29 AUGUST 1989: SCU4: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE OF SYDNEY CREDIT UNION LIMITED

Mr John Coyne, are you known as Jack?

JC:       Yes, Jack.

Where were you born and when?

JC:       Born in Sydney, 8 March 1935.

In the city?

JC:       Paddington Women’s Hospital.

Where did you grow up? In that area?

JC:       No, I grew up in Eastlakes or Mascot generally. Pretty good area to be brought up in because we were surrounded by golf courses and that. We had all the advantages of living in the city with all the golf courses which only had post and rail fences then. We were like raggedy-arsed kids on the golf course chasing snakes and stealing golf balls and all that sort of thing that kids do. Marvellous place to live, it was great.

What sort of influences on you from parents?

JC:       Pretty strong influences. Dad was a very good sportsman. He was a very good cricketer and a very good footballer. He was one of those fortunate people who could play any sport at all and just be good at it. He was a first grade footballer for South Sydney. Had the potential to be a first grade cricketer but because of the Depression years, dad could never realise that because he couldn’t afford to join a cricket club. I think the Depression had a fairly big influence on my family. Dad only worked, if he could get work, two or three days a week. The family originally came from Newcastle and I always remember mum working from a very early age because it was imperative. She started work with Woolworths I guess when my sister and I were very young. Actually mum was the first woman manager of a Woolworths store, which I remember quite well. It was at Rockdale. These things stick in your mind.

I had a pretty easy going sort of childhood. Things were a bit different to what they are now. You had a lot more freedom. I remember going to school and mum was very stern on dressing properly and that. I always used to remember that I was very embarrassed that I had a pair of shoes to wear to school, so I used to take them off and put them in my bag to take to school as soon as I got out of sight of home, because I wasn’t game to do it in front of mum. Mum was a very strong influence financially-wise. As a matter of fact in a way the influence of mum was very strong with money. A very powerful saver and a very good budgeter and all that sort of thing. It didn’t always me grab me all that much. I thought you often did without things when you didn’t have to.

Dad went along with that. But sporting wise dad was a top guy that way.

Catholic upbringing?

JC:       Dad was Catholic, mum was a Protestant. Very mixed, as is usual in Irish families. Mum’s brother was a Catholic, because his father was a Catholic. Mum being Church of England she followed the other way. Dad was a Catholic and came from a very strong Catholic family. It always works out that way that I was baptised Church of England but I am married to a Catholic, and my daughter is a Catholic. If I ever approached religion I would take a Catholic attitude, let me put it that way. Irish Catholic.

The reason I was asking is because there seems to be so much influence of the Catholics on the credit union. Since we are doing the history of the Sydney Credit Union it is sort of relevant to some extent I think.

JC:       Dad was always very strong on the Irishness part of it. I was taught that I was Irish, even though I had a touch of northern English, which I guess is Celtic anyway and a touch of German. But I would say three-quarters Irish and I was always taught I was Irish and always thought that way, I suppose.

Was your father in the army at all, in the services?

JC:       No. Dad was in what do they call them, protected or restricted industry, or something. He was a skilled wire worker. Of course those guys they wouldn’t let them go into the army even if they wanted to. I don’t think he ever really wanted to. But he was a skilled wire worker so he worked in a protected industry.

So there was no military influence in the family, so to speak?

JC:       None at all, except my great-grandfather who lived with us from the time I was a young man. He came from Lancashire and was rather proud of it. But he was Celtic, very much so and looked Celtic. He was very much Empire and all that sort of thing. The story was he skipped ship in Sydney as a young man, before the turn of the century. As quite an old man he served in the First World War in France and things like that. There are old books of his around.

What other organisations did you first join, do you think? Sporting organisations were they?

JC:       Sport played a big part in my life.

School?

JC:       Yes, at school. I was a reasonable football player.

What did you like and not like at school?

JC:       I don’t think I liked much about school at all, to tell you the truth.

Were you mathematically inclined?

JC:       No. When I think back on these things, when I first went to primary school I just used to being up the top of the class all the time and everything like that. Then when I was about fourth class, or something like that, they had one of these pilot schemes of putting supposedly bright children together in these what they called opportunity classes. At school of course I always racked it better to the standard sort of teacher. On reflection I would have done better at a Catholic school because they would have belted it into me. But when I went to this opportunity class I soon found out that if I didn’t want to do anything, I didn’t have to do anything. So I didn’t do anything except what I wanted to do. I liked some things and I didn’t like others. I hated mathematics. I liked things like English and History in particular, enjoyed those sort of things. All this laziness about me I soon found out that if I could take it easy I was going to take it easy. I don’t think it did me a great deal of good at the time.

So your interests at school other than that were mainly sports?

JC:       Mainly sport. Yes I was very keen on sport. I was always sort of organising things like raffles and Melbourne Cup sweeps and money-raising. I was always into that as a kid. It always got me, raising money for some sort of charity and that sort of thing. I liked doing that sort of thing. Dad was involved very much in the administration side when he finished playing football with South Sydney Football Club. He had the idea of the administration. But school, no I didn’t like school very much.

So you went on to play football. Not South Sydney?

JC:       Yes I did play for South Sydney. I played junior representative football. I was a big guy and in the junior football in South Sydney area that was one of the last to take off the weight limits. They used to have weight limits like say if you were an under twenty-one player you had to be under ten stone seven pounds, and all that sort of thing. If you were an under eighteen player, under nine stone. I was up about eleven stone by the time I was fourteen. So when I left school I had to play unlimited weight football at about sixteen. It probably did me a fair bit of good when they took the weight limits off and I dropped back to under eighteens.

So where was your first job?

JC:       First job, Lands Department.

As?

JC:       Cadet draughtsman. Cadet survey draughtsman.

Did you like that?

JC:       I quite liked the Lands Department. They were the old style public service. A lot of aspects I didn’t like about it, like the stiffness of the old style public servant, wear a coat all day and be very rigid on the things he did. Also the boss influence, which never went down with the Irish descendants. So he didn’t like it very much.

Where did you work, down the old Lands Department building? What was that like to work in?

JC:       It was quite incredible when you look back on it. The draughtsmen in those days were artists in their own right because everything was hand drawn. I was quite good at technical drawing and lettering and that sort of thing at school. That was one thing that I enjoyed, technical drawing, etc. It seems a bit odd taking in to account my hatred of mathematics. A lot of the old guys there were artists in their own absolute right. They used to keep old books and stuff of events that happened, you know, going back to the 1880s. It was only 1950 then and I suppose it was well in living memory the previous century to a lot of the guys. There were ex-World War One veterans, two veterans, who were a lot of fun for a young guy to work with because they sort of had authority and they did whatever they liked and it seemed to me to be a real good time. They had a great, very healthy disrespect for authority, which I have always liked.

Things come back. One of the guys in my early childhood, I lived next door to Edgar Ross. I guess he was a socialist historian, Edgar Ross was. He is still alive. Fleur, his daughter, was the same age as me. They lived next door to us. We virtually grew up as kids together and there was a hell of a lot of influence of the rights of man. Dad was very strong on that too, and so was mum. As I say, great-grandfather was a bit more Empire. So when you look back it was a marvellous thing to live next door to Edgar Ross. Tess had an enormous influence on all of us, because she was a magnificent lady, absolutely beautiful lady. Of course I got a fair bit of propaganda pumped into me about the common cause. Of course Edgar was editor of the Common Cause and these sorts of things. You got it pumped into you that the communist system was the only system. Funnily enough as a kid I would never wear that. I might have had a bit of my great-grandfather in me.

Bit too much Irish and Catholic influence.

JC:       On that type of thing, it was a marvellous place to go. Kids, even little kids, could sort of join in conversations and they didn’t talk down to you in any great degree. They talked to you more or less, which is a pretty good way to get your message across. I think that helped me, apart from the Irishness and the Catholicness, the communist influence of egalitarianism, I think that was well bred into me.

Your father he wasn’t keen in any particular political party at all?

JC:       No. He was always a very strong Labor supporter. He wasn’t into ideology all that much. Which I thought, when you read the history of it, was one of the great advantages of the Labor Party, that they didn’t have any particular ideology but to look after the working man. It always sort of impressed me. I don’t believe in ideology very much at all. I think ideology is like religion, it becomes too rigid and can take you into odd directions that you have got to stick to this ideology, when you know in your own mind you can’t be free to go in the direction you think you should go. That is why ideology has never really grabbed me very much at all, of any kind.

I only met Edgar Ross recently when I interviewed him. Such a gentle man. As you were saying they sort of sent him up badly in that series, which I quite liked.

JC:       They sent him up badly. I didn’t like at all. I liked the series. I know Freddy Daly pretty well and I asked Freddy a fair bit about it. Fred said, ‘Oh there is a bit of poetic licence,’ he said, ‘but generally very accurate.’

Well Edgar Ross is so different from that.

JC:       Yes, he is a guy you just sort of took too. His whole family, like Tess she was a lovely lady and she was always doing all sorts of things for people. Fleur and I were very close friends up until it must have been about twelve or so. She had a club foot, a sort of turned leg actually. I wasn’t as close to Bobby by any means, because he was a couple of years older than me. But I never sort of kept in touch. Often wish I did.

He is living in Queensland now.

JC:       Bobby?

Edgar Ross, he is living in Queensland.

JC:       Is it only recently he has gone to Queensland?

No, I think he has been there for a few years. I interviewed him at his publishers at West Ryde there when I got round to collaring him.

JC:       I thought somebody had told me he was living out in the hills district somewhere.

He was a while ago. But he has been up in Queensland for a while now. I think he’s son is in Queensland, that is what it is. I think that is what it is. He just wrote a biography of his father, R S Ross, Bob Ross.

JC:       There is Bob and there is Lloyd his brother. I can remember at the time there was a great falling out between them.

Do you remember that, do you?

JC:       Yes, I can remember that. I never got the full meaning of it, I suppose as a kid, but I do remember comments that were made regarding him as a traitor. More or less a class traitor I suppose, or a traitor of some description.

Well they were socialists. But did you meet Lloyd Ross at Edgar’s house?

JC:       Yes I did. I can remember meeting him there. I have got an idea things were pretty strained at the time too.

That would be after the War wouldn’t it?

JC:       Yes, just after the War then.

Well it was at its most strained then. That was the business of the groupers. He was involved in the industrial groups.

JC:       I was always terribly disappointed with Lloyd’s book, it was a boring bloody thing, even though it was a marvellous history.

Which one was that? The biography of Curtin?

JC:       Yes. It was very dull, I thought. It was a good history I suppose but he could have made it a bit more exciting I would think.

So when you were a kid the main thing you did for recreation was sport. Anything else?

