-timers, who still think they have got ownership of it.
As a matter of fact there are some credit unions which were actually started with money from the different countries. I mean there are a couple of Dutch ones which were actually started with money from the Dutch Government.
PN: One of the things that I found a little bit of a misnomer when I came here, the members of the credit union out at Email in 1974 when I arrived. There was massive retrenchments going on at the Email factory at the time and when I came the workforce was pretty close to 2,000 people, that was the beginning of 1974, by the end of 1974, mid-1975 the workforce was down to 800 when they had pruned everybody out. That created a few difficulties for us in the follow-up of loans. Quite a few of the people actually said, “Ah bugger it, I’m not paying, Email can bloody well pay it, they own the credit union.” So they were of the opinion that it was the Email management that actually ran the credit union, mainly because Pat Egan was the Chairman of Directors. Of course that was not the case and when it was it pointed out to them they generally changed their tune and tried to make some sort of arrangement to pay back their debt. But a lot of them had the opinion that it was Email management that was running the credit union.
Now what about dealings with the Supervisory Committee and the internal auditor?
PN: The Supervisory Committee it was almost disbanded by the time that I came to the credit union. It was sort of losing its impetus in those days. That is when we employed Marion Patterson as the internal auditor. Marion did quite a good job actually. Following her, and you haven’t got it listed there, we had Diana Hutchesson. She would have been with us from about 1976. There was one other person for a little while, a Mrs Wiegold, I can’t think of her first name. The other one was Diana Hutchesson. Diana was also an internal auditor with Mid-West Credit Union, so she would do one or two days at Mid-West and come up and do one or two days here each week. The arrangement wasn’t too bad, the only thing was that she had a little bit of a loose tongue in a sense and we knew a lot of what was happening at Mid-West, so no doubt they knew a lot of what was happening at Orange Mutual. The type of work that she ended up doing was very basic, it was more just the checking of transactions to see that they had the dates on them and that they were properly completed, it wasn’t quite the audit work that we wanted. We had asked our external auditor for a program for her to follow but we never really seemed to get anything in writing on that. They used to talk with her, the external auditors used to talk with her to look things up and she did pick up one or two odd things as far as loans were concerned with incomplete documentation and stuff like that, but nothing of a major consequence. When she left in about 1979, so she was with us about three or four years, we didn’t replace her with an internal auditor.
What about newsletters?
PN: When I first came here in 1974 there was one produced every month.
Was that still Norm Binns?
PN: It was Norm Binns doing that. Norm used to put a lot of time into it and the time and effort that he put in wasn’t really rewarded by the membership understanding what the credit union was doing. These bulletins in the early days apparently they used to take them around to their bundy clocks in the factory and they would put them there and the members would take them. After a while the fact that we had the office there they would be left sitting on the desk in the office and a member would walk in, pick up the bulletin see it was a new one, look at one side of it, turn it over and put it back on the desk. You would say to them take it, but they would say they didn’t want it, it would only get thrown in the rubbish bin. So unfortunately it got to a point that we just didn’t do them. We dropped back into a quarterly newsletter and probably not long after, still while Charles Wright was here, we dispensed with doing them at all because they turned out to be a bit of a time consuming thing. Norm Binns dropped off doing it, I am not too sure when he finished writing them, but it wasn’t all that long after I started working with the credit union in 1974. He might have done it for about twelve months and after that it was just left to the staff to do. Of course with the growth that we were experiencing over those years and the resources that we had available to us, it was a bit difficult. They did them quarterly for a while.
Who did them quarterly?
PN: The staff. Probably myself, probably Charles Wright did the early ones, the Manager. I am not too sure after that. I know I did a couple. Gradually it just got to a point where there just wasn’t the time available to put them together.
You didn’t have the real need the way many credit unions do because you’re such a tight area. For instance, at Central-West it was a big thing with them. They used to send them out with their pay, put in with the pay slips. There is a bloke who was a journalist who used to put them together as well. He was working in the County Council there and he used to do it with their facilities. They were all spread over a period too.
