RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO NEIL RUNCIE
Dr Runcie, where were you born and when?
NR: I was born in Sydney in 1928, near Hillston Park at Ashfield.
Did you grow up around there?
NR: Yes I grew up at Hillston Park and I went to Canterbury Boys’ High School. I left school after the Intermediate and matriculated at Sydney Technical College and then went to the University of Sydney where I studied economics and at some time I was working in the State Public Service, initially at the Sydney Teachers’ College and then at the Bureau of Statistics and Economics.
What sort of influence do you think you got from your father?
NR: Oh quite a considerable influence because he was a public servant and he was keen for me to get into the work force in a secure job. Having seen the unemployed after the First World War when he came back from the War itself in 1920, 1921, and during the Great Depression, this had left a very considerable impact on him and he was keen to encourage me to get a job a to start a career in the public service environment.
You didn’t know anything of the Depression?
NR: I didn’t know of it first hand, only really sketchy details that one would remember from early childhood.
What sort of influence did you get from your mother?
NR: Well I think my mother lived in the same district as my father, they went to the same church; my mother was the organist at the local Congregational Church and my father attended that church; so there were very similar environmental influences on both my parents. He was of Scottish descent and she was a mixture of English and Irish, but I see myself as a fifth generation Australian really.
What was their attitude to credit?
NR: They were products of the Victorian era. They didn’t believe in borrowing and it was to be avoided. I think that the revolution in credit of course came after World War Two, so it really wasn’t an influence on my upbringing.
At school do you remember what subjects you preferred, what you liked and disliked?
NR: Well mathematics and physics were my strongest points, chemistry. I wanted to be a civil engineer initially, but because I left school at the Intermediate stage, at fourteen, it didn’t enable me to pursue civil engineering and I went into economics by accident. I couldn’t get into the Faculty of Law because I was too young, in those days you had to have a minimum age of sixteen and I entered the University at age fifteen so in fact I couldn’t enter the Faculty of Law. I went into economics by accident, expecting to switch to law a year later, but I liked economics and it has stuck with me ever since.
At your university did you do any sport or any other clubs or societies?
NR: I was an evening student so I couldn’t participate in the university sporting activities. I played tennis. We had a tennis court in our backyard all my life and so I was a keen tennis player. At school I played cricket, as most boys were required to play cricket in my day, and swimming and surfing. I enjoyed a sort of normal Sydney-side childhood I would say.
At school had you been doing any sport, apart from cricket, football?
NR: Well the same sports, cricket, swimming and tennis were the sports that I participated in.
So what was your first job?
NR: My first job was as a junior clerk at the Sydney Teachers’ College and I am very grateful for that experience because the college was, in those days, very active and very well staffed. I believe that meeting many distinguished people on the staff of the college was a very big and very interesting experience for a young man.
Where did you go after that?
NR: I left the Sydney Teachers’ College to go to the Bureau of Statistics as a junior research officer at the end of my first year in the university. My results were promising and the Government Statistician, Stanley Carver, invited me to become a junior research officer at the Bureau of Statistics. I readily accepted and didn’t regret it.
Did you stay there?
NR: I stayed there for a number of years while I completed my university degree. I was seconded to the New South Wales Mines Department and to the Commonwealth Bureau of Statistics during the course of this time as an expert on mining and mineral statistics. I had also worked on the Census of Manufacturing Production. But it did involve my going down practically all the mines in this State and visiting a lot of mining activities. I left the Bureau to go to the university after I graduated.
Do you think going down mines all over the place and seeing how people worked down there had any affect on you?
NR: I think I had a fair picture before I went down the mines of what the conditions were like. I don’t think the actual going down a mine was in any way different to what I had anticipated. The coal mines were quite dreadful I thought as a place to work. Silver, lead, zinc mines were very interesting and they differed one from the other. I found it very interesting, I was very interested in the nature of the ore bodies and the minor minerals that were there. Very interested to talk with the miners. I felt that it was an interesting experience, but I suppose there wasn’t anything really different to what I had anticipated there.
So how long was it before you left the public service proper?
NR: Well I think it was about six years and I left to join the University of Technology under a special arrangement with Wallace Worth, who was Chairman of the State Public Service Board at the time.
Have you any idea what year that was?
NR: Oh about 1952 I think, I would have to look it up on my CV. I joined the University on an arrangement that I could return to the Bureau of Statistics, they were keen to give me the option of returning, and the University also gave me that option. In fact there were provisions in the legislation to enable this switching to occur.