JC:       Oh we were pretty wild kids over the golf course. The lakes we would swim and we would walk through swamps and catch snakes and chase horses. Get thrown off by the ranger off the golf course. Lots of fun things that kids do. I will never forget the time when we used to go and get golf balls out of the lakes. You could sell them because they were pretty hard to get at the time. Of course if you saw a golfer hit one in the water, you wouldn’t go down and say, ‘I will get it out for you,’ you would just sit on top of the hill and they would call you down and ask you to pull it out. Usually you would hope they would go away and then you would go and get the ball because you could sell it. You would get about three of four shillings for it at the time, because they were hard to get. We used to call it treading for golf balls because you couldn’t see the bottom of the water because it was covered in weed. No swimming costumes of course, we would just drop our pants and tuck our shirt up under our armpits and feel around at the bottom with your feet for the ball. We got pretty good at it, we would pick them up with our toes. I will never forget the time the old ranger, Bill, he came charging down, jumped off his horse, grabbed my pants and took off. I chased him across the golf course and up King Street to get my strides. I ended up throwing a bloody saucepan at him and he dropped my pants. That is the sort of life we used to lead and it was a lot of fun.

So where did you go to work after the Lands Department? You were at the Lands Department for how long?

JC:       The Lands Department for six or seven years. Seven years. I remember the time when we started at the Lands Department, there was a sort of group of us. One of the first intakes of very young men, kids out of school, and when we went there we were under the old public service examination system. So after we got through, and they were pretty good exams and pretty searching exams. I was most of the way qualifying as a draughtsman I remember I got very dirty on what happened with the association of the union, POA I think, Professional Officers Association, our draughtsmen were in that award including me. There was just about a whole group of us who had just about finished our course. The executive of the people representing the draughtsman at the time changed all the rules. We were nearly finished and we were suddenly told we had to go to tech and do a three or four year course to qualify as draughtsmen, when we had just about finished this public service exam which all these guys had done. We all thought at the time, and I suppose I was one of the leading figures, that all those old guys had done was look after themselves. They’d done something to raise their status and stuff the young guys down the track. So out of a pretty big group of us, I would say there would have been twenty of us at the Lands Department at the time, most of us left the Lands Department. We were very dirty on it when we found out that other government departments would recognise that we had done this thing. Regulation 124, I remember it well, Examinations for Survey Draughtsmen. We found they would recognise it, so I left and went to the Main Roads and the guys I worked with went to the Housing Commission and County Council. They went to all sorts of other places. I always remember being very dirty on the guy, I liked him as a person, old Archie Wardley he was one of the senior draughtsmen there but he was the Chairman of the draughtsmen’s group. We always regarded Arch as a person who looked after Arch first and let the rest worry about themselves and that is a thing I didn’t like very much.

So where did you go?

JC:       I went to the Main Roads Department.

Who were you working under then, at that time?

JC:       Pat Ells was the Minister. I was always impressed with Pat Ells, he had a great deal of vision, particularly as a young man, you know the work he did to improve the roads in this State. I think it is without absolute parallel, what was done. We had a terrible system of roads and it is only the Americans built some roads when they were out here that we had any roads at all. Worked there with Cliff Bolton, he was a funny old bugger, actually an old arsehole full of bull shit, but not a bad bloke. Worked there for a while and quite enjoyed it. ??????? was getting a lot of publicity at the time. Pat Ells was the rising star and we worked in Pat’s Ministry. He had been the youngest Lord Mayor and all that sort of thing.

I stayed there for about a year and a half, but at that time I was starting to be a fairly good football player. So after about a year there I was playing in Reserve Grade with South Sydney at the time, when the great Clive Churchill was playing with Souths, in one of their great sides, their great great sides. Raiders, Purcills, Churchills, just run through them. Anyway Churchill had a falling out with Souths and he decided to go to Brisbane to play and I was playing Reserve and going pretty well I thought and Clive came and asked me would I go to Brisbane with him. He wanted to make sure he had a few good players with him. That was a pretty big turning point in my life. I just suddenly made a decision. I didn’t tell anyone at the time. I had just been elected to the committee of the South Sydney Football Club, I was about twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. I had been elected to it and I went in the next week, and I didn’t even tell my parents, just walked in and said Clive had asked me to go to Brisbane with him and I just walked in the meeting and suddenly made up my mind there. I said, ‘I am going to resign from the committee.’ They said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I am going to Brisbane with Clive Churchill.’ So I just resigned, resigned from work and took off for Brisbane.

How did you go up there?

JC:       Played the best football I have ever played in my life suppose.

What team were you playing with?

JC:       Norths in Brisbane. They were one of the old pre-War top sides. They hadn’t won the comp for nineteen years when we went up there and we turned it around.

What position did you play?

JC:       I played front row. I played with combined Brisbane, because there wasn’t a Brisbane team at the time. I played with combined Brisbane against New Zealand and got through to the final trials for the Queensland side. Was rather upset that I missed the side, I thought I should have got in it. I think I was reading what they were saying about me in the papers. Of course for years Queensland had been thrashed by New South Wales, but that year, 1959, they beat New South Wales three out of five in the series. I worked for the Brisbane City Council up there, by the way, as a draughtsman which I quite enjoyed. For Land Use Survey in Brisbane.

Anyway back in those days the Kangaroo Team used to go over to England well before competition finished because it took a long time to get there. It might have been the last time I ever went on a boat, I can’t remember exactly what it was, I was twenty-four at the time. Clive went over about four games before competition finished before the semi-finals and they ordered me to coach, which was a terrific lift to me. I was Captain-Coach and fortunate enough to win the competition, so that was a pretty big deal that.

Clive Churchill wasn’t in that, at that time?

JC:       Well Clive was playing, but he was appointed Coach of the Australian side and they had to leave four weeks before the season finished, before even the semi-finals started.

You did well by going up there.

JC:       Yes, I did rather well.

Did they used to pay you at all?

JC:       Oh yes. They didn’t pay me a lot, because they took me up there as an unknown. I think two hundred and fifty pounds they paid me, two hundred an fifty pounds a job and free board. We had a lot of fun up there too. We were wild young bastards. Kerry Vidercofsci used to say, ‘I have spilt more than you have ever drunk.’ He never split more than we drunk. We used train hard and have a lot of fun. Wild kids.

So how long were you playing up there?

JC:       Oh the next year I went up to Cairns. That was a big difference then, because they gave me six hundred and fifty pounds and free board. I worked for the ??????? Electricity Board up there. I think at the time I was the second highest paid player in Queensland. I was actually getting international’s money. I did all right. Not a bad side. I don’t think I played very well up there. I ended up playing in the final and I played for Country and I played against France up there. I had fallen in love at the time and I don’t think I concentrated on football too much.

Did you get married?

JC:       No, I didn’t get married. We broke the engagement off and that is why I came back to Sydney. I was going to stay in Queensland. I had every intention of living in Cairns for the rest of my life, I love Cairns a magnificent place. Then I got an offer from Souths. I had never played first grade with South Sydney and they gave me an offer to come back to Sydney for very good money. So I said, ‘That’s it, off go.’ So I went back. Had three years with Souths. A middle of the road side most of the time. Did all right. Played mostly first grade. I was getting up around about twenty-eight at the time, and I got a marvellous offer from Newcastle to go and play there. So I went up and played my last season in Newcastle and broke my leg in the semi-final. Turned twenty-nine, got married.

In Newcastle?

JC:       No, my wife comes from Sydney. I actually used to travel up there on weekends. I used to play with South Sydney and travel up there on weekends. Actually that is where my family come from, my people. Most probably two of the best seasons I ever played was the one in Brisbane and the one in Newcastle. With dad’s old mates up there in Newcastle.

End Tape 1A: 4489 Words: 1 hour 45 minutes

22 AUGUST 1989: SCU4: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

So what made you become involved with the start of the credit union? Who was it that involved you? Or did you start thinking about it independently?

JC:       I had heard about it independently. I came back from Queensland in 1961 and I started work at the City Council, which by the way I think is the best place I ever worked in my life. Terrific, One class shit job, that was the style of it. I got very involved with the trade union first, because I was pretty keen on that sort of thing.

Which one was that the POA?

JC:       The MEU, the Municipal Employees Union, that was with PSOA Branch. I got to know Dermot Ryan pretty well in those times.

He was involved there?

JC:       When I first come I was a union delegate and Dermot was the Chairman of the white collar branch, for want of a better word.

Who was the Secretary of the union then?

JC:       Reg Trix. Peter McMahon was the Assistant Secretary. I got to know Dermot rather well and apart from that there were the other guys who I still have an enormous association with like Maurie Dailey. I had known Maurie Dailey since I was very young. I had known Tommy Dugger and some of the other fellows because we played junior football with and against one another and that sort of thing. I started here and the Council had a great sporting background, they were into that sort of thing. It was a great place to work it was a place where if you did your work no-one would bother you. So you did everything with enthusiasm and all sorts of things.

Who was Mayor then? Harry Jenson?

JC:       Harry Jenson was the Mayor, that’s right.

Did you get to meet him at all?

JC:       Yes, I got to meet Harry. Dad over the years knew a lot of politicians. While he was never sort of formally involved in politics, he knew a lot of them because he broadcast football for about ten or twelve years on 2SM. He started off with Reg Grundy, the multi-squillionaire these days, broadcasting football, when 2SM was the first radio station to do it. They used to do it uninterrupted, no races. So dad got to be quite well known for over ten years. He used to broadcast the Reserve Grade and used to do the commentary on the First Grade. He was in that for a long time and he got to know a lot of people. When I came back from Queensland we were in the middle of some sort of a mini-depression, I guess, in 1961 when work was incredibly hard to get. When I left Sydney and you were a survey draughtsman you just used to be able to walk into virtually anywhere and pick up a job. I come back and I found out I just couldn’t get a job, there wasn’t any advertised. So I went and worked in a factory for a while which made me make my mind up I would never work in a factory again, once I got out of it. I hated the conditions.

What factory was it?

JC:       ACI, the glass works. It seemed to be like something out of the last century, you know, a miserable lot of wimps.

So what did you do?

JC:       Storeman type thing. I said to myself one day that I wasn’t going to work in a factory even if I had to walk round everywhere and ask for a job. So I walked off the street into the front of the Town Hall and asked if they had any jobs for draughtsmen. Teddy Arnott, a famous old guy, put his glasses on top of his head and he said, ‘Son, as a matter of fact we are going to advertise tomorrow.’ So I put my name down. To make sure, and I suppose in those days if you didn’t know someone in the Council you didn’t get a job in the Council, dad knew some people. I can’t think of the guy’s name he used to be a big funeral director very closely tied up with the Labor Party, he brought me in and introduced me to Harry Jenson one day. I don’t know if Harry had a word to someone or not, but I remember Tommy Graham, one of the guys who interviewed me, saying, ‘You didn’t anyone to ring up anyway, you were going to get the job because you were the best qualified.’ I also remember at that time I was entitled to start on the fifth year of the scale and they asked me one question, ‘We have got people here who have applied to start on the first year of the scale,’ he said, ‘are you prepared to start on the first year of the scale?’ I immediately said, ‘Yes.’ That’s how tight jobs were.