PN: When you have got so those sort of resources available to you, why not.
Have you got any of the early ones left that Norm Binns did?
PN: Actually I probably have somewhere. I have got quite a bit of stuff in the storeroom, but I am not too sure what newsletters we would have there. I can have a look at that.
I will have a look. What other areas should we cover that you have been involved with? Any changes to solicitors and auditors and that sort of thing, you don’t seem to have?
PN: Well Todd and Niven were our auditors until 1974. Colin Maclean came to Peter Collins that year and said, “Peter, your business is getting too big for our firm to handle, so I would recommend that you move.” I am not too sure when Todd and Niven finished, but Aird finished in 1974 and Alan Morse and Company should have started in 1974 I would have thought. We had John Owen, the partner from Alan Morse and Company who did it. I am sure they started in 1974, 1975.
I will look that up again. What about banks? You were in the National in the first instance. Then you went to the Central which was ANZ in those days, and then back to the National on the Central. That was 1982.
PN: The other thing that I was going to mention was I spent four and half years on the Credit Union Savings Reserve Board. I was appointed by Bob Deivass, 1988 to 1990, when it was abolished, and from 1992 up to the present time with FINCOM on the Advisory Committee, so I am still on the Advisory Committee. I probably got more out of the Reserve Board than the Reserve Board got out of me. It was quite an experience being on the Reserve Board with people like Keith Mannix and Mark Melluish and those fellows. John McIntyre, John Prescott, Alex Sala. The benefit that I got out of it was probably dealing a lot closer with those sort of people and the credit union certainly benefited by it because I could see the mistakes that other credit unions were making and I was going to make sure that mine wasn’t going to make the same mistakes. So it was a great experience as far as I was concerned, with that aspect of the credit union. I am probably not as happy being a member of the Advisory Committee, because that is exactly what we are just an Advisory Committee. We can advise the Commissioners of FINCOM on what we think the changes should be.
End Tape 2A: 4203 Words: 1 hour 25 minutes
19 JUNE 1995: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO PHILLIP (PHIL) NOKES
PN: We were talking about the FINCOM Advisory Committee, the fact that we can advise them and they can take notice or they needn’t and generally they don’t. We did get a win with the reduction in liquidity. But I think there was also pressure from a lot of other areas, in particular the building society area. Where we felt we got a win by having a reduction, the building societies did even better than we because they ended up with exactly the liquidity requirements that we have got, where they never had that previously, they always had a higher requirement. It certainly levelled the playing field for building societies in that area.
Now what about the World Council and all that sort of thing, have you ever had anything to do with that?
PN: I have never had anything to do with the World Council but we have attended all of the AFCUL and CUSCAL type national conferences. The Directors themselves have always attended the ICUD Annual Conference in Canberra and have also attended many of the ICUD training programs that they have. That has certainly been a vast improvement as far as Directors are concerned. We had a period sort of after the early days of the New South Wales League running their courses down at Little Bay, there was a period when not much happened in that area and there was a desperate need for Directors to become more informed and be more professional. I think ICUD is certainly achieving its goals in that particular area.
What about AICUM?
PN: I was never allowed to join AICUM while Pat Egan was Chairman of the Board because he felt it was only a forum where Managers could get together to discuss their salary grievances, so I was never allowed to join while he was there. I only became a member of AICUM in 1985, 1986, after Pat had resigned and retired in 1984. But I have been an attendee at most of the AICUM type things that have been on except for their State meetings that they have every month, I don’t get to those. The Annual Albury Conference.
They have them here don’t they?
PN: No. They have had one meeting here I think, but we have a regular Regional Managers Meeting here on a bi-monthly basis where the Managers of credit unions from Springwood, Lithgow, Bathurst, Orange, Parkes, Dubbo all get together. In actual fact Jim Hatfield from Wagga Mutual and Warwick Kingsley from Albury-Murray quite often come and join us at our regional meetings. We have people like John McDermot and Keith Mannix, although Keith will no longer be involved, come up and inform us what is going on with CUSCAL matters. Quite often we have someone from one of our insurance companies or from some other body that is interested in flogging something to credit unions come up and speak. We also use those forums to update us on legislative matters and things like that so they are quite good.