Did you ever go back?
NR: No. I stayed with the University until very recently, two years ago. It has been a very happy and rewarding experience. I enjoyed university life and I have engaged in a lot of other activities over the years. I think you can’t be a good economist by being only an economist and I think you can’t be a good academic by being only an academic. I think that one needs to spice one’s experience in a variety of directions.
What got you into the radio end of things, by the way?
NR: I suppose the experience of living in London where I was very impressed with the work of the BBC, the quality of their broadcasting was streets ahead of anything I had listened to in Australia. At the time I was there Francis Maclean, the Chief Engineer of the BBC, was very active in extending FM broadcasting throughout the whole country. So while I was studying for my PhD, 1958, 1959 and the first half of 1960, most of Britain was in fact covered by FM broadcasting. It was that experience that brought me back to Australia with a strong conviction, one that we needed FM broadcasting in Australia because the quality was so superior to AM broadcasting, and secondly a strong conviction that we should be doing much better in educational broadcasting.
What about the credit union movement, how did that first come to your notice?
NR: The credit union movement came to my notice before I went to England for my PhD studies. In the 1950s as a lecturer at the university there was a rapid development of instalment credit financing. The finance companies from 1949 onwards were forced to borrow from the public rather than from the banking system. So one of the most conspicuous advertisements from financial institutions in the press in the 1950s were those of the instalment credit finance companies. They expanded very rapidly and I decided that I would make instalment credit one of my special areas of interest and of course that led me into a study of credit unions, as well as banks, as well as finance companies, as well as retailers, all the institutions providing instalment credit in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
How did you go about this study?
NR: Well I think that it was an area where it was necessary to gather the basic data at first hand. In other words there wasn’t a great deal published about it, especially in Australia. There was a lot in the United States, but not so very much in Australia. So a lot of the work that I did in Australia initially was breaking new ground. This is also true in Canada and New Zealand and the United Kingdom, where my work of a very early nature in terms of research in these areas.
You managed to get grants to go round and stay in the countries under research?
NR: Yes. I received two grants, both in England, from the Hilary Norman Fund, the Bank of England, and from the ??????? Foundation, they helped finance these studies that I undertook.
That must have been quite unusual to get grants at that time?
NR: Well I went to Britain and I used London as my base. I used that as well to visit Europe, very strictly looking at the financial institutions, and getting back to London. In fact I have got to be a tourist in Europe, it has still eluded me. It was interesting to talk with some of the financial institutions in Europe because the early ideas on co-operatives, People’s Banking in the nineteenth century has very widespread roots in Europe.
Who did you talk to over there, can you remember, what organisations?
NR: Well there were literally hundreds of organisations that I spoke to.
Anybody outstanding at all?
NR: Nobody I can recall as being outstanding in any individual way. I was very much a student gathering facts about the development. I was seeing central bankers, I was seeing statisticians, I was seeing executives of finance companies, executives of retailing organisations.
Seeing people in co-operatives?
NR: Yes seeing people in co-operatives. In Britain of course the credit union movement at that stage was really non-existent. It was interesting to observe the reasons for that. The retail co-operatives provided credit and there wasn’t a great deal of interest. I did have discussions with a number of people in the House of Commons, Parliamentary Inquiries, and subsequently correspondence with them about this gap in the British financial system. But of course so much has happened in the United States and in Canada as well. I think some of the best studies of credit unions have been done in Canada. The Caisse Populaire in Quebec and the American-style credit unions in the rest of Canada. The Americans have done so much research that they have had all the experiences of different situations and it is really a matter of tapping into the work that has been done in the United States.
Did you go to Madison to the CUNA?
NR: Yes I made a brief visit to them. I had been in correspondence with them for some years and had discussions with the head of their research, I have forgotten his name.
Did you manage to go to any of the Annual Meetings at all?
NR: No I didn’t. The visit to the United States was fairly brief and I think I only spent something like a day in Madison, so it was a very brief visit. I was travelling throughout the United States on a very limited budget.
Did you manage to get to Levis at all?
NR: No.
So when you got back was that when you joined the credit union yourself?
