Project: Sydney Electricity Employees’ Credit Union Oral History
Interviewer: Richard Raxworthy
Interviewee: Paul Ryan
Date: 2 December 1992
Tape Number: 2

SIDE A

I will ask you Mr Ryan where were you born and when?

PR: 1938, Ellis Point, Sydney Rocks, the old part of Sydney.

Did you grow up around there?

PR: I did, first twenty-three years I was down there. Great place to live, great place to grow up. A community of people who lived as a community and were an extended family. Greatest way to grow up.

What about your father where did he work?

PR: Worked on the wharves, he was a wharf labourer. During the Depression he spent a lot of time in the country. Came back and was married in Sydney and from then on he worked as a storeman to start with and ended his time working as a wharf labourer.

Did he have a great influence on you do you think?

PR: I would say no. He was a great father. All you can expect from a father is to provide you with the wherewithal to grow up and be somebody and he did that.

Any political influence?

PR: He taught me that political parties generally didn’t do a great deal for anybody. During his time on the waterfront the only people that would do anything at all were the Communists and the Communists were motivated by things other than the ideals that we lived for in those days. But he worked, just as an example, on a cargo called lamp black and lamp black was that carbon black and he’d go to work in a morning clean and he’d have no protective clothing, no protective gear whatsoever, and by the time he was finished of an afternoon he would be black from head to foot. His gear would be black. He would come home and have to clean himself as best as possible and mum would have to clean these clothes. They would be destroyed in no time flat. This was what the union movement, and the Communists in particular, were able to right. Now of course they’ve gone completely the opposite way, they got to a stage where they got everything and eventually destroyed the jobs they were out to protect.

So where did you go to school?

PR: Started of at St Bridget’s, Millers Point in The Rocks area and I spent my very early days there. Then mum, who probably had a great influence on my life by realising that education was a way out of The Rocks area, she scraped and scrimped and sent my brothers and myself to Aloysius at Milsons Point. I spent from there until 1953 I think. The last year, again at my mother’s insistence, I went to boarding school because I wasn’t studying as well as I should at day school. I spent one year there and left in 1953.

What did you like, what were you good at?

PR: I didn’t like studying, I didn’t like the routine of having to study. I enjoyed learning things that I liked learning about but certainly I didn’t like the idea of the strict regime of learning to pass an exam. For example, when I went to boarding school I had one subject that I had to do. I was at a boarding school which was a country boarding school and the majority of kids were country kids. I took a subject called Agriculture and you wouldn’t believe it at the end of the Intermediate Certificate I passed and came first in the class and I came from cruellest plain of Millers Point. It was something that I liked and I wanted to learn about, whereas the others were being forced on me to learn.

So where did you go to work first?

PR: I started in 1954, 4 February 1954, with the Sydney County Council as a junior clerk. I was there then until I left on 29 November 1991.

Where did you go then?

PR: I had a holiday for a few months. I found that I was at a loose end and really couldn’t come to terms with the idea of being unemployed. Didn’t want to retire, I was getting on my wife’s nerves. I applied for a job as a corporate administrator for an organisation, a private company, and I found that life with them was almost intolerable, they wanted me to become a junior executive again which meant they wanted me to work long hours and weekends and so forth and I wasn’t prepared to go back into that, I felt that if I wanted that I would have stayed with Sydney Electricity. So I lasted eight weeks before I told them that I wasn’t suited for the job. I had another month or so holiday and I got another job, where I am at present, with the Rural Assistance Authority, much more to my liking, much more like the Sydney County Council, and I’m a loans officer. I got that job for two reasons, one that I had the experience in the credit union with loans work; and two I have a farm in the country which has taught me a bit about the farming side of things.

When did you first hear about credit unions?

PR: I remember being associated with the credit union movement, on the fringes of it, right from the start of it within the Sydney County Council which was in about 1963 or thereabouts.

Do you remember who first introduced you to the idea of credit unions?

PR: Because I was involved in the union itself, I used to go to all the union meetings, I think it was just something that evolved rather than suddenly coming on me. People were talking about it.

Were you actually a delegate of the union?

PR: No. I was one of those loudmouthed people who had listened to his father for long enough and got involved in things that I thought were important to people. I don’t remember any specific time where I became involved in the credit union movement as such.

Did you go to the formation meeting?