When you first came here was the Chapter going or not?
PN: It might have had a couple of meetings. When I first came here I was only a Loans Officer and probably wasn’t quite as involved with Directors in the early days. The Chapter was operational, but I think it folded not long after that. I think the reason that probably happened was that the credit unions in the region were employing more professional people and the Directors’ involvement was becoming less. I think people saw the Chapter really as an area where Directors were being updated and not so much management being updated.
There was a period when they were using them for staff training.
PN: Not in my time. That would probably have been a possibility I would think in the early days.
Of course there only seems to be the two going now, one in Sydney on in Melbourne and that is about it. They are very much social now I think. What about your current Chairman? You have spoken about Pat Egan.
PN: Well Bert is a different kettle of fish totally to Pat. Bert is a person who is definitely not an autocratic leader. He is a person who tries to act as a Chairman. Doesn’t control meetings perhaps as good as we would like them to be controlled at times. Our Board meetings have always been fairly informal affairs. Even under Pat Egan, Pat had sort of made up his mind what the decision was going to be before we even put it to the vote, so it was very rare that there was ever a vote, it was a consensus of opinion. If the majority appeared to be in favour of it, we just moved on to the next topic on the agenda with Pat. Bert sort of tended to follow on a little bit that way. Perhaps not quite as dictatorial as Pat. The only thing that Bert has a bit of a problem with at times, he put his mouth into gear before his brain gets into gear and he sometimes comes out with some pretty outlandish things particularly at meetings. He is on the Membership Council and I am sure they could probably tell you the same thing, that he hasn’t always thought something through before he opens up and talks about it. He hasn’t done us any harm and is a pretty jovial sort of a character and well-liked. I don’t have any problems with him.
What about the Board generally, do you have a Board stirrer now after Brian Wright?
PN: Well I guess over the years you have always got someone who wants to dot the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’. In Pat Egan’s day it wasn’t a problem because what ever Pat did nobody argued with, they just went along with it. After Pat left and Bert took over we had a bit of the change in the Board at that time because Brian Callaghan and Norm Binns both left the Board round about the same time. Brian Callaghan left the same year as Pat and Norm Binns left two years later, from memory. Brian Callaghan did finish the same year as Pat in 1984 and Norm Binns finished in 1985, so he went on twelve months longer. So that sort of changed the complexion of the Board quite considerably. It sort of got out Pat and his henchmen, if you could call them that. Brian Callaghan and Norm were both fairly well-up in the management scale of things out at Email and were quite intelligent, good on their feet with the words and everything else, where most of the other Directors were probably more the working class type Directors and not quite so good on their feet. As a general rule the Egan, Binns, Callaghan group tended to sort of dominate most meetings. After that period we then got people like Russel Ameys came on to the Board in 1985. He sort of took over from Norm Binns. Russel was very much a graph man, everything had to be graphed which was a big thing at Email. Alan Smith also came on. Alan was a fairly loud sort of character, he wasn’t a graph man. He was a Line Supervisor out at Email and did quite a good job as a member of the Board. Peter Eslake came on later on in 1986, he was a Cost Accountant so he was always dotting ‘i’s’ and crossing ‘t’s’ as far as the figure work was concerned. The year before last Dick Castine came on the Board. Dick is a Quality Manager out at Email and of course the one thing that he wants this organisation to get is accreditation under the Australian Quality Standards. He got Email through the system and he wants to put the credit union through it now. He is actually the local regional Chairman of the Quality Group in this area, so he has got a bit of a barrow to push. I have got no doubt we would like to become certified, and we will in time, but I don’t think we will do it quite as quick as Dick thinks we will.
They are trying to certify me, Quality Assurance, the Public Works Department. I do a lot of work for the Public Works Department and all their consultants have to be Quality Assured. They haven’t had an historian go through Quality Assurance yet, but I think they want me to do it.