I knew a lot of people here and I got tied up with the union. Ended up Chairman of the white collar section of it when Dermot went on to the Central Executive. That is the time really that Dermot started to talk about credit unions. But I had heard about credit unions before that. I still kept in contact with a lot of the blokes that I used to work with at the Lands Department. Back in those days, it must have been 1959 or something like that, the guys at the Lands Department formed a credit union. The whole principle of it to me sounded to be terrific. You didn’t need to prove you didn’t need the money before you got it. If you had a good name and you needed the money and you would pay it back, then fine. They would look at you that way so long as it was for a fairly reasonable sort of thing. As kids we would all go round biting each other for a couple of bucks because we wanted to go places and do things and chase girls and that all took money. So I thought this was a real good idea and I had talked to a few of the blokes about it. Then Dermot started to come in and talk about it. Dermot was involved with a parish credit union, I think Lidcombe Parish. The lesser part was exactly the same, you used to have these little bins where everybody put in a couple dollars a week and if you needed a couple you would bite it out and he would bite you the next week. Of course the guys working out in the gangs didn’t have it that easy, they weren’t very well paid and they were always broke and needed a few bob here and there. That just didn’t have any access to money and that sort of thing, so the idea really appealed to me.

It was a completely democratic thing. I don’t know so much about democratic because that is misused a hell of a lot, but a thing that people had some input into. But more that it sounded to me like a thing that wasn’t going to sit in judgement on you all the time. It was a fair way. Back in those days Maurie, me and Tom we were all pretty radical in those days. Let’s face it.

Edgar Ross’ influence again, I suppose.

JC:       I suppose it had a fair bit to do with it. The nuisance of the ’50s into the ’60s. The ’60s were the best. I often pity any people who came through the ’60s and enjoy the fun of the ’60s. You were pretty dedicated to this fairer sort of society thing. I suppose as you get older you realise there is no such thing as a fair society. But making it fairer, a fair go for people, and this rejection of the old time authority and the finger up the bum stuff that we didn’t like. The credit union just seemed to fit in to a hell of a lot of that stuff. You would look out for the guys who you knew and were part of the things you worked with. The City Council was very much a one class ship, not like the public service that I knew, it wasn’t anything like that at all, very structured and very sort of a class-structured thing.

Is the City Council still like that?

JC:       The City Council is not anywhere near like it was. I don’t think any society today is anything like what it was in the ’60s. This driving for the better world and the fairness. We are tossing fairness out the window in great lumps these days in this pursuit of economic beauty, I don’t know.

So where do you think you first heard about the idea? Did Dermot talk to you about it? Did Dermot talk to somebody else?

JC:       Dermot was talking to a lot of blokes that he had had a long association with. He thought the idea was to start a credit union and I got involved in the talks and everything. I used to go over to the pub where we used to go, George Adams bar in George Street, and talk about these things. In those days I was very involved in football too which would take me away from basically the mainstream of the thing that was happening there at the time. Then it got around one way and another. They held a meeting in the front of the Town Hall which was incredibly well attended.

Which meeting was that?

JC:       The inaugural meeting.

The real inaugural meeting, or the one which was a membership drive. There were two.

JC:       A sort of membership drive. Well there was a couple of them. The one that I remember the most

Did you have Directors already appointed by that time?

JC:       What happened was they had Directors appointed at the time. I remember I was at the meeting and I was getting very keen on this you see. I thought it was such a damn good idea and everything like this. I went along to the meeting and I was going to get someone to nominate me for this. Suddenly I found out at this big meeting that it was all cut dried. The Directors were there. Dermot announced who the Directors were, he announced who the Supervisory Committee were. I remember after that I said, ‘I think you are a bit of a bastard about that,’ I said, ‘I was pretty keen to get involved in that.’ I said, ‘It wasn’t very bloody democratic the way you did it.’ He said, ‘Why, are you interested in being involved?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You are just appointed to the Supervisory Committee.’ So I was one of the original Supervisory Committee. Another bloke, Barry Homes, said the same thing. He was a pretty bright young guy keen on working in the credit union and he put the same thing on Dermot. He said, ‘I am very interested in that and I work out there and all these blokes wouldn’t give it to me.’ He said, ‘You are on the Supervisory Committee too.’

So much for democracy. This is Dermot’s guided democracy is it?

JC:       Dermot was sensational with guided democracy. Incredible. People were starting to hide. He was an incredibly kind man in so many ways, Dermot. Very tough bastard and a ferocious arguer.

Did you ever get into any fights with Dermot?

JC:       I yes I got in to some super ones with Dermot, yes.

Actual physical fights?

JC:       No, we never actually came to blows, but it came close a few times.

I have heard about a few you know.

JC:       I know about a few. Some good ones. Dermot wasn’t bad at a bit of creative accounting if it served him well. Our first auditor was a young guy at the time, Frank Richards. He is one of the heads of the accounting firm, Kendalls, he is one of the principals of that now. Frank as we called him at the time, he is now John F Richards, a great fellow, a guy into sport and all that sort of thing. He was a pretty young bloke like the rest of us and he was a very good footballer himself, played a couple of games First Grade with Wests. He lived behind Maurie O’Brien. Maurice O’Brien was one of our first Chairman, a guy who played football in the juniors with us. Amazing all this football, Irish, Catholic stuff just keeps coming through it all the way. Anyway Frank had just finished accountancy school and had topped the State in some sort of subject and Dermot said, ‘We need an auditor, do you want to be the auditor?’ So in jumps Frank. Little did he know the trail it would lead him on. Anyway after about one or two years Dermot wanted to do something. Of course we didn’t know much about bookkeeping or accounts or anything at the time. As it worked out later you could see it coming down the track that it looked like we were going to make a minor loss. That was because they had rebated money back instead of holding it for reserves. So what Dermot wanted to do, he wanted to bring the year forward for two weeks and back dated. Well of course Frank was highly indignant about that. He said, ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, ‘it is dishonest.’ Of course Dermot dismissed all that sort of thing. He said, and what was his favourite saying, ‘If it is morally wrong it can’t be legally right and if it is morally right it is has got to be legally right,’ something like that. So anyway they get into an argument because Frank is backing it up, he’s not going to have any part of this it is shifty. Frank is very stern about this sort of thing. So I think we had had a fair few drinks and we go over to the Catholic Club and I think we finished up at City Tatts, somehow we got in there. We are all pretty drunk, or well on the way, and the argument is still on. Anyway half down ?????? Dermot belts Frank right in the ??? Well Frank turns round and Frank can fight and so can Dermot. So they were into it up in George Street, belting each other on the footpath. We were telling them to break it up they were mad. So we break it all up and they are still have a go at one another and we are keeping them apart. ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘You bloody accountants, you wouldn’t know what you were doing. Bloody living by the book, you’re not giving people a fair go,’ and all this sort of thing. So it goes on. We got down to the Town Hall ground, we had a car parked there I think. We are walking through there and it is in the dark part and Dermot and Frank got close to one another and it was on again. They were in to it, bang, bang bang. So we didn’t realise it was happening and we looked round and saw it happen and the next thing we see the coppers pull up. A copper jumps out of a car. Roy Tully was there, but I don’t think Roy was even on the Board at the time but he happened to be with us, Roy grabs hold of the copper and says, ‘It’s all right. It’s all right, they are friends.’ The copper said, ‘I would hate to see what they would do to one another if they weren’t. Just get them out of here.’ So we got hold of them and split them up. Anyway it worked out, Dermot got his way. He and Maurie have had a few good goes at one another. They have belted one another a couple of times. I got very close to it once.

Dermot didn’t like to be questioned very closely on things he thought he was doing right, or what he was entitled to do. Things like that.

So how did you go on the Supervisory Committee then?

JC:       I was on the Supervisory Committee before all this happened. I was on the Supervisory Committee for a year and did nothing.

Oh I see. You didn’t have cause to pull him up at all?

JC:       No, not in that sense. You always felt that you were part of the one thing and you had to support one another. Once the thing was resolved one way or another, everyone came together and supported one another on what happened. As a matter of fact, I think we were inclined to agree with Dermot each time.

Who else was on the Supervisory Committee with you at that time?

JC:       If you hadn’t of asked me, I would have been able to tell you straight off. Barry Homes. It will come to be later on.

Did you have many arguments did you?

JC:       Not arguments as such on the Supervisory Committee because mostly I don’t think we knew what we were doing. We were doing internal audit and you would check the signatures. But you were never quite sure what you were doing. I think we learned that a bit later. No we would have pretty heavy arguments say over the pub or in a meeting. I used to argue with Dermot a bit. He was a bit dictatorial on things and I would argue like mad with him. I always loved the guy, he was mad. I always remember one time, the first time he was sent over as a delegate to World Council. None of us were very well paid at the time and somehow he got around us that he wanted some extra money. He realised that there wasn’t much room for any expenses on the thing but he wanted some extra money. He wouldn’t tell us why he wanted, and he get asking us to give it to him. We kept on saying, ‘Tell us what you want it for?’ He said, ‘Well it is for expenses.’ Obviously he didn’t have the money and they weren’t paying him any expenses. Like you can’t go to those joints and not eat. Of course at the time I think we were all pristine pure and anti-corruption and all of this sort of thing. We used to think all of them were getting paid two shillings and sixpence and where on a good deal, but of course they weren’t you realised later. I remember the argument with him at the time. He was in his office.

Did he get it?

JC:       Of course he got it. I think at the time I went down to his office and I said, ‘Look you will get the bloody money, but you have to tell us what you want the money for?’ He said, ‘None of your bloody business.’ I said, ‘Well you can go and get stuffed, you are not getting the money.’ He said, ‘I will get the money.’ So it ended up with us roaring and shouting at one another. Later on you realised that he needed it.

He was very hard to argue with in a meeting. He would lay back and he was one of the old style tough guy. He was the Chairman and if you wanted to disagree he would say, ‘Well tip me out of the chair. If you can tip me out of the chair then you can disagree with me. If you can’t tip me out of the chair then you have got no right to disagree with me.’ He was an incredible enthusiast and a genius in his own right.

Well in the first days, you didn’t get appointed Director straight away, on the Supervisory Committee.

JC:       No, it was two years later I got appointed a Director.

Do you remember in the meeting when everything had already been decided and they got an inaugural meeting and they didn’t take a vote, they didn’t do anything. All they did was to invite everybody to join? Do you remember that one at the Town Hall? Whose idea was that?