PR: That I can’t even remember. I could have, I went to meetings one after the other in those days, but specifically no I can’t remember that.

So did you join right from the start of the credit union? What is your membership number?

PR: My membership number, service number, is 14650, which really bears no significance as far as membership of the credit union is concerned. Because it was an industrial credit union our service number with the council became our number in the credit union. The number doesn’t give you any indication of the time of joining.

I believe the first few did, because they gave themselves numbers.

PR: That is usually the way. I think that was the staff. I really don’t think they could have had a separate number. I don’t want to present you with an argument but from the council’s point of view, the deductions of money and so forth, they couldn’t have two separate numbers.

Do you remember who got you to join the credit union?

PR: I think I just joined. I think we all joined as a matter of course. It was something that we thought was terrific and there was no reason why we shouldn’t be involved in it.

Did somebody come round and talk to you, or was it a general meeting?

PR: My first recollections were of getting other people to join it. I really can’t remember who got me to actually sign the piece of paper. I think it came about just because I wanted to put my money in, or take money out, I’m not sure exactly what started it off. I can say that in all honestly, I really don’t know.

As far as the individual credit union is concerned, do you remember them writing up anything in the Sydney County Council magazine that they had?

PR: Well the management of Sydney County Council were the prime movers, by and large, in getting the credit union movement going within the organisation. I was led from the top, which is quite surprising.

People say you had a letter from Abe Landa.

PR: I haven’t got a letter from Abe Landa, but I’ve got the letter which was sent back to him on 1 March 1962 which acknowledges a letter which he sent on 8 February 1962 which basically told us we should form a credit union.

It was sent round to most of the heads of departments of government.

PR: Abe Landa in those days was the Minister for Housing and Co-operative Societies.

So where did you get those copy letters?

PR: I’ve always been interested in the background of things and during my time as a director I got them to produce a record of what happened in the credit union. I think you’ve got copies of those yearly sheets, which were just an extract from our annual reports. Nevertheless it gave some continuity to the idea of where the credit union had come from and gone to. As a result of that I then dug around. I found it difficult to get the staff to do any real digging, if it wasn’t presented to them they didn’t do a great deal, but I dug around myself and got these out of old files. It is not as though it is a comprehensive background documentation to it but it does show that the Federated Municipal and Shire Employees’ Union of Australia was part of the formation. The general manager of the council certainly took a personal interest in it, and he then pushed one of the senior clerical blokes in the council into becoming the first chairman of it, and that was Ray Pemberton.

??? was General Secretary of the union?

PR: Yes, good old Reg. I can tell you some stories about him in the old days as well. Poor old Reg is long gone.

You put some money into the credit union but did you have a need for credit?

PR: Yes it goes back to the time when I was newly married, I suppose, and I had to get on my hands and knees to go to the bank to get them to approve money to buy a block of land. I wanted to borrow five hundred pound. I had a thousand pound and I wanted to borrow five hundred pound and I almost had to beg the bank manager to approve it. I had to prove to the bank manager that I was a worthy recipient of the bank’s money and it always irked me, I thought it was terrible. The philosophy of the credit union, which I always interpreted to mean was to loan money to people with dignity and let them dignity, was a philosophy that I always thought was great. If you ask me later on I will tell you where I think it has gone now, but in those days it was certainly a principle. People were able to get money from the credit union which just could not have been got from a bank or any other financial institution.

Did you see any situations where large interest rates were being charged, which the credit unions aimed to rectify?

PR: Well even up until the time that I left, which was in March 1992, we were still seeing those exorbitant rates. The poorer people who had got involved in gambling or in some activity where they have got to get money have gone to, have gone to the loan sharks. Those loans sharks were charging 30 and 40 per cent interest. It was always our endeavour to bail them out of there and try and fix them up with a loan through the credit union. Sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t. We’d bail them out and then within no time flat the bastards were back there again getting another lot.

What about the finance companies?

PR: Well they weren’t as bad. They weren’t the arm breakers. The arm breakers were the three ball type operators and the loan sharks, people that really abused their fellow human beings that weren’t able to protect themselves.

Were you aware of any of this going on within the Sydney County Council? I mean when you got paid how were you paid? Was there people following the paymasters around?