PN: Barring that, the rest of the Directors have been probably led along reasonable well. Bill Thorpe is the funny member of the Board in that Bill doesn’t have a lot to say but when he does he has actually figured things out fairly well. What he says, quite often, is very pertinent at the time. But he seems like he is a non-event most of the time and then all of a sudden he will come out with some fantastic thing. Whether the rest of the Board agree with him or not is another thing, but that is how Bill goes. He is certainly pushing this historical side of things. He has always been very keen on getting the past documented.
Now well I think I have run out of questions. Have you got anything that we should have covered that we haven’t? Probably a million things.
PN: Well there probably is a lot of things, but probably in my time, in the twenty-one years that I have been with the credit union I have seen quite a deal of change occur in the way we do things. We have become more and more like banks as time goes by. Even though the Directors keep saying we are not a bank we are a credit union and all this sort of thing, they still tend to go along with the products and services that banks develop. We haven’t always gone to our members and asked them if this is what they want. Quite often you will get one person who will go along to a Director and ask say how come we haven’t got member cheque books. Probably one of the main reasons we got member chequeing accounts was that one of the Directors, Peter Grey, had a chequeing account with the ANZ Bank and they were charging him too many fees. So we ended up with chequeing accounts. Also he and his wife and daughter set up a Mr Whippy business and they wanted to have a no fees cheque account. I don’t say that was the real reason behind it, but he certainly pushed for member cheque books. They were one of the first to get member chequeing. As I said, I have seen a number of changes. I don’t think the philosophy of the members is anywhere near as good as it used to be as when I first came here, mainly because the credit union was very small in those days. When I came in 1974 I think we had about $1 million in assets and roughly about 2,500 members. The Directors were much closer to the members and able to keep them better informed. As we have grown we have not been able to maintain that level of information going through to the members. It is a thing that the Directors keep saying we should be doing, we should be doing, but unfortunately the resources are not available to keep that information flow to the members going the way we would like it. We have this year employed the services of a Development, Training and Marketing person in Narelle Carr. Narelle is doing a fantastic job, in particular in the documentation of procedures and also in getting information out to the members on the services that the credit union is offering, something that we have not been able to do for many years. I don’t think you will ever change the members that are there just wanting a free service, and that is why a lot of them have actually joined the credit union. It is not because they have got any philosophical ideals as far as their fellow workmates and that are concerned, whereas in the early days at Email there was a lot of that philosophy around. The toolmakers set the credit union up, well they were instrumental in getting the credit union put into Email, and they were the ones with the surplus funds and that money was then pooled and lent out to the process workers. The toolmakers themselves got a lot of satisfaction out of seeing other people improve their lifestyles as a result of the way their money was being put into the pool. I think that sort of fellowship and mateship, and it is not only with the credit union, Australia-wide there is not the mateship around that there once was.
Well you can’t say that with Tony Siemer.
PN: Well Tony was a bit different I suppose. But then again Tony’s initial objective was to assist the migrants, it wasn’t there really to assist the people of Orange, it was there to assist the migrants that came into the community. Probably more so the German migrant community rather than the White Russian migrant community. As it happened the credit union ended being set up in Email and not in the community under the Good Neighbour Council and I think as a result of it being set up in Email it assisted a lot more migrants in the plant from different nationalities, it wasn’t just the Germans, it was the Yugoslavs, it was the Hungarians and it was the White Russians and everybody else that turned up, they all got some benefit from it. Other than that, I think we are perhaps not the same as we were in 1974 with our own members because of our size, but I still think we are conscious of our members’ requirements on a much closer basis than what the banks are with their customers. That still puts us in front of the banks. We are probably, as I said, not as good as we were back in 1974 with our own membership but we were better than the banks in those days and we are still better than the banks today, I think, in that respect.
Well, if you can’t think of anything else we should discuss, I will say thank you very much Mr Phil Nokes.
End Tape 2B: 2518 Words: 1 hour