JC:       Dermot’s. He had told everyone they were in it. He just elected every one. People would say, ‘What? Elected? You are kidding?’ I think it was the best thing that ever happened to this credit union. Because people had a way of doing things in those days. They would follow the guys with the ideas to a certain degree, but when it came round to electing people they suddenly turned conservative. They used to elect all these conservative pricks who wouldn’t know had to run the proverbial country out house. People tended to do that and I think Dermot recognised that, if he had let them have an election they would elect all the conservative staid accountant type people into the positions which meant it wouldn’t go anywhere. They wouldn’t do the things the credit union was supposed to do. I am sure he knew that so he made sure that wouldn’t happen. He got an awful lot of young guys, that wouldn’t have even been considered. The City Council was a marvellous place to work, it was a fun joint. You would do things like go out all night and come back to work the next day and work the next day. It was a bit frowned on by a lot of the older guys, even though they did it themselves when they were kids. As you get older you say, ‘Look at those young bastards, that is exactly what I used to do.’ But I am sure that is what he had in mind. He had people he wanted and he had to make sure that it couldn’t be bound by conservatism or anything like that. He was the only one that had the front to do it.

So can you describe any outstanding meetings that you attended in the early days, at all? Ones that you can really remember? A good yarn, shall we say.

JC:       I most remember it as on the whole it was exciting. That is all we used to talk about, this credit union. Everyone used to tell us how difficult money was to handle and everything like that and we would say it was a lot of bull shit, they had been telling us lies. But of course we found out later they weren’t.

So when you started, the credit union got started, there it is in Dermot’s office. Were you involved in it every night trying to balance the books?

JC:       We all were. Everyone was involved. When I was playing football in Newcastle they gave me leave of absence for the football season. But I still used to go down of a lunch time and help out on the counter and all that sort of thing. They gave me leave of absence for six months of something like that. I came back into it after that. You would all get down in Dermot’s office and Rachel North was cooking steak and all sorts of things, because you would work until all sorts of hours. Somebody would give you a book and say, ‘You will be adding on interest. Do that.’ So you just did it. You didn’t know if you were doing it right or not. But it was more the principle of what you were all about rather than anything else.

Dermot wasn’t very good with figures, so I have heard said.

JC:       He is very cunning with figures, Dermot.

What about balancing the books? Maurie said that he would only give him ‘Z’.

JC:       Dermot was a lot more cunning than he ever let on. Dermot made mistakes because he wanted to make mistakes very often. He wasn’t a great one for a great deal of detail, Dermot. Dermot hated detail, ‘That’s close enough. It’s a hundred bucks out, so what.’

The grand vision was his thing was it?

JC:       That was Dermot. Dermot was wrong when he wanted to be wrong a lot of times. It always seemed to be Dermot’s way when he did whatever was wrong.

Do you remember any of the others he used to clash with? Did he clash with Jack Bannister or any of the others?

JC:       Well he would argue with Jack a bit. Dermot used to say ‘He’s a pompous bastard.’ Well Jack was very much an airforce officer in his day, but he was full of kindness Jack. But he had this pompous way he would talk to Dermot which used to give him the shits. They were similar in a lot of ways, Jack and Dermot. Dermot used to horrify Jack at times. He would say, ‘They wouldn’t do that in the officers’ mess.’

What was all this about? When they used to have meetings, what was the catering like in the first instance?

JC:       The catering. There was plenty of it. It was greasy-thumb we used to call it. Somewhere Dermot had got hold of a sort of a little oven type thing. He probably got it out of the stores. We had some deal going with some butcher somewhere and he would turn up with a great pile of steak. Steak would be cooking and fresh bread and butter everywhere. Ripping into the food. You would work like mad and then you would charge over to the pub to get as many down your throat as you could before the beer went off.

That was after the six o’clock swill out. You weren’t on the Loans Committee were you?

JC:       Oh every one was on the Loans Committee. Gee we heard some incredible stories.

Well come on, let’s hear some of these incredible stories.

JC:       Some of the things they could think up. I remember one time one bloke who used to play in the centre with New Town, he came in with a story one time. He had a bit of a bad name because he wouldn’t pay back a bit here and there. But he told me such a good story about his girlfriend being pregnant and his car being repossessed and the bookmaker was going to get him and everything like that. He was in tears himself and he had us nearly all in tears and got the sum and never paid us a zack back. Usually you can pick those people, but you couldn’t pick this one. Sensational.

We ran it very strongly towards the kindness attitude and the fair go. We weren’t very often let down, quite frankly. It was a pretty good experience. You tend to hear a lot of the same stories over and over again. Blokes would come in and one time one bloke came in and saying he was doing it so tough, he owed this and that. He owed money all over the place and we said, ‘Well after you have worked all this out, you must be doing it pretty tough for a feed?’ He said, ‘We get by. A packet of frankfurts and some peas and a bit of spuds don’t cost much.’ We said, ‘How much are you behind in your payments?’ He said, ‘Oh I am not behind in any payments.’ That just staggered us. Well there was this guy so what could we do for him. Of course he was a fellow that never looked back.

End Tape 1B: 4638 Words: 1 hour 45 minutes.

22 AUGUST 1989: SCU5: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

You were about to tell me a story, when the tape finished, about a fellow who wanted to buy a taxi and you hadn’t previously done any commercial loans of any description.

JC:       We hadn’t done any of that at all. The guy came in and he wanted to buy a taxi and that was all very new to us. No-one quite knew how to handle it but Dermot Ryan was very much in favour, ‘Well give the guy a chance. This is something where he can make a better life for himself.’ So that caused a fair bit of argument and sole searching of just what were we in the business for and everything like that. After a lot of argument with a fair few against it and a fair few for and I think Dermot again got his way, he said, ‘Well let’s go in this direction.’ That was the first time we did something like that. He was rather successful with it as a matter of fact and did quite well with that one. That sort of broke new ground for us, that was something that we really didn’t think of. I don’t think we had a great idea what the credit union was about rather than it was to put stuff in people’s homes and make stuff easier for them, where they could get things and not be looked down on. They weren’t being ripped off like they were with hire purchase. Everyone thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread when it came in, but no-one in those days ever really knew much about interest rates and how they worked. Of course the old hire purchase, when you worked it out, made a lot of stuff available buy God you paid a lot for the stuff. Of course with the credit union one of the big things we had was that the person had cash, and he had the bargaining power of cash.

Had they at that time loaned any money for houses? Any housing loans at that time?

JC:       No, none at all. We actually couldn’t lend much. I think we had a $2,000 limit in the very early days. Obviously we didn’t have an enormous amount of money to lend. It was structured a little differently than the way it is now. We didn’t actually take money on investment. In those days we felt very strongly that the idea was one interest for everything that we charged and there was one interest rate we gave for stuff deposited. It took a fair while for maybe the thinking to work around that things weren’t as simple as that. Trying to keep the idea of money much simpler than it was confused people enormously. These days people have been educated so much in the use of money and I think it is one of the great things we ever did, really, educate people in the use of money and we really did. In those days no-one was prepared to educate you and people were confused about what interest rates were. Banks used to lend money at flat interest rates and we lent it at true, or reducing, and of course it made our interest rate look twice as much as the banks were charging so we had to explain that. These days people just know it straight away, because the flat rate is illegal and so it should be because it is the greatest rort that ever went around the track. To add up all the interest put together and then chop it in little bits. It meant you couldn’t pay up early because if you paid up early you paid an enormous penalty.

I think you pay a month’s penalty now.

JC:       They lay that on. That is an hangover of the old flat interest rate style of thing. You could actually pay off a loan at flat interest and still find you owed more than you originally borrowed. Of course with reducing interest you can never owe more than you actually borrowed but under the flat interest rate you could.

Do you think that the credit unions have lost their principles in the way they charge interest rates now?

JC:       No, I don’t think so at all. We set out with great ideas, great hopes. Funnily enough to mention this, very much in the early days, we achieved to a great degree the many things that we looked out for, that we tried to do. That was more truth in lending, let’s put it that way. Education of people in what money was about, how it works, what you pay, what you get, things like that. I think today there are very few people who don’t know something about it, as a matter of fact to the least educated, in that sense, probably knows more today than the most educated in those days with regard to interest rates, etc. As far as principles are concerned, as I said earlier ideology doesn’t grab me very much because I think it is very constrictive it ties you into something and you tend to live for the sake of that thing, that ideology, and it doesn’t advance. The ideology of say Marxism, the Bible, all those sorts of things, stays where it was and you don’t extend to it and change. Well Marxism is a sort of religion anyway.

Well there is more to it than that. The view of history for instance, that the point of studying history is to change it, I will go along with that one.

JC:       But if you get tied into a ideology that says you can’t move?

A dogma.

JC:       Yes, that’s a dogma, better, that says you can’t move. I think we have moved to what we want to see done, people having access to credit, let’s put it that way. Having access to credit at reasonable rates. I only ever wrote one speech, and I have got a copy of it, because I always thought I did better by saying what I felt at the time. In this one I said, I remember pretty clearly, ‘We have never said that we would charge the lowest rate of interest. We have never said that we would pay the highest rate of interest. What we have always said that we will charge a fair interest and pay a fair interest, given the economic times.’ Now there is not much we can do, or any single entity or any great bank, if you like, on its own, remember that, there is not much can be done to vary what market forces, and I hate that term but we will use it, say is going to happen. You can’t do much about it singly, but you can attempt to be fair within what happens and I think we have still retained that fairness. We always were pragmatic anyway, or we wouldn’t have built this organisation if we hadn’t of been. We have reached the point where to many of us we are seeing what we set out to do, happening.

You’ve made it happen.

JC:       We’ve made it happen. Whether interest rates are high or low is just a matter of whatever. Let’s face it back in the days when we started, when we had regulation, they fixed those interest rates which varied up and down. In those days I guess 8 per cent at one time was seen to be an enormous amount of money to get on an investment, but now it is laughable.

Now what I have got to ask you is, what are you going to make happen next?

JC:       Ah, now that is a real good question. As a matter of fact that is a bloody super question because to us as we came in as young men we clearly saw what the problems were and clearly saw where we wanted to go. Now in the doing of that we have basically achieved what we set out to do, that is to make or see the monetary system at the level we work at become fairer. Now in my opinion it has been, it has become vastly fairer. While people go crook about the unfairness of the day, the monetary system is always going to be unfair let’s face it, but it is fairer than it was. So in that sense we have done very well, extremely well. But for so many of us we have really achieved and maybe gone past our goals. Maybe we are fronting up to the ????? principle. Maybe we are fronting up to the situation, and it worries me to a great degree, where are those fired up young men that we were twenty-five years ago, I am not seeing many of them now. What I think may be happening, and maybe it is inevitable it is pretty hard to say though you have got to keep battling against it to keep this fairness within the system. It is inevitable that something that is started and had guys like the Ryans and the Millers and all them, tough hard men, battle hard, great starters of things. Dermot particularly was a great starter of things and I don’t know if Dermot would feel comfortable working within the environment we have got now. He was a starter not in the sense of an administrator. A genius starter absolutely. But maybe I am digressing a little.