NR: I suggested, had a number of staff meetings at the university, that we should start a university staff credit union. I had made this suggestion before going overseas and repeated it when I came back from my PhD studies. The Bursar of the University, Joe Burke, rang me up one day and said he had been thinking about what I had said about the development of a university credit union and he said, “Go to it I will back you.” That was really the start. We held preliminary meetings and launched it. I thought there was a case for establishing credit unions in universities throughout Australia and so I visited most of the campuses, talking to staff associations about the organisation of credit unions and had correspondence with them. So the University of New South Wales was actually the first university credit union in Australia and a number of others followed very quickly. The one in Canberra took off. The one at Sydney University was tied to the Welfare Association and this in fact proved as a restraining factor on their growth because many members of staff were not members of the Welfare Association and you had to be a member of the Welfare Association to be able to participate in the credit union. That restrained the growth of the Sydney University credit union. But the amalgamation of the universities credit unions in New South Wales has produced a large, I think highly successful venture.
When you actually started the University of New South Wales, was it then called the University of Technology?
NR: The University of New South Wales. We had lost the term Technology when we added a medical faculty. The Faculty of Medicine was not prepared to wear that title.
You must have had a formal meeting, but did you get people like Stan Arneil in or did you do it all yourself?
NR: I think we were able to launch it without a great deal of assistance directly from Stan. He was readily available for advice and comment, as was the Registrar of Co-operative Societies. I think we were seen to be a group with a lot of expertise. I think that I was able to recruit to our first Board an outstanding collection of people. I think there were three accountants, a couple of lawyers, several people from the University administration and myself as an economist. So we set up a credit union really following the guidelines that were laid down by the Registrar of Co-operatives and with access to material that I had gathered, in the United States in particular. I think that my contact with Stan came very much with the issues of the development of credit unions elsewhere in the State and in Australian universities generally, that brought me into contact with him as to how best to promote the idea which I had fallen in love with. I thought it was a marvellous idea and I still do.
It doesn’t seem to be quite clear exactly what triggered your interest. You took it up as an academic study first and then got into the feeling, the spirit, of credit unionism itself?
NR: That would be one way of putting it yes. I think the connecting factor in the various activities that I have been involved in outside the university; credit unions, radio stations, the environment movement; have a common theme of community self-help and education. I believe that there are enormous untapped resources in the community that we are not using today and the co-operative movement is one way of trying to tap that. I was very interested in the co-operative movement generally, but I looked at the development of credit unions and the history and the ideas that were involved in a very analytical way, as an academic.
When you started the University credit union, you became Chairman?
NR: I was the Foundation Chairman and Chairman for three years. It was a totally consuming activity because it wasn’t just the matter of a Board meeting once a week. When you launch something entirely new like this, where there are many sceptical members of staff, highly critical members of staff, you have to be on your toes all the time. In fact it was a six day a week job I would say, in lunch times and after work with meetings on at least three or four days of the various committees. In the Economics Society, which I had been Secretary of in the 1950s, we used a committee system very successfully. I transferred that idea to the structure of the credit union at the University of New South Wales and so we had a whole range of committees and as Chairman I attended all the committee meetings. We had a few crises in the early days.
Such as?
NR: Well bad debts. I was keen to avoid bad debts and I think we didn’t have a bad debt in the first three years, but that was only as a result of enormous effort. I can remember two cases very clearly where we had to chase people, two people who had left the university. One was a young secretary who had over-stated her age and was in fact a minor and skipped interstate and I went interstate to see her parents. She had over-stated her age and was working as an adult in the university and had been granted a loan and then disappeared, but we were able to track her down. The other case was of a cleaner who in fact left the university to start a fish shop and I can remember his name very clearly. We recovered both of those loans in full, but not without a lot of effort. That was the major crisis. I was very keen to avoid bad debts. The credit union grew very rapidly in the first three years and I think I had an excellent Board assisting me.
Now you were on manual accounting at that time?
NR: The Secretary of the credit union was the university’s internal auditor, so we had some very good assistance in setting up our accounting system. Yes, it was a manual accounting system initially.
Were there pay-roll and salary deductions straight away?
NR: Yes. That was of course a very big advantage in establishing this kind of credit union.
End Tape 1A: 3117 Words: 1 hour 10 minutes
RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO NEIL RUNCIE
As far as the credit union is concerned at the University of New South Wales, was that a member of the League straight away, the New South Wales Credit Union League?
NR: Yes. The University credit union was part of the League. I was very keen for it to participate fully in the credit union movement. A break with the Association of Credit Unions occurred later, after I had left the credit union.
What was that over, do you remember?
NR: No, I don’t.
What year was the break then?