PR: In the old days, prior to the credit union. Now this is an interesting thing which I hadn’t thought of up until now. There used to be a multitude of small funds kept within each of the branches of the council and in our branch in particular one of the clerks used to go around every Tuesday with a pay card and collect from the group of people there two pound, or whatever the bloke could afford. That fellow then would take the two pound, or the accumulation of two pounds, and the clerk would take them up and put them into a bank account up at Pyrmont. Of course there was no inflation in those days, money remained the same so interest wasn’t important. There was so little given to people as interest rates that no one asked for them. So this bloke at the end of the year would divvy up all this money to the people who had it invested and he would pay them out and the interest used to stay in his pocket if I remember rightly. They were right throughout the council, little savings funds. That is a memory and a half.

Did the union follow the paymaster around as well?

PR: In those days, in my time, it came out of our wages.

When you were in the credit union do you remember when they started payroll deductions?

PR: I can’t remember that no.

So what do you remember?

PR: As far as payroll deductions, I can’t remember it ever before payroll deductions.

Do you remember the first office?

PR: In the Queen Victoria Building, it was a little dungeon like place in the basement of the Queen Victoria Building. If my memory serves me right that is where it was first.

Where did it move to next?

PR: I can’t remember. See I came from Pyrmont, Pyrmont was my base, and I didn’t spend a great deal of time in those days.

Did you have representatives at Pyrmont?

PR: Yes. It wasn’t the system that we have today, it was much smaller and people really had to look after themselves and there wasn’t a great deal of assistance. My memory would have to be prompted as to how I handled it, but I think it was only pay deductions that we had.

What if you wanted a loan?

PR: We just had to forward the paperwork through the clearance. There was no rush and bustle to get a loan in twenty-four hours like everybody wants it today. I might take two or three weeks to get a piece of paper through from start to finish, today they want it instantaneously and hence the need for all these costly technological advances.

So when did you and how did you come to be working for the credit union? When did you become an official or an officer?

PR: Went to a meeting way back, you will have to find that out from the back records. I got in via the Internal Audit Committee. I started off in the Internal Audit Committee as one of their group and I think I was only in there for twelve months and I forgot to put my hand down when they asked who wanted to be chairman and I became chairman of the group. It was during that time, and I can’t claim it was all my doing, but prior to that the Internal Audit Committee was a wishy-washy type of organisation that no one really took a great deal of notice of.

Did you have a manual of how to do it?

PR: No, nothing. There was nothing there. During my period as chairman we split the committee up into three. We had leaders of each of the groups and the groups were given specific tasks to do. We decided on what we needed to have written instructions on and that was our first task, to write instructions on how they used to go about the auditing of the various bits and pieces.

Did you go to any of the courses the league was running?

PR: In those days no one took any notice of internal audit committees or supervisory committees, they seemed to be something that were a hangover from the first days of the credit union movement. If you put your hand up at a board meeting or whatever the chairman certainly pulled you into gear and let you know you was only an Internal Audit Committee member. That was something I always objected to, to, I always thought the Internal Audit Committee if they did their job properly were the watchdog of the members so therefore they had to keep their eye on what was going on with the board. It was the usual thing, if an Internal Audit Committee member was noisy and pulled the board into line every so often you always knew he would be the next person to go onto the board. The easiest way to stop an noisy voice is to put him in with the group that’s running it.

You became a member of the Internal Audit Committee in 1974, you think it was only a year before you became chairman?

PR: I think so.

It was only four years after that when you had problems with the defalcation.

PR: I remember that as clearly as anything. The accountant at that time was a bloke by the name of Emmanuel Anasis, a lovely bloke who was pushed into being general manager by the then chairman when he really didn’t want to take the job on. When he became general manager he came to me as chairman one night, I think I was chairman at that stage. Anyhow being one of the noisy ones and one of the ones that he was able to talk to, he came and told me that the books of account didn’t balance, there was something wrong with them. I said to him, “Well you must tell the chairman.” I saw one of the directors that same night and I said to him, “Do you realise that I’ve just been told by the manager that the books don’t balance.” The director said to me, “I don’t want to know about it.” I said, “What do you mean you don’t want to know about it?” I am not an accountant so I didn’t really what the significance of that initial finding was. Just digressing I’ll tell you what happened to Emmanuel Anasis after that, because he wasn’t suited to being general manager at that time they then sacked him. He rang me and he said, “I’m being sacked,” and he asked me for some support. So as chairman of the Internal Audit Committee I went to the board meeting that night and Emmanuel wanted to make a statement to the board. The chairman at that time was my namesake, Maurie Ryan, Maurie Ryan told him he wasn’t going to say anything and that was all there was to it. I got up and put my point of view that Maurie was out of order, that Emmanuel should be given the opportunity to state his case and he should do so. But Maurie then ruled me out of order and on that same night he changed the rule that allowed the Internal Audit Committee member to comment on whatever he saw fit, remember that each board meeting there was an Internal Audit Committee member there. His comment at the opening of the meeting was to welcome the Internal Audit Committee member and to tell them that they could comment on whatever they wanted. He then put in a rider which said, “The Internal Audit Committee are restricted to making comments on only those things pertaining to the Internal Audit Committee’s work.” That was as a direct result of what he did to Emmanuel Anasis. I can’t disagree with the principle of getting ridding of a general manager who is not doing his job, but the principle of putting him the job in the first place was just absolutely wrong, he wasn’t the right bloke for the job.