No, I am interested because in actual fact I see looking at what you people have done, and you have been telling me about it and I can see it, I am querying now have you got to the point where you are spending too much of the energy battling the banks for the people that you have already helped up into a better position. You haven’t gone back down in to the too hard basket, which you went to in these credit unions before and said now what are we going to do with this mob that are down the bottom there that are still not in the reach of the credit unions, of any sources of finance. Or any sources of employment in some cases, or even accommodation in some cases.

JC:       Quite frankly I brought this up with a fellow called Al Alexander, who was at one time the Secretary of the World Council of Credit Unions. He gave me a fairly good answer on that, I thought. One time I was in Maine in the USA, that was where Al came from. He said, ‘Come over and have a look at what we are doing in our State in smaller type credit unions, which we were at the time. Now for the State of Maine their credit union is fifty million, they are a big credit union. We went past a sort of a finance company and I made the comment, ‘The no good bastards, they are ripping people off and everything like that. They shouldn’t be allowed to exist.’ He said, ‘Wait a minute, you are wrong.’ I said, ‘Why am I wrong?’ He said, ‘Because, just because we are using credit unions and we have a credit union, we came up with a great idea, don’t ever get it into your head we are able to service everyone. We can’t. We can’t because we can’t give money away. We can’t because to bring these people into our system we would have to charge everyone so much higher because we know that people at that level just can’t pay you back. There is just no way.’ He said, ‘Don’t think, whatever you think of it, that credit unions will be able to service that area. That’s the area where government should be working.’ I agree with him.

Couldn’t a co-operative movement work in that direction?

JC:       The co-operative movement

Because governments won’t get into it either.

JC:       Well that becomes the point, that becomes the whole point. There are people within our community because of the level that the community lives at, the general level. Now the general level it totally different in say a Fijian village, or a South American back-water, the total level is quite different. But in the general level that we have, the people who have dropped off the end of that level the other way we can’t do a great deal for them without giving them something. Now credit unions can’t give things, because if it gives money away to people it ceases to exist, it destroys itself. It works on the point of your lending to gain a profit to run this thing. I remember George Prescott, who used to be with the Waterside Workers for many years, George was, I think, President of the Communist Party of Australia at one stage, I remember George saying something once. He said, ‘You people go on with a lot of bull shit at times, Calum,’ that’s George’s son. George said at one time, we were carrying on with some high flown ideas about not making profits and everything. I remember George getting up at a meeting and he said, ‘I know what you are going on about.’ He said, ‘What’s wrong with making a profit? If you don’t make a profit you make a loss and if you make a loss you’ve lost everything.’ That was pretty bloody good.

Can I take you back. You were involved with the MEU, the Municipal Employees’ Union for a while, weren’t you. Exactly what started you off in that. I know you were a member of the union but what got you into it?

JC:       Oh I guess I always had a sort of a feel for these sort of things. I was definitely rebellious, I suppose, in a lot of ways. Things about the system that I didn’t like. I have had a long-standing dislike of the quasi class systems that existed and things like that. I have got a feeling about the rights of people and that people should get their fair go. I think within fairness to I accept that society must be structured in the way that some will lead, some will follow, some will work their guts out and some will get nothing, that usually happens. But I think the idea of fairness is just something that was built into me from the time I was a kid I think. Dad was always into administration of things rather than joining. I guess I felt that the fair go of things and I was always pretty well outspoken, often at the wrong times, about things.

So you became a delegate did you?

JC:       Yes, I became a delegate.

Where, and when?

JC:       I was a delegate from the Draughtsmen and Technical Officers to the MEU, the PUSA, Public Utilities Officers’ Association. I was on that for a while. I got to know Peter McMahon rather well. Peter of course was one of the very bright young men coming through at the time. I had an association with the people that I knew and of course the City Council wasn’t just a place you work at, it was also a social organisation. I felt that I might be able to do something, put forward my ideas. I was quite prepared to say anything I felt at the time. I have got a bit smarter these days, but I have still got a big mouth sometimes. So that was basically what it was about, the fair go principle sort of thing.

So where were you delegate first?

JC:       To the MEU?

In Sydney from the Town Hall?

JC:       Yes, from the Town Hall.

You became involved in the Labor Party before that, did you?

JC:       No I didn’t. I was always a person who was very much a Labor type of thinker, if I had to think anyway. I thought they were always on the side of fairness. Dad was a great admirer of say Curtin and Chifley, etc. From the family basis and sort of knew we were all dirty on Bob Menzies of course. But with the politics in that era we were dirty on the Prime Minister anyway.

The Labor Party came later. I got involved with the MEU. I progressed through and was a delegate to the various conferences of the MEU. One meeting had a lot to say about the split up of a Council they had appointed, the split up of the original Council. Then Dermot, he was the Chairman of the white collar workers area, Dermot went on to be on the Executive of the MEU, the State Executive and left the position open. So I was elected by my peers as the Chairman of that Town Hall section which had the responsibility in those days, which was pretty heavy, of negotiation really for awards, award payments. These were negotiated with Secretary of the Branch who at one time was Joe Carl, who is now the General Secretary of the MEU. At the time I started the negotiations I think I did one of the last negotiations when Joe was the Secretary of the PSOA Branch. Later on Brian Ratcliffe, who is now a member of this Board, a Director of this credit union, he became the Secretary of the PSOA Branch. So I had several negotiations with Brian. Pretty successful negotiations actually, done on the basis that I was always prepared to barter, compromise. I never believed that the hard line stuff ever got anyone too far anyway. But learning the times you had to be hard and the times when you said it was far enough and this is where we stop. Other times negotiating things. I found it very interesting, to say the least.

Is there any way that the work for the union helped you with the credit union?

JC:       Oh yes, I think in progression of anything, anything you do, has some affect on you. By the way, as a matter of interest, that at the time Brian and I were negotiating awards and we were successful it might have been helped by the fact that a fellow called Paul Keating was our Research Officer. He was bright and his research was spot on. It helped us a hell of a lot.

No that was a progression in to that and I quite enjoyed it very much, the union days. But then you get involved in other things such as a credit union and stuff like that. I sort of had to make my mind up at one stage. At one stage it was being touted as a possibility that when Dermot left the Central Executive of the union, there was one group that thought I might have got the job as Vice-President on the Executive, but others didn’t. I remember the time and I was torn between two things at that time, really. I loved the ideas and things of the credit union and was also attracted by the established trade union movement. I remember at one time I said to Peter McMahon, I had a great deal of time for his judgement, I said, ‘Peter, do you think I would be Vice-President of the union within the next few years?’ He said, ‘Quite frankly, no, you haven’t go the numbers.’ I said, ‘Right. Suits me. I know which way I want to go and I can make a fairly good contribution.’ So I resigned from my position in the union, well it was in good hands let’s face it. One goes another one is there to take your place, it is a continuing thing. I put all my concentration then, because I had finished playing football by this time, went into the credit union movement. The principles attracted me in very much the same way as the trade union movement. The fairness, I don’t like using terms like the common man or the ordinary man or anything like that, but fairness for Australians generally. I suppose that is the way I would rather look at it, but it is only words.

Well what about the Labor Party? When did you become involved with the Labor Party?

JC:       I can’t remember the actual years.

It was later?

JC:       Oh it would be around about sometime in 1965, 1966, something like that, I can’t quite remember. No, it was when I was involved with the union that’s right. Because I couldn’t be a delegate to State Council unless I was a member of the Party. I might have always been a supporter but I hadn’t formally done much about it. So I went and joined the Eastlakes Branch and was quickly elected on to the Elected Council and the State Elected Council. I was pretty disappointed with the Labor Party branch politics. It is an area where there were some pretty bright guys. Laurie Brererton was our local member, came through that area as a very young man. Joe Carl’s son, I can’t think of his name, but old Joe Carl, the Premier’s son, I think I got to meet him. I became quite friendly with him and quite liked him. I enjoyed working in one of his campaigns because I liked the man personally. I was a bit disillusioned with the branch stuff. I thought there was a bit too much hobby-horsing and stuff like that. I thought that at branch level sometimes the Labor Party tends to loose sight of what it is all about. It rather wants to invent new radical ideas than concentrate on the idea of a fair go for all sort of thing. I think that some of the people at branch level get awful airy-fairy, wander off in all sorts of weird and wonderful things which didn’t interest me particularly, because I thought they were non-productive.

So you didn’t really get involved in the Labor Party in the way Dermot did. Dermot used his political contacts and his union contacts to further the credit union movement generally, didn’t he?

JC:       Very much so.

Have you got any examples of this?

JC:       Well he had a long-standing friendship with Tom Uren. A long-standing friendship with Peter Cox, from his area, around Lidcombe way. He also knew Barnie French very well, Barnie was a good friend of his. Gee I could run through a heap that Dermot knew. But because of the nature of the man, he was a maker of things rather than a runner of things, he had probably one of the shrewdest and toughest political minds that I ever came in contact with. As a matter of fact until I spent time with Dermot I really didn’t believe things were done that way. But he was tough and he was hard. Incredible charm when he wanted to use it. He was very disarming when he was negotiating with politicians. I remember one time when the Libs were in, no it wasn’t the Libs at the time. We had seen Frank Crean, another guy who impressed me very much I liked him very much a man of enormous principle, we had to see the present Governor-General Bill Haydon. We were negotiating various things. To give you an idea of the things Dermot would do, we were negotiating to get the taxation exemption for credit unions, which was generally world wide because of the co-operative bit. Frank Crean was very, very sympathetic to the whole idea of it and he was on side. Bill Haydon wasn’t and he took a fair bit of convincing. So one day Bill Haydon used to pull in his top public servants and he pulled a fair bit of whack at that time in the Cabinet, this was after Gough got into power. Dermot was sat down there and Dermot was dressed rather neatly for Dermot that day, he had his tie almost done up and his hair combed. Just before we went in to do that interview, would you believe what the bugger did, he pulled his tie down and ruffled his hair up so it looked all undone. Of course to the senior public service, Bill Haydon, they though they had a nice dope here. But he found himself agreeing to things before he realised Dermot wasn’t a dope. Dermot had him. You could see the look on his face, ‘You’ve got me.’ He tried to talk down to Dermot and suddenly he woke up, he wasn’t dealing with a dope at all. That is the sort of thing he used to do.

End Tape 2A: 4125 Words: 1 hour 40 minutes.