NR: I am foggy on that. Certainly, behind the scenes, when I had discovered that they had left encouraged them to go back to the League and try and participate in the movement overall. I saw considerable advantages for them in participating. There had been some deep-seated controversies in the movement. The question of the level of fees, the question of deficit budgeting. There had been some major issues in the development of the credit union movement and I can understand that the individual credit unions may want to break away. In fact of course in New South Wales there were break-aways from the Association which weakened the whole movement.
As far as the various issues, were you involved in any of them at the League level?
NR: No, not really. I had lectured to conferences for the League on a number of occasions, but I had not participated closely in the affairs of the League. There were certain central ideas that I wanted to get across to them. They were ideas about research and management training. As an academic involved in these areas, I believe very strongly in them, and I made proposals on a number of occasions that they should set up a credit union management institute and also a credit union research institute. I saw these as two complementary activities, one concerned with management training for Directors and staff, and a separate exercise dealing with research. I argued that there would be government inquiries that they needed to give evidence to and they should try and be as professional as possible in collecting data about the movement. So I had a sharp cut-off really from the movement. I went on to other things. You can’t keep up with everything that you are involved in throughout your life, otherwise you’re doing everything and you fall between too many stools.
Which were the Schools that you lectured at? The School of Administration?
NR: Well I participated in the development of the Master of Business Administration program at the University of New South Wales and in our Bachelor of Commerce Degree I was, if you like, the Foundation Lecturer in Economics in the Bachelor of Commerce. So naturally I was concerned with education issues in the credit union movement. I turned up to a few meetings when I was invited. I got to know people like Tom Kelly, Dermot Ryan, Stan Arneil.
How did you get to know them, do you remember?
NR: Well only through the League itself. Through participating in the period that I was Chairman of the University’s credit union, in the conferences that took place in those critical three years.
Which three years were they exactly?
NR: They would have been 1960 to 1963, perhaps the first part of 1964.
That was pretty early on, wasn’t it. Did you know Kevin Yates at all?
NR: Yes of course. The book I wrote on credit unions in the South Pacific dealt with the history of the credit union movement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua-New Guinea and I aimed to establish the roots of the movement in every State. I think this is a pioneer piece of research. Not many people of course realise that the roots of the movement go back much further than Kevin Yates. Kevin brought back the enthusiasm and the observation of the North American scene, and the Canadian credit unions in particular, but the concept of people’s banks, the concept of a people’s banking movement goes back much further than that and the first real credit union was in Victoria in 1904 where it was essentially a co-operative, small loans and savings organisation. That is exactly the way I still see credit unions as small co-operative banks. I see them cast in this special mould and I believe that everything that has happened has confirmed this. This was a controversial view of course in the 1950s and 1960s to put this to the people in the credit union movement. They were wanting to separate themselves out from the co-operative movement and they saw themselves as someone different from banking institutions. I was always telling them that they were really part of a much longer tradition of banking in the co-operative movement and I saw them as marrying these ideas. The People’s Banking Movement of the nineteenth century is their ancestor.
Tom Kelly is the one that has run with that in the context of the credit unions here in New South Wales and he of course lost his Vice-Presidency over that. Did you follow him, or did he consult you at any time when he was trying to push that through?
NR: I remember having discussions with Tom about this, but I arrived at my position from an historical search of what had happened in Europe and what had happened in North America, where the ideas had come from, and here in Australia because the ideas pre-dated the post-World War Two development. Even in New South Wales there was enabling legislation, but the provisions were too restrictive for it to work.
I know from my research that there was a push in 1914 and then again in 1926 to start a lot of credit unions over here, but it never sort of took off.
NR: Well the co-operative legislation was of course the origin of the credit union legislation and the basic idea is still that of a co-operative.
There is one thing that I would like to ask you, from my point of view. I have often had an eye on, so to speak, the lending societies that were around and were encouraged greatly by John Wesley in the 1700s, which pre-date anything that is spoken of in the general history of the movement. Did you ever come across those at all?
NR: I was aware that there was a long history in Europe of attempts to create small groups of people who would save and lend to each other. Now that idea was certainly around before the People’s Banking Movement really took off, I am thinking particularly of the Raiffeisen societies and the Schulze-Delitzsch developments in Europe.
They were a bit later of course.
NR: Yes the nineteenth century.
What I was getting at was the antecedents before that.
NR: I didn’t study that. It wasn’t relevant for me in the sense that I wasn’t looking at credit union history in that sort of detail.
I did some work on the Guilds you see, and I watched the various rules that they had. They had a form of loans for the journeymen which they needed while they were travelling around. I wondered if that was an antecedent of the lending societies which led to the co-operatives, which led again on?