Then were you allowed to assist with finding out what was wrong?

PR: Then Ken May was brought in with a group of investigators. It was as a result of that they found out what was missing and how it went missing. Then we started to tidy it up. Ken May then stayed with us and became the general manager. I think Emmanuel was followed by Ken. They did some shocking things I felt. This recollection is a bit hard, talking or thinking about the past it is always difficult to get them into years, into proper perspective. I’m not sure who followed who, whether Ken followed Emmanuel.

I didn’t know that Anasis ever became general manager. I thought Col Dade was manager?

PR: I think you will find Col Dade left and they appointed Emmanuel, I think that is how it worked. It was only a relatively short space of time. Barry Waterhouse would be the bloke who can probably answer all those questions for you, because he was there on the spot. I was on the outside, he was on the inside.

So was there anything else of significance during that period? You still stayed on the Internal Audit Committee?

PR: The defalcation was significant. I sat down this morning and tried to work out what I should remember and I’d forgotten all about that. That was the major happening. I worked with Keith Davidson in any case. My first recollection of Keith Davidson in the old days, and I bumped into him on the first day I joined the council, or the first day that I was over at Pyrmont; he was a clerk over there; in 1954. Keith was there as large as life. He was a rotund type of a character. I am not going make any statement about how round he was around the stomach because my friend here is of similar proportions.

Did he gamble in those days?

PR: Nothing significant. I can remember him just getting married in those days. He was the same as everybody else. Always a bullshit artist but there were plenty of them around in those days. Good table tennis player.

So you weren’t aware of his gambling getting out of control?

PR: No. I don’t think anybody was. He skited about making money but nobody really took too much notice of him. The other interest thing that I might mention, when I became chairman of the Internal Audit Committee they were still altering the books of account with white colouring. I went to Maurie Ryan and I said to him, “Maurie you can’t change the books of account with white paint. You must cross things out and write them in again so people can see what the hell you are doing.” You can just imagine, Keith Davidson must have been his glory, he must have thought all his Christmases had come at once. There was white paint everywhere, the books were covered in white paint. That’s interesting too. I haven’t thought of that for years.

It is most certainly not acceptable now.

PR: It wasn’t acceptable in those days but they just accepted it. See white paint was new in those days, suddenly it was on the scene and people were using it rather than crossing out.

Well of course it is even easier now with computers.

PR: Just wipe it altogether and it disappears.

It never was there. Unless you print out every so often you never know. Before you go on to your time on the board is there anything else that you can remember? At that time you’d already moved branches hadn’t you?

PR: Yes. I must admit that I wasn’t for, I was one of the only ones that wasn’t for, changing to buying our own building.

Before that you went to Roden Cutler House didn’t you?

PR: Yes we went from Queen Victoria Building to the Sydney County Council building on the 5th Floor and then we moved from there to premises down the road in Rodan Cutler House. We had them free for a couple of years and then they were going to charge us for accommodation so they decided it was better to buy. I put a different point of view. Prior to that happening I had spoken to Brian Fallon, who was then Secretary of the Council, and I just pointed out to him that the idea was to buy rather than rent. I put an alternative point of view to the board was rather than tie the members’ money up, and that was what I always saw it as, members’ money, we shouldn’t put it into a building we should use it for the members and use what the council was prepared to give us. Brian Fallon had told me that they were prepared to give us whatever accommodation we needed and there wouldn’t be any problem as far as charge was concerned.