22 AUGUST 1989: SCU5: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

You said a little while ago that you didn’t believe that things were done this way. Were you thinking of this occasion or were you thinking of another occasion?

JC:       Generally Dermot was a pretty tough guy. I realise that negotiation wasn’t just sitting down talking to people, a hell of a lot had to be done in the meantime. You had to get your people on side and you had lobby people. You had to move around and change your story a little bit to suit the occasion. Really look to get numbers if you could before you negotiated. As young guys I don’t expect you really think about it all that much in the political area until you start to get into it. Running a meeting, chairing a meeting, I think probably taught me in simple terms how to do it. It is pretty hard to do. You can go to a million meetings and until you are in the chair you don’t realise that you are not taking much notice of procedure, particularly as a young fellow. Then you very well realise then that you have got to know procedure, you’ve got to know the way the parliamentary system, parliamentary in inverted commas, works so you can control meetings. The object is to get good decisions. I guess I went on a degree after that, after Dermot taught me a lot, I started to read a lot about it. I suppose I did learn an awesome amount about it then and now I can do things by instinct because I know the rules and I can just spout them off the top of my head. If you ask me to sit down and write them down I couldn’t, but if some situation comes up then you learn to operate within in, how things works and how procedure works.

You weren’t involved with the Chapter much, were you?

JC:       No. I use to go to the Chapter meetings and such. Quite frankly I thought a lot of the early Chapter meetings were a bit like some aspects of branches of the Labor Party. They had all sorts of theories that weren’t taking you anywhere. I thought you had to stay with the main line. Really Owen Jones in the early days of this credit union did an enormous amount of work, Owen. Particularly in the early days he was very involved in those Chapter things. They were very important, I think, socially to get the people together and the credit union movement off the ground.

You became involved with the New South Wales League there fairly early on in your career.

JC:       I think I was pretty young. I can’t remember the actual dates, it was a fair while back.

So did Dermot get you into that?

JC:       Well because this credit union took a view a bit different to the general credit union idea was at the time, which was bound up in sort of the old co-operative dogma, if you like, much better than ideology. The meanings of words change over the years and what we call ideology now you correctly point out is really dogma, but English meanings change. But back in the early days we sort of regarded them as, what would you call them, do-gooders, members of the Holy Name Society, all that sort of thing. This of course excepts Stan Arneil, with the exception of Stan Arneil. They had the idea that this was some beautiful thing that shouldn’t be too necessarily commercial or anything in its way. It was based on kindness and money came second. Well you can’t have kindness unless you can pay for it. We took, led by Dermot and agreed by all the Board, if we hadn’t have had the Board behind us or some members of the group I don’t think we would have gone the way, taken the track we did. We were all very convinced that if this thing was going to be strong, it had to have a very strong association, because anyone standing aloneI think the banks disliked and the finance companies disliked us but I don’t think they looked on as any real threat or that we would go anywhere. They seemed to think that the credit union was some sort of bumbling team of do-gooders, which I frankly think they were until the early ’60s, until the middle ’60s say. They wouldn’t go anywhere because they didn’t have that drive or meanness, or toughness, or whatever it was to make their way in a tough world. I think there was a tendency to pat them on the head, they didn’t need that end of the business anyway. Then very quickly, in a very short time the whole profile of the ideas of the people who were coming through the credit union movement at the time, that was the time of the explosion of credit unions. It had a lot to do with groups of people, Stan Arneil for one.

Stan Arneil in the early days was the great flag waver, the banner bearer, one of the best publicists I have ever had anything to do with in my life. Stan was an incredible rebel in his own right. He was a sort of rebel within a system, it is hard to point out just what. But Stan had an enormous belief in the rights of the ordinary man and impressed me, and all of us, this Board, very much. I think Stan may have seen at that time that people on this Board would have been a very good medium to use, because they were generally a bit different to the way Boards were structured. The credit union, while the idea was great and everything, they tended to turn conservative when they elected their Board. So they wouldn’t have the rough, tough guys who got out and over the pub and got drunk and did raucous bloody terrible things that you should have got arrested for, and all of that sort of thing.

I don’t think Stan very much approved of that, either?

JC:       Stan was a pretty lively fellow in his youth, don’t worry, when he was younger. I can tell you a few good stories about Stan.

Well carry on.

JC:       Well, lots of fun. We used to love getting full of drink together. We used to sing these horrible songs there, and it is just a song that sits in your head from the time you were a kid. You see the little kids in kindergarten doing these songs for Eisteddfod type things. A lovely little song the kids used to sing was, ‘When it is June neath the summer moon, ???????? to grow moon beams, such a scene there has never been as it is around the fairy queen.’ So I got in my head one day this would sound funny if I stood up on the stage and roared it out at the top of my voice. So I did and it brought the house down. So Stanley quickly jumped on it, and we used to do it as a duet very often around the place, particularly when Stan would be full of whisky and I’d be full of beer. At the end of the night we would sing this mad song. No Stan was a guy who enjoyed fun, enjoyed a good time. A deeply religious man, but he brought a sort of a joy to his religion. I was never into religion all that much. But Stanley certainly had a big influence on the way we went, I would say, very much so. I remember another story about Stan. Stan being the great publicist that he was, it was the first time I ever heard the story someone had told him about a village in Africa where there was a credit union. He met the little guy piggy-backing his brother along the road way, a kind little guy piggy-backing his brother, he was a cripple of some kind. Someone said to him, ‘What are you doing, isn’t he heavy?’ He said, ‘No he’s not heavy, he’s my brother.’ Well Stan told it with such feeling and incredible aplomb as only Stanley could. It was before an AFCUL meeting, but he told it somewhere else at some sort of promotional meeting I think we had with credit unions. Stan was a very emotional man, no risk. Anyway Stanley told the story and R J Hill he cried on cue at the end of it. We were all in tears. This absolutely beautiful story that Stan had told. So anyway we went up to Queensland, one of the very early AFCUL, Australian Federation meetings, was held up there. Some States were on side and some weren’t and everything like that. So Stan was getting the story across, as only Stan could. He puts on a magnificent speech and of course he finishes with story about, ‘He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.’ Of course there was a group of us who had heard it before. Stan cried on cue and we all started to laugh. They all thought we were philistines. ‘Look at those low mongrels up there, all full of drink, laughing and Stan crying.’ We upset a lot of people, rough tough louts, you know.

We were rough and tough. We were louts. We did drink too much. But we all had this idea of this fair go for people and we bolted right through the meetings of the New South Wales Association. We became ruthless in our lobbying to get rid of the people who weren’t prepared to be tough and hard. As the new wave of credit unions, which were mostly industrial credit unions, started to come about we found that there were a lot more guys like us coming into it. I think we helped them to be that way. Much tougher, much harder. Make the credit unions strong. Apart from our own credit union being strong, because we were never little in terms of those days. See we had a two thousand membership which was regarded as being a pretty big credit union back in the early ’60s. Now it would be regarded as a small credit union. But in those days we were bigger and we had a thing that worked well because we looked on it this way, like to get all the rules and make the thing work. We tried to introduce that into the Association and we were to a great degree very, very successful. We used to enjoy the battle, treat it with a great deal of glee. If you think about the old days of the Association meetings there used to be blood on the floor.

Do you remember the split down the middle when Stan was on the other side?

JC:       Well we had a lot to do with the split. The Australian credit union movement really had its proper base in New South Wales. When these new credit unions, and we were one of the leaders of them, Transport Credit Union was another one where Ken Miller came from. Some pretty rough, tough guys came out of it and we wanted to change a lot of things. Then the American movement started to take a great deal of interest in the Australian movement at the time. Of course the American movement, with all its faults, I still have a great admiration for. They were an odd sort of movement and went in a hundred different directions at once, but they built something that was pretty good. Back in the old days of the credit unions there was a great split in the American movement between a fellow called Roy Bergengren and the insurance society that was set up by the Credit Union National Association of America, because they were having a great deal of problem getting insurance and bond insurance. They set up and became a very big, and very well run too by the way, very big, very good insurance company. They the tail began to wag the dog in America.

The insurance company itself was pouring a great deal of money into the development of credit unions in various other parts of the world. They started to put money into Australia. They set up the first what you could call proper seminars and everything at Newport. Some of us learnt a great deal about the wider aspects of credit unions. Of course Stan was very much on side with these people. So were we all at the start. They did put a fair bit of money and effort in and sent people out to help us and everything like that. Then we got into a great insurance battle in that we believed that we went into the idea of insuring with CUNA Mutual, but it was based on the idea that we wanted an Australian part of it. All properly done in Australia so that we would be autonomous. Very nationalistic and I don’t see much wrong with that, quite frankly. They had come in and we were very much on side with them, and of course they saw the man who may have been seen as the best-known figure in the Australian movement as Stan Arneil, and he was. The great publicist, the evangelist, if you like, who was pushing the credit union movement. They employed Stan as their person out here. Some of the issue of their development money of course, naturally would come through Stan. Then we found out that, in our opinion, and I think it was right, that they weren’t setting up as a separate Australian unit for insurance with a separate Australian pool. They were actually doing it by their books in America, which we believed was outside the way of doing things. Of course they gained a great deal of influence in America because they had the development running. They were the thing could make the money to do it. That is what I mean, profit can never be a dirty word. If you are going to be kind and do something, you have got to have the money to do it. If you haven’t got money you can’t do it. A lot of it was premised on never making a profit, which is one of the things which always killed the co-operative movement, in my opinion but that is another story.

What, not keeping a proper reserve?

JC:       No. Constantly paying out dividends. Not building a reserve. Not building their strength. Not building the enormous economic muscle you have got to have if you are going to live in this world today. If you haven’t got it, forget it. You can have all the best intentions in the world. Or you can do it the way they do in the communist countries, control it through the power situation, but that is an extension. It is not here and I would never like to see it here. Or you control it through the money and not through the political system. Now if you  haven’t got the money you can’t do anything, you are dead, you are finished. You can have all the best intentions in the world, but if you haven’t got it, if you haven’t made that money yourself out of your own organisation, and you have got to rely on charity you are rat shit again. Because you are nothing, you haven’t done the thing yourself, you haven’t done the hard bit. That is what it is all about.

Anyway this battle went on and it came on the floor of the Association meetings under various guises. Of course politics, and pretty tough politicians, playing against one another. Stan Arneil on the one hand and Ryan and Ken Miller on the other side. Two pretty tough groups, two pretty tough camps. The usual sorts of things like the Savings Protection Fund and that we wanted a proper strong Act in New South Wales for credit unions. Well those things have been proven to be right. The Act, of course, because we had a strong Act things that happened in Western Australia can’t happen in New South Wales. Just illegal to do it. You couldn’t start to do those things. Savings Protection Fund saved credit union after credit union which were led into bad practices. That is another story of course, how they came into those things. It is now the Savings Reserve Board. Now it is a statutory Board set up. In those days the Savings Protection Fund wasn’t. Now all these things became issues that led to the splits. Of course we were very prominent in them. In effect it became in some ways a power struggle, I think. On the one hand Stanley and CUNA Mutual and on the other hand Dermot Ryan, Ken Miller and the New South Wales Association which was beginning to get powerful, broad and tough at the time. There was certainly some blood on the floor then.