NR: I would think that it played a part in thinking about problems of self-help in the community, in this case as you mention amongst journeymen and craftsmen. There would be many origins of this kind, but that certainly must have been one of the important ones. Thank you for mentioning that.
It is something I don’t see mentioned anywhere and I just wondered about it. You were out of the movement when there was the insurance split, when Stan Arneil became Manager of CUNA Mutual.
NR: Yes I was. I was aware that there was a lot of distress at the time, but I was involved in other activities particularly the broadcasting movement, where I became very heavily involved, and in the environment movement. So I didn’t participate actively, not being on the Board of the University’s credit union I didn’t feel as though I could participate directly. I had many discussions with Stan on that. We had lots of contact.
Were you aware of the issues as he saw them, as compared to the way the League Directors and Chairman saw it?
NR: I would have been at the time. There were a lot of things happening in the movement that one can call growing pains. The first thing that comes to mind, especially when you mention the name of Stan Arneil, is the idealism of the founders of the movement in New South Wales and Australia. I think that it’s very important to recognise that idealism. Even when I was going round five or six years ago to credit unions in Australia with a review to revising my book, Credit Unions in the South Pacific, I found people asking me what I thought of the way the movement was going, that the idealism was being lost. There was a recognition that the movement was becoming more professional and there was a down-grading in effect of the input of the committed idealistic amateur and a recognition that with the growth of the movement there had to be more professionalism. There had to be professional skills of management in budgeting and marketing and in planning. This obviously is still a cause of distress to many people in the movement because one of the very special things about credit unions is their counselling of people who need financial assistance. I found it a very humanising experience as Chairman of the credit union and Chairman of the Credit Committee, to be dealing with the financial problems of everyone from cleaners through to professors, the whole range. The University’s credit union covered, right from its inception, everyone. It was part of my strong conviction that we shouldn’t be restricted to members of any particular group of the university but cover everybody on campus. The administration, the academic staff, the general staff, gardeners, cleaners the lot. This view wasn’t always shared I might add by everyone even on the Board of the credit union. Certainly I think that as the credit unions have become larger there has been some loss of the personal counselling and I find many of the older people in the movement very distressed by this. In every State I found this issue raised when I went to talk to people in the credit union movement as recently as five years ago.
Yes they all seem to be agreed. What I found, what I thought was a real tragedy in some ways, is the fact that Stan Arneil, on the one hand, and Dermot Ryan and Ken Miller, on the other hand, they are all idealists in the credit union movement and they all say something has gone wrong. Yet they were on both sides of the fence regarding the various splits that went on.
NR: I think that is true. There are a number of elements in the situation. One element is the element of local nationalism, a sense that we should be able to do it ourselves rather than be attached to a movement that is dominated by the United States credit union movement. At the same time there are those people who felt that it was important to be part of an international movement. One can see both of those elements, the internationalism of some people conflicting with the nationalism of other people. Just as you find the professionalism conflicting with the concerned amateur, if you like to put it in those terms, the concerned amateur idealistic member of the Board. There are many of those people who did an excellent job on the Board, but with the growth of the credit unions you had to get a marrying of these ideas. That is why the credit unions I think found it important to run Schools and Conferences, which they were doing all the time. I can commend that, I think that was an excellent feature. The problems with CUNA might have been resolved if the personalities had been different at the time. But I believe that it was all part of the growing pains of a movement coming to play its role in the Australian financial system.
Were you involved with John McIntyre and Graham Humphreys in the founding of ICUD and AICUM, the Institutes of Credit Union Managers and Directors?
NR: Yes I had discussions with them in the early stages. I spoke for quite some time about the desirability of this move before it happened. Now, the History Co-operative that you have mentioned, followed representations that I had made to the League and to each League in Australia about the importance of recording their history. What you are doing now, I had suggested to each League in Australia as being of vital importance. I said that many of the people in the credit union movement were passing on and they should record oral histories. I described the formation of the history group as a stepping stone to my research institute. I believe that the next step from the oral history and the recorded history exercise is to set up a professional credit union research organisation. The credit unions need to go about recording their own individual histories. When they get that done then a lot of this can be brought together. I designed the questionnaire which I sent to each League in Australia setting out the sort of questions that I thought each individual credit union should ask about its formation. I have many individual credit union responses to that questionnaire in my files. There hasn’t been as much academic research into the development of credit unions as I would like to see. I believe, for example, that Mike Skully’s book is a book that has been written entirely from secondary sources and the credit union movement needs to do some primary research itself. If you look, for example, at the work that CUNA was doing in its Research Department in the 1950s and early 1960s on financial ratio analysis, which I discussed in my book, Credit Unions in the South Pacific, this is really not got off and running in the local movement, but it is a very useful tool. The measurement of income, the question of deficit budgeting, these were all controversial management practices, as you would appreciate.