SIDE B

So you objected to the buying of the building?

PR: I didn’t object to the building per se, it was the use of the members’ money. I always thought the money should have been used for the members, it was their money so why should we tie it up in a building. I am not unhappy at what happened, because we bought the building and it has proven to be an asset and it is always there to be sold if we need to sell it. Rather than having it tied up in a bank or whatever we’ve got it there. It has well and truly proven that the wisdom of the board was right in those days. But then again I could say that maybe my wisdom was just as good and we’re not in the business of being property owners as a credit union.

So who asked you first to stand for the board?

PR: There was a casual vacancy. George Trott, I think, was the bloke that I replaced. He left and I was asked whether I wanted to nominate. I had to go through a selection panel.

There was Kean, Mick Kean?

PR: He came after me. I retired in 1992 and Mick Kean took my spot. 1985 I got on the board. I was asked whether I was interested and I think I had to apply the same as everybody else for the job and I had to go down and get interviewed by them and they then appointed me. I then stood for election the following annual general meeting, in September.

Did you do any campaigning?

PR: Not to get on to the board, because that was basically the lot of directors. I knew all the directors well because I had been on the Internal Audit Committee for all that time before. As I said to you before, being one of the noisy people they probably thought if they got me on the board they could quieten me down, but I don’t really think that was exactly how it turned out.

What was the first issue when you did get on the board?

PR: I was always concerned about the use of the members’ money, the spending of money by the directors and staff. I always felt that they were elected to look after their friends and workmates’ money and not there to consider they had a divine right to take what they wanted. I am not suggesting for a second there was anything wrong with what it was being spent on, but the idea of going to a conference in Surfers Paradise was one of the main problems I had with them, where all the board went. When I objected to it rather than just going to the conference they then had a planning meeting on up there as well. They changed the logistics of the meeting. I felt that was wrong. They took all their families with them and made it into a holiday. I always considered that was just not the right thing to do. We were honorary people, we had a commitment to the members and it wasn’t our money, it was there to be looked after and treasured.

Was that an AFCUL meeting?

PR: I think it was an AFCUL meeting.

What about the Electricity Industry and Local Government Credit Union Association?

PR: I never got involved with that. But I know from dealing with the blokes that were, particularly George Wilson, they did that on a shoestring. They travelled around in their own cars, or if they had to go by plane they went in small planes. They did it on a shoestring budget. But in recent years it just got out of hand. No one would stay in anything other than five star accommodation. In addition to that we got a daily sustenance. We got too much. We were spending money that I felt was just a bit too ripe. I eventually got them to agree to three board members going to each of the functions, so if there was an AFCUL meeting then three went to it. Whatever the meetings were we sent three away.

I was always in favour of the wives going. The families I didn’t really have a problem with, but wives were left out of this organisation, the movement, and families suffered because of a bloke’s involvement. The only way that I could see they got something back was by going to some of these little functions where they were feted. So I never, ever had any problems with the wives going to these things. Besides that it kept the blokes away from chasing other women. Maurie Ryan was the one that was always great believer in the wives going. I just continued on what other chairmen had put in place. I didn’t have the same problem that some of them did with the wives and the families going.

What about factionalism on the board, was there factionalism?

PR: There is always factionalism when you’ve got nine people trying to get what they want for themselves. One of the director’s favourite sayings was “Five beats four,” and he quoted that to me quite often. That was George Wilson. He would be quite happy to be known as ‘Five Beats Four’ because he always used to talk about it. I tried not to get into this business. I would hope that you could talk to people prior to a board meeting about your point of view and influence them, but I always wanted people to use their brains when it came to the board meetings. Board meetings where a decision was made gave everybody a chance of putting a point of view. I used to get so cranky that people would go there and take a political stance on an issue when they knew quite well that the issue was well and they should have changed their mind but because they had given their commitment to somebody they wouldn’t change.

The factions, along what lines were they? Were they about issues?

PR: Issue-based. One group could be in favour of one set of problems and the same group could be in favour of another, we intermingled. I went along with some of them. I was a kind of a fence-sitter. I wanted to be able to exercise my vote as I saw it at the time that the motion was put, I didn’t want anybody telling me how I was going to vote.

Was there any factionalism along the lines of where you were in the Sydney County Council, whether you were administration or whether you were something else?