It was a terrible pity, I thought, that the split came in the way, or came at all. But history will tell you that when strong personalities are around and they start to go in different directions and one thinks he is going the right way and the other one just as strongly thinks he is going the right way, those things will happen. It is just history.

Where did Tom Kelly come in this?

JC:       Well you never knew quite where Tommy stood. I never regarded Tommy so much as a credit union man, as a co-operative man. Tommy I think very much was a co-operative man. Very much imbued with the Rochdale pioneers and all that sort of thing, rather than the new wave of people who came through who said, ‘Stuff the dogma, let’s get it done.’ But as later days come Tommy swung around. Tom was a man who was eminently reasonable in his own way. He was very competent. I think it was his very reasonableness that led him to be this way. He had a single-minded approach in a way but it was too bound up, in my thinking, with dogma, ideology, or whatever. It was down-market as far as we were concerned. Because people tend to go that way in some ways. I think even today Dermot Ryan sees the credit union movement now as not being what it should be, but something he saw it as ten or fifteen years ago. He thinks it went off in the wrong direction. I totally disagree with him, I think it went in the right direction. I think if it had gone the other way we would have finished like the co-operative movement, which gets less and less powerful every day.

Not in some parts of the world.

JC:       Not in some parts of the world because they have taken a totally different approach to it.

True. I come from Nottingham in England there, where the best shop in town, the David Jones of Nottingham, is the Co-operative.

JC:       That’s right. Because they shook themselves loose of the shackles of the past and became like the capitalist entrepreneurs. They realised that was what they had to compete with. There is no good telling people, ‘You should shop at the co-operative because you own it,’ because they just bloody well won’t if it is not what they want to do. It has got to take the attitude then, ‘We will be the best thing in town. Or as good as anything in town,’ then people will come to you. That is when your co-operative works. They make the proper reserves and are as tough and as rough and as hard as any bloody private enterprise man going around the track. But if you take it the other way of wanting to give all the money, you can’t make the things, you can’t put it together, you can’t build your economic muscle. Well that is where you go down the sink, in my opinion. I think that gets lost sight of in the way that people love the purity of the thought behind the thing, rather than the actual doing of the thing and they are two different things.

So you were involved with the League for a number of years. Then you were later involved with the Australian Federation.

JC:       I was involved with the Australian Federation pretty early. Or about the middle of the time I was on the Board of the Association, as it is now known, or the League as it was then. That came as an idea that was put together by some people, but very much in the idea of what we are looking for a strong credit union movement in the country. Back in the days of the old Warburton Schools, it just so happened that someone was down from Queensland and someone was up from South Australia, they decided it was a damn good idea. Merv Callaghan, he was also the Secretary of the Police Association in Queensland, and Dermot who was strong in the union bit had met him somewhere along the line. Terry Fitzgerald from South Australia said, ‘Let’s form an Australian Federation and let’s go from there.’ That was the genus of that and that kicked off very quickly. It became a Federation of Leagues. It was purposely called that the Australian Federation of Credit Union Leagues, because it recognised the sovereignty of the States and it was a pyramid thing.

It very quickly started to change the whole idea of representation at world forums. In the past each State had an association of some kind, some only two or three very small like that. The Credit Union National Association of America used to fund these people to go to the Credit Union International, I think they used to call it. The various States of America then added on District 14 which I think included the rest of the world. But they used to fund the people to go individually from each State. Then of course when the Australian Federation was formed it became a different thing, the Federation then had control about who represented Australia at the forums. That was quickly changed. That was another Ryan-Miller exercise where they lobbied the rest of the world and formed the World Council of Credit Unions. I went to the first actual meeting of the World Council of Credit Unions. No, it was the second one, not the inaugural one, the second one. I was the Australian President then.

What was Ken Miller like?

JC:       Ken? Ken was quite different to Dermot. Ken was every bit as hard, every bit as good a politician. He had more time for detail than Dermot ever had. As a matter of fact, he had a great time for detail. Dermot and Ken complemented one another enormously, particularly in those early days. Dermot had very little time for detail, not that he couldn’t do it if he wanted to, but he had very little time for it. Where Ken could come down and look at the detail and quieten down to some degree Dermot’s flare, style, whatever you call it. They worked very well together. Ken of course came through as one of the great men of the Australian credit union movement, where maybe Dermot was along with Stan. Dermot and Stan were the great pioneers. Ken went through the pioneer stage to become one of the great administrators. He wasn’t as great a pioneer, I don’t think, as Dermot or Stan, but he became a great administrator.

So you were Vice-President of the New South Wales Credit Union League for six terms. So you were working with Dermot to some extent.

JC:       No Dermot wasn’t on the New South Wales League at that time. He had left at that time to work full-time for the Australian Federation. Ken Miller was the Chairman at the time and I was Vice-Chairman to Ken for quite some years.

So you followed him, so to speak.

JC:       Yes, I followed him in a lot of things, funnily enough. I followed him in the union bit. In that sense with the League when Dermot I went I came in.

How much were you encouraged to by him, shall we say?

JC:       Very much. We didn’t have to agree on a lot of things. As a matter of fact we could violently disagree on how you did things, but we very seldom disagreed on what should be done. We disagreed quite often on how it should be done. He had an enormous influence. He is a guy of great charisma is a term that would be used these days, it wasn’t very well-known in those days.

Did it ever come to fisticuffs between you and him?

JC:       Lots of loud arguments. By the time we got to arguing loudly half the time we were both too drunk to fight one another anyway. That’s true. The things he could say to people upset them terribly. But it never really upset me, because I used to tend to think they were a bit funny. But he could be terribly insulting and he would do it on purpose.

Were you carrying out Dermot’s grand plans, so to speak, by following him in various positions?

JC:       I often wonder about that. I don’t think so.

Were you meant to, shall we put it that way, and maybe you changed them a bit in your own way? How did your vision differ? Have you got any examples of how you thought differently to him?

JC:       Well Dermot was prepared to do the thing in the big picture and I thought often as many of those great starters of things do, they go over the top. He would hold people to things they had told him, when obviously it wasn’t in anyone’s interest to hold them to those things. You had to say there is the time we shall compromise and we shall work something out and make some sort of agreement. Dermot wasn’t real fussy, he was very Churchillian in that way, he wasn’t real fussy about making compromises with anyone. I suppose you could draw an enormous analogy there. In times of peace no-one in England wanted Churchill because he was a pain in the arse. He wanted to do all sorts of things. He used to get pissed and insult people

End Tape 2B: 4450 Words: 1 hour 45 minutes.

29 AUGUST 1989: SCU6: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

JC:       I was drawing the analogy of say a person like Dermot Ryan and Winston Churchill. I did say a few things which are quite correct. The point was that while their actual political ideas, or maybe even many of their social ideas, were far apart, it seems to be the attitudes were similar in some ways. You know you are talking on an terribly grand scale I suppose as far as Churchill was concerned and a somewhat less grand scale, but grand enough, as far as Dermot goes. In fact they were, what would you call them, warriors? You didn’t really want them around in times of peace, but when a war came and there was something to be dealt with or done, had to be singled-minded and the way of winning things that is where Dermot and Winston are pretty much alike. I don’t think they handled peace very well. I don’t know if they even liked peace in that way. ‘The stock horse snuffs the battle with delight’ which comes from The Man From Snowy River, well they did, they snuffed the battle with delight. Maybe Dermot found peace a bit boring so he tried to invent wars. Then again people with people like that tend to go away from them in a way and don’t realise they need them until the battle is on again. That is when the trumpets sound and the drums play and that is where they are, flags flying and they are going out to win. They won’t even think about losing. Anyway, I think that is a lot like Dermot.

Somebody said to me something about his running of Annual General Meetings, they referred to Von Ryan’s Express apparently. Do you know who coined that phrase?

JC:       I can’t remember who said that.

Must have been after the film came out.

JC:       It was after the film. I could have even said it, but one of us said it. ‘Bloody reading Von Ryan’s Express‘. Of course I had to go along with him a fair way on a lot of those things. I think if you are at a meeting to discharge business, then you are at a meeting to discharge business. You know, wandering off into flights of rhetoric I don’t think help to the discharge of business. If you are looking to a forum where you want people to put forward ideas and have debate and argument as a forum, well that I think is a different thing altogether. I think Dermot did participate in those sorts of things extremely well. He is a magnificent raconteur, one of the best after dinner speakers I have ever heard. He is funny, he is incredible, give him a subject to talk on he might not keep to the subject but that doesn’t stop him. Seldom spoils a good story for the sake of the truth, but it is usually along the lines of what happened. Generally a rather fascinating man that I have a great deal of love for. He had an enormous influence on me. He did things I couldn’t do. I don’t think I could scold people like he did and get away with it, I would get a punch in the mouth. All in all, as I said before, a great pioneer.

Right. Now what happened next?

JC:       Well I think we had reached the stage in the first seven years where there was exciting and great development. Laying a base for what was going to happen for the future. Then some changes came about. Dermot went to work with the Australian Federation, which of course was in its early days and needed a starter, a warrior if you like, because they wanted to put it together. The credit union movement then, I thought at that stage, tended to take a lot of different directions as such, a different way of reaching the directions we were looking at. I always thought that in the very early days the administration was good, don’t get me wrong there, but it was a different time of administration that obviously wasn’t going to hold up into the administration of something that was in essence a financial organisation. You couldn’t say it wasn’t, because it was. The type of administration, I thought, was due for some sort of change.

I haven’t mentioned much about Owen Jones. Now Owen was in the early days of the credit union similar in many ways to Dermot, similar in a lot of other ways to Jack Bannister. In some ways an amalgam of both, but then again his own man in his own way. He is a man of enormous intelligence. He had great beliefs in things but then again a dislike for detail as such. Owen had been a pilot officer during the Second World War, he was a rear-gunner, and that didn’t have a very high life expectancy, I don’t think too many made it, which may have had some effect on Owen. He had a great fondness for the drink which caused Owen a bit of trouble, a great fondness for it and a terrible inability to handle it. He for many years had given the drink away and when the credit union came about he really channelled an enormous amount of his energies and great intelligence into the early set up of our credit union as we saw it.