What was your view of deficit budgeting?
NR: Well it is indeed a strategy you can use for growth, but it also has its dangers. I think that some of the errors of judgement that were associated with that need to be chronicled and recorded by the movement itself.
Did you follow the problems that came through the 1970s, particularly when they had to resort to a lot of credit unions being amalgamated forcibly and have Administrators put in and eventually to have a Common Board where they pushed a number of credit unions into one common one, and such like?
NR: I was aware of these difficulties and I had discussions with the Registrar’s representatives here in New South Wales and in some of the other States about these problems at the time.
What about the failure of the Kurri Credit Union and the Shop Distributive and Allied Credit Union that Stan Arneil was managing?
NR: I am not familiar with the details of those two but I am aware of the problems. The deficit budgeting strategy was one that clearly brought the credit union movement into a period of great difficulty and it presupposed the existence of a credit union central bank that could see them through periods of difficulty.
Were you ever consulted by Les Robinson and Ken Miller during the setting up of the Central?
NR: I certainly had discussions with both of them. I remember Les very well. I certainly aimed at some stage to go back and update the work that I had started in terms of the history of the movement. But the concept of a credit union central bank is in effect a lender of last resort for credit unions that got into difficulties. It was an idea that I had been pressing not only for credit unions but for building societies, even mortgage companies. In fact a letter that I wrote about the State Mortgage, the recent crisis in Victoria was precisely on that point, that Unit Trusts in the area should in fact be seeking lender of last resort facilities either through official sources or through a co-operative venture of their own.
Were you involved at all at the time they were setting up the Savings Protection Fund, which later of course led to the Credit Union Savings Reserve Fund, the compulsory one?
NR: I wasn’t involved directly in that, but the idea of having a central fund which could be used to help credit unions that got into difficulties was part of my thesis that credit unions were basically small co-operative banks and I believe it is part of the operation of the banking system that they should have some sort of central banking assistance. I believe the Financial Corporations Act that Frank Crean introduced in 1974 really was a gateway into providing that sort of assistance from the Central Bank. Without that particular piece of legislation being followed up by the authorities, and it is still on the books, other developments occurred at the industry and State level in providing Guarantee Funds, Reserve Funds, each State had its own with differing degrees of involvement of the State Registrar.
Were you involved at all, at any level, in those negotiations that culminated in 1974? Dermot Ryan was one person and of course Vince Martin was another. Were you involved at all on any level that brought about that Act?
NR: The Financial Corporations Act? Well Frank Crean was the Federal Treasurer at the time and the Act is still known as the Crean Act. My speciality in economics is the development of the capital market with particular reference to non-banking financial intermediaries and financial intermediation. I have had a position in various writings that favour the development of some sort of supervisory framework over non-banking financial intermediaries. Over my working life the banks have declined in relative importance and the non-banking financial intermediaries have expanded. It is only since the period in the 1980s of so-called deregulation, post-Campbell, that the banks have expanded relatively to the non-banking financial intermediaries. So there has been a consistent theme I think in the work that I have done that has pointed to the need for the financial system to work efficiently and to avoid the hiccoughs of nineteenth century financial crisis.
So how actually do you see the Historical Co-operative developing?
NR: I was very pleased to hear of the Historical Co-operative because I had drawn the movement’s attention to the fact that many of the founders of the movement in the post-World War Two period were passing on, Registrars and leading personalities. But the direction that I believe has to be taken is to use this as a stepping-stone to the establishment of a research institute into the problems of co-operatives. It is an important milestone to record the history of the movement at this critical stage. I think the next step is to make the movement more professional, to do proper research, so that some of the lessons from the history are in fact learnt and built into the operation of the movement. There have been dramatic changes in the way in which credit unions are operating and some of these changes have worried many people in the movement, especially people who associate credit unions with a personalised service, the counselling side of it. I think the need is to improve the standard of management and to do this there has to be a research program, specifically directed at the credit unions. They need to have a research agenda and to set about it.
Thank you very much Professor Runcie.
End Tape 1B: 3375 Words: 1 hour