PR: No. It was always my observation that it had nothing to do with that. A couple of them were mates and they always voted together. Then the rest of us then had to just try and work out what was the best for the credit union.

In the case of five beats four, who were the five and who were the four?

PR: It usually worked out that George was the organiser. George Wilson, Bill Brady. John Gormley; he was one of the five but he wasn’t on anybody’s faction, you used to wonder what John was thinking most of the time. John Gormley, Jack Stone, there’s one more.

What about the four?

PR: Barry Jones, Paul Ryan, Des McNally and someone else.

What about Barry Waterhouse?

PR: No Barry Waterhouse was gone when I got on there. I can only talk about how it was when I was there, but I guess the same type of thing happened in Barry Waterhouse’s day too. The five were the people I said, with one missing. The fourth was John Rowlands in the latter part of my time on the board. No Sid Needham was the one. Col Harvey was the five. Those names I mentioned before plus Col Harvey and the four were Paul Ryan, Des McNally, Barry Jones and Sid Needham when Sid Needham was on the board.

They continue to have nine on the board?

PR: Yep. I think it is a good number, I think it is manageable. When I was chairman I found it a good number. It gave people a chance to bring in different ideas and that was highly important because the more ideas you’ve got the less chance you’ve got of making mistakes.

What about board committees?

PR: The committee would go away and spend three months working on a particular thing and then come to the board meeting and the board meeting would throw it out.

Which committee are you talking about?

PR: Any of them, it wouldn’t matter. There was no rhyme nor reason sometimes.

How many committees were there?

PR: There were three in my time, three main ones.

Which ones are they? The Education Committee was one.

PR: They were the ones that looked after the reps nights, more of the social activities. There was one that looked after the financial side and there was one that looked after… See my memory is not as good as I thought it was. I know there were three and the names of them varied from year to year.

What were you on?

PR: I tended not to be too worried which one I was on. There might be some conjecture on this but I always considered I was the motivating force in getting the reps nights reactivated and on a far better scale where the reps were involved as well as the staff. So we took staff along to these reps nights, which we tried to do originally two a year. So we’d go right around the whole of the circuit of the council’s reps groups and we’d have a night out for them twice a year in a local club. I gave a bit of a talk as chairman, John Gormley I think also did the same when he was chairman. It came in when I came onto the board rather than when I was chairman. We got the staff to talk, we had dinner with them and everybody then had a chance to talk about credit unions.

When did you become vice chairman and who comprised the executive in your day?

PR: Well when I was deputy chairman John Gormley was chairman, I was deputy chairman, Bill Brady was the third member of the executive. I think that was how it started off and then I became chairman, Jack became deputy chairman and Bill Brady stayed on as the third member. That’s how it worked I think.

Did major decisions tend to be taken by the executive?

PR: I always considered that all we did was preliminary work and that the board was the one that took responsibility for it. I objected to the idea that the decisions came from the executive. That was what had to be written down in the books, that it was a board decision. All they should do is filter the information and come up with some type of recommendation so that people can talk about it.

At the moment I am doing the histories of two credit unions, there is Power Credit Union; which used to be the Electricity Commission; and the SEC, Sydney Electricity Employees’ Credit Union. Now when I had to put the matter of the history to the board in the first instance, yours, there was a number of times it went back and forth to the board and all decisions went back to the board; whereas in Power it went to the board in the first place and they put a ceiling on the amount that was allowed to be spent and it was sent to the executive and the executive handled the rest of it.

PR: I would have thought once the board approved it then our manager would have looked after it. Why did it have to go back to the board?

Your board didn’t approve it straight away.

PR: We were always very tardy in making decisions, only because good decisions came out. We weren’t one of the best credit unions around because of bad decisions, we were there because we made prudent and excellent decisions.

What about people, Maurie Ryan what was he like?

PR: Maurie Ryan and I got on pretty well together except when he told me to shut up at the board meeting that night. I always respected him, I thought he was a smart fellow. Remembering he was a very senior member of the council and in those days I was only relatively junior, I could speak to him. I don’t have any trouble talking to anybody but I found talking to him was quite easy and he was a man from the same working-class type background as I was and had no pretensions and no ideas of grandeur. I always found him all right.

What about Col Dade, how was he different?

PR: Col Dade was one of the blokes that got into the credit union movement because he happened to be there at the time it was formed. I never thought that Col had the background nor the ability to even have been chairman of the credit union, nor manager of the credit union. I always thought they plucked people out of the sky imprudently. Some of the background to that was Col Dade was chairman of the board and Maurie Ryan wanted to be chairman. The job came up as general manager so Maurie Ryan suggested to Col Dade that he become general manager. Col Dad, who at that point in time, knew nothing about paperwork and the management of a financial institution other than what he had picked up on the board was suddenly general manager with Keith Davidson as his 2IC. That was just a decision that was fraught with all types of possibilities and the possibility did come to fruition in Davidson’s case. Col was a nice bloke, a fellow who was interested in helping but wasn’t what I call either chairman or general manager material.

What about the directors? At the present moment as far as I see it apart from Col Dade there was nobody representing the ordinary working people around the credit union, they were all administrators or they were all clerical people.

PR: That has always been one of the problems, but you can’t run a board today with people who don’t know anything about computers or the technical side of the thing. That is one of the things I see wrong with the present movement, is that the technical side of things has become so great that the average person is frightened of the responsibility of being a director, remembering that your assets are liable if there is a major problem within the credit union that you should have known about and had some control over. I think that people are frightened these days, the majority. That is one of the reasons why the honorary system, the non-paid group, has been pushed into the background and will eventually be pushed out of the credit union movement altogether.

You have had some outstanding directors around the movement that came from the rank and file, so to speak.

PR: In the old days, I don’t think they are there any more. I think they were great for the days that were but with all the problems that go with legislation and technology those blokes wouldn’t have survived today. They were good motivators who got a movement going but then I think a lot of them then realised that they had to step aside and let other people do it.

Did you go to any credit union schools and seminars?

PR: I avoided most of those things like the plague. I went to the conferences and that but I always considered that I heard the same people say the same things over and over again and most of it was crap to start with.

Any other positions, say the Electricity Industry and Local Government Association did you get involved in that?

PR: No I never got involved with that. I was a family bloke and I knew that I was on thin ice with my wife going to these functions. I was spending an average of one night every week on credit union business. An average of one night a week, some weeks it would be three other weeks it wouldn’t be three.

Why was that?

PR: I tried to lead by example. You can’t get nine people to be active if you are not active yourself. I didn’t expect anybody to do anything more than I did.

Jack Stone is also out every night and having difficulty. But some credit unions that isn’t so. Even the chairman will be on the phone with the manager and the executive will be working that way, but the others they turn up once a month for the board meeting and that’s it.

PR: That is what I am saying about the credit union movement, the honorary people have lost control of the credit union movement. The credit union movement is now run by the management group. I would defy anybody to tell me otherwise.

Some chairmen are very hands-on yet they don’t spend an awful lot of time on it, apart from on the phone that is. They don’t have endless meetings. Some credit unions do, some credit unions don’t.

PR: I know from my dealings with the credit union, the bigger credit unions, the person that was high profile and did all the talking on behalf of the credit union was the general manager. For example, the State Government Credit Union with Helen McIntyre. I would suggest to you that if you ask people who they can name out of the State Government Credit Union they would name Helen McIntyre, they wouldn’t know who the chairman was.

What about Sydney Credit Union?

PR: Sydney Credit Union I would say they are a bit like Sydney County Council still. Jack Coyne, isn’t it, Jack spends a lot of his time down at the credit union office. Their board was a different board, they weren’t involved like we were. Maurie Daly made a decision for the credit union himself. We didn’t allow Tony Williams to do that, nor Ken May. When you consider it the board of the credit union is a group of people elected by members and if you’re not involved why are you there, why not just employ a manager? It is great to say they don’t go to meetings, and I’ve heard it so often, “Oh we don’t go to meetings twice a month. We have one a month and it only takes an hour or two.” How can you run a multi-million dollar bloody business?

They are on the phone every morning.

PR: Not in these days there not. Not the average director. Most directors don’t even know what it is bloody going on. You go to a conference and ask a director how big their credit union is and they look at you blankly. “How many members have you got?” “Oh I don’t know that. The manager hasn’t told us.” Or words to that effect, that’s enlarging it a bit. But they don’t know what their credit union is on about. Our blokes could go to a conference and they could tell you the size of the credit union, how many dollars we had and all the relevant facts that showed what we were as a credit union and most of the others didn’t know.

Take a fairly large credit union like New South Wales Teachers’, now each of those directors have got specialties that they follow up.

PR: I guarantee that with Teachers’ the same thing applies as with State Government. They’ve got a general manager who is an excellent general manager, excellent, I know him but I haven’t got any idea who the chairman is.

They’ve had the same chairman right the way through, Col Johnson.

PR: The blokes that get profile in the movement are the management group. In the old days it wasn’t. Blokes like Maurie Ryan and Dermot Ryan and all these other blokes they were the high fliers and everybody knew them and the managers were there in the background. Not any more the managers are in the foreground and the directors are in the background.

You think that is all wrong?

PR: I think it is crazy. It will destroy the credit union. It will destroy the very thing that the credit unions were set up for because managers haven’t got the feel for the working-class bloke that works outside, by and large. Remembering that the old days of people being represented by directors who they worked with, I guess that has all changed too.

Not in the Electricity Commission, they always insist on the different areas having their own directors.

PR: I think you will find the members haven’t got the same attachment to the credit union as they had in the past. That is understandable because times are tough, finances are available now from anybody and everybody. We are in the market place to fight the same way as everybody else to keep our members and to whatever. I think the time for credit unions is almost finished, the old way of doing things, the Dermot Ryan, Maurie Ryan, Col Dade style of credit union and what it represented in those days has gone. They are more conscious of the dollars, they are more conscious of bad debts, they are more conscious of everything other than the person that is actually a member and it is unfortunate. Legislation will eventually tie it up so much that they won’t be able to lend money to people who can’t afford to pay it back as they used to in the old days. You will be faced with the proposition later on of credit unions being under the Credit Act and not under the Credit Union Act, or whatever it is. So therefore we will be tied up the same way as all the finance companies and so forth are.

What about the credit union itself while you were there, what arguments did you get into and how did you come to leave the board?

PR: I left because of pressure from the family, there was no other reason than that. But I was also starting to feel downhearted about the way the credit union was going. The credit union and the need to change from the old philosophy to whatever they’ve got at present, I kind of objected to going to conferences. The people that we actually employed to look after the running of the credit union telling the directors how they were going to run it. I can see in the not too distant future the same people telling directors in credit unions, all of the credit unions around the place, how much interest they should charge and how much they should give and set standards by which credit unions will operate, which will mean they won’t be individuals any more, they will just be part of this overall credit union movement. I saw that coming with Project Renewal. I saw no alternative to Project Renewal but I can’t see how an organisation, an Australian-wide organisation, is going to be run by this membership council and the major board. I think it is run on a day-to-day basis by the ex-bank blokes who run the credit union movement.

What shall we talk about now that we haven’t yet covered?

PR: What I might be able to elaborate a bit more on, during my time as chairman we joined Shared Enterprises, which was a direct move away from the credit union-based FCS computer system. You will get more information from Tony on that.

I have heard mention of that from Bankstown and Sydney Credit Union.

PR: Bankstown and Sydney Electricity came in at the same time, or thereabouts, whereas Sydney was one of the founding group on that. Our computer we only purchased at the same time as Shared Enterprise was thought of, so we didn’t come in until we got some use out of it and needed to update. I also was chairman at the time that the name changed from Sydney County Council Employees’ Credit Union to Sydney Electricity Employees Credit Union.

Also during that period we tended to tighten our ties up. I always thought it highly important to be involved with the executive of the Sydney Electricity and the Sydney County Council. I remember one magnificent night we invited all the senior executives to the council, including the general manager, to a dinner and that was really tremendous, really turned out well. They have had another one since with a new group of managers. We also took the general manager of the County Council and Sydney Electricity along to our planning meeting with us and he gave us a run down on where he saw the council going. This was during that terrible time of change. These were things I felt quite proud about.

I didn’t really have a great to do with Shared Enterprise, except that I agreed with Tony Williams that we should go ahead that way and we pushed and got them to agree.

The other thing I was always pushing was the idea of sharing resources. Unfortunately the management group didn’t want to share resources, they wanted to own them. They paid lip-service to the principle of it, but when it came down to it they weren’t interested. The idea of having an office somewhere where all the credit unions operated from in that district and we shared the cost of running that in a predetermined way. I was all for seeing the credit union movement as an entity but based on fighting for members to try and service people, no matter whose credit union they belonged to.

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