Of course other people involved in that could touch on the brilliance in many ways of Ronnie Preston who set up our computer programs and was a man of rather incredible ideals. If you could ever work out what he was saying, be used to put things forward something like, in ‘Yes Prime Minister,’ who explains things about English and that at all the odd times, and how things should be right. Well Ron sometimes talked like that. But an incredible person with figures, an absolute genius. When calculators first came on the market he used to take deal of delight in saying to someone, ‘You can take the calculator and I will sit there.’ Well he would run his finger down the list of figures while the other guy is using the calculator and he would do it in half the time of the guy he was using the calculator. He just had an incredible affinity with figures, a marvellous guy. A fantastic fellow in many ways, a magnificent swimmer, played water polo for New South Wales. Very disappointed in missing out for the Olympic team in 1956, wasn’t it. He was in the trials for the series, played goal-keeper for water polo for New South Wales. Didn’t have a goal scored against him but missed out on the Olympic team. A great disappointment for Ron. But that is digressing.

But Own was a man of great depth of feeling, he believed in things. Owen was a Methodist Minister’s grandson and I think a little bit of Methodism rubbed off on him. Then as we came along Owen was appointed our first Manager and did very well. Then Maurie Dailey was appointed Assistant Manager. I think there came some changes.

But towards the end of his tenure Owen Jones began not to be able to handle things so well.

JC:       I think things went past Owen in many ways, in the set up and administration side of things. He was very good in the early days because it was taking bits and pieces and trying to stick them together, paste them up and make a thing work without the need for that incredible attention to detail that a credit union like ours, which was on the verge of great expansion, had to handle. Of course unfortunately Owen got back on the drink again, which didn’t help things too much. It didn’t make him any less dedicated to the credit union, but it certainly made his dislike detail become very much more obvious. Towards the end he wasn’t handling administration, in my opinion, very well. At that times there were some problems, and I realise what it was, and we had some tough decisions to make. The upshot of it was that Owen resigned as Manager.

Round about this time, just before this, Jack Bannister had come into the Chair following Dermot. Well Jack’s way of doing things was somewhat different than Dermot’s. Jack was inherently an administrator. Jack enjoyed administration, he was strong on detail. Jack was a lot more pucker, he liked to see things done as a maybe the establishment, in inverted commas, would rather see things done, with a little bit more decorum and dignity. Of course Jack could be incredibly undignified at times too, but mostly he was pretty dignified.

What do you mean by that?

JC:       Well Jack would be in the middle of one of these pompous assessments of something. He would lift up his left cheek and fart, something like that. He was rather well known for it. You know very dignified all day at some conference or something like that late in the night he would break into an incredibly raucous song that he learned in the Officers’ Mess in Bombay, or something like that. Very, very rude songs one may say. He was a top guy Jack. I think he got a mention in Despatches. To get that mention he flew a plane across the Indian Ocean in enemy waters sometimes about three feet about above the water. Enormous abilities in many ways. I think Jack was a man for his times.

We are going to have to get Jack Bannister and Tom Duggan and have a singsong some time obviously.

JC:       Tom is a brilliant singer, absolutely fantastic. Tom is a magnificent Irish tenor and he know every ribald Irish song that was ever written and all the words of them. Most of the poetry written by the Pattersons and the Lawsons and everything like that. He is an incredible entertainer, Tom. Marvellous person to say travel with.

Perhaps we should take him down to the Hero of Waterloo one Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

JC:       Oh he would lay them in the aisles, Tom, he is superb.

Record him of course.

JC:       Yes it would be marvellous. I have heard him on records and stuff. As Tom gets along, as most Irish tenors are, the drop of the Guinness or a drop of the Bush Mills tends to improve the tone, not like other people.

Anyway in those things, I thought that was where our great changes came about. Our direction changed. I must admit that Maurie had a great deal of influence on the change in direction at the time when Maurie started as Manager of the credit union. Maurie of course is an excellent administrator. He has got an ability to administrate, to be a person who runs things and runs things very well. He has got very strong ideas. He has got a great belief in the fair go for people and he has also got a great belief that if someone doesn’t return that fair go and do the right thing, he will give them a very solid kick in the arse. In that way he is a damned good administrator. He handles things beautifully well. Many of us think he is very similar to a guy in government circles, who I have heard it said very often, is the last of the great Town Clerks, particularly in the City of Sydney. That was Jack Luscombe who had a style of good administration, good relationship with the people who worked for him and a way that worked. Maurie is similar in very many ways to Jack Luscombe. He looks after his staff to make sure things are done well and handle it. I really think that is where we took some great turnings.

It was about that time we started our mergers, which if you look at them they were take-overs, but the were mergers. We started to see that there were an enormous amount of credit unions within local government which because of very size they couldn’t supply the things that were being expected from them by their membership, because they could never get big enough to do it. The three or four hundred, five hundred, could never supply the things that people were wanting to have, and had the ability to repay and had the ability to want to improve their lives in that way. So back in those days the mergers began. If you remember, the Rockdale one, which was quite a big one. A very successful credit union Rockdale, but the then Board of Directors, as a matter of fact Johnny Clark in on our Board of Directors now he was the Chairman of their credit union. He has been on our Board for some time.

So who initiated that merger?

JC:       Well we got to know a lot of these people at the various Annual Meetings of the Association, or the League as it was then known. Possibly chat at the meetings. We got to know these people and talk to them and we were sort of seen in local government per se as against public utilities, in local government as a sort of leader in the field. They came to us and talked to us and asked for our advice and of course we were quite happy to give them help. We paid for a lot of them to go to various seminars and Schools. I always think that that was one of the top things we did. We were generous, and rightly so, in that way. People should have access to the knowledge that was available. I think most of this stuff came about because we used to talk it up about where we were going, what we could possibly do. We had this vision of being, possibly in the long-term, able to assist people with the purchase of houses and things more than what you just put in a house. I think a lot of the local government credit unions started to see this and could see really they were backed into a corner. They would like to do these things for their people, their people trusted them and they thought this was a way to go. They could see that the way to go was to get bigger. So I think we have been through something like ten or fifteen mergers. I don’t really know, I can’t count them.

To do this, we had to supply administration that was spot on. It wasn’t just administration that was well-intentioned, but administration that was very, very professional. As good as, if not better, than banks and finance companies and that sort of thing. We started to realise that very well. No-one realised it more than Maurie Dailey. Maurie, of course, set up the systems and the ways. He wouldn’t accept the slapdash methods of the past to set up an administration which I believe is as good as any you will see around. It doesn’t mean it is perfect and it doesn’t mean we haven’t made mistakes, but if you don’t make mistakes you don’t do anything. I am very proud of our administration now.

Jack Bannister was a man for his times, he was very good in that. He could be argumentative about various things if he thought we were straying from the dogma. Jack tends to hold the dogma a little bit. He is a bit flexible but he does hold it.

Quite of a number of the mergers were almost forced on you weren’t they by virtue of the Askin Government breaking up the City Council?

JC:       Oh yes, the very early ones of Leichhardt and Marrickville and that sort of thing. Leichhardt we took in immediately almost. Marrickville we took in somewhat later. Their people wanted to know what it was about when their Boards of Directors put the things forward. But after a while they worked very successfully, frankly.

It is a bit ironic that it was a Liberal Government who actually spread the Sydney Credit Union around the place.

JC:       I think it would have happened anyway. I think it just brought it forward a little. As a matter of fact I think one of the best Minister we ever had, or the most sympathetic Minister we ever had towards credit unions in the very early days, was Steppa Stevens. He came from up the north coast and he was a Lib. But he understood what we were all about. I think, funnily enough, because he understood what co-operatives were all about. He came from a banana growing area and all that. He was a pretty good guy. I will never forget the story. The League couldn’t really do much PR in the terms of politics and stuff like that. So we used to have what we used to call an Annual Dinner, the Credit Union Annual Dinner. We used to invite all sorts of people from around the town. Anyway the City was coming along with this dinner, and it was a terrific night. We used to invite a lot of politicians. Of course Dermot knew them and we knew some from the MEU. They helped us out enormously, the MEU was a great backstop to us in the early days, they did assist very much in the development of the credit union. We had all the people then and it became a pretty popular night, because politicians usually have got to so many stuffed shirt do’s and everything like that, they realised when they went to this one there was a bit more too it. No-one was going to talk about what you did when you left it. So a few of the politicians started to get along, and I have fond memories of Sir Nicholas Shea one time late a night decided he was going set up rowing lane in the middle of the floor and did so. He appointed himself cox. Can you imagine him being cox and everyone rowing away in the middle of the floor, having the time of their life. But one of the good stories was when Dermot was Chairman at the time. He is sitting up and everyone was enjoying themselves and there were to be a few speeches later on. We used to give each speaker time. Someone from the Libs, someone from Labor, someone from one side of the City Council, someone from the other. Now Steppa Stevens was almost blind and he used to read with great big cue cards in front of him. He was sitting on one side of Dermot and Sid Einfeld, great man, sitting on the other side. So anyway they are having a chat away and they have got a bottle of whisky, sculling between Steppa, Dermot and Sid. They are all sitting down there and Steppa got up and had his go. Steppa’s speech wasn’t all that political, but it was political enough. He sat down and it was Sid’s turn to have a go. So Sid before he got up leant over the back of Dermot and said, ‘Hey Step, I am going to have a bit of a go at you in my speech.’ Step looked round and he said, ‘Are you Sid, that’s all right, I don’t mind. Pass the whisky you Jew bastard.’ Of course Sid got up and had a go at him. Steppa was a great man for credit unions. Sid Einfeld became a great man for credit unions too. He has got a real feel for those kinds of things. Incredibly kind humane, marvellous man, Sid.

So what did he have to do with the credit unions, Sid Einfeld?

JC:       Well Sid was our responsible Minister in the Wran administration up until the time that he retired. Sid was a great backer of credit unions. He liked the idea, he liked the way we had done things. He liked the way we ran things as a business. He could understand very well. Sid being the humane man he is realised the importance of it and being of the persuasion and heritage that he came from, he realised the importance of business too. So we were pretty much favoured and he was very helpful in very many ways. In setting up the statutory stuff for the Savings Protection stuff, he saw the great need for this and that we were going so well. I think he favoured us above others in that way. Sid appointed me to the Advisory Committee of the State Government, which I was on for Sid’s term of office. When the new Minister came in he wanted someone else. I was the Minister’s appointee for five years to the Advisory Committee.

What did that entail?

JC:       Well it meant meeting at least once a month, sometimes more often, advising the State Government on legislation. We used to fix the interest rates, as a matter of fact, the ceiling interest rates that credit unions could charge at that time. Changes of rules, problems with credit unions that were in trouble, our advice on what should be done. An enormous myriad of things.

Who else was on the Committee?

JC:       Helen McIntyre.

Who did she represent?

JC:       She was the New South Wales Credit Union League. David Horton, who was the Registrar at the time. I got on particularly well with David, as a matter of fact. Not everyone did I don’t think. ????? from up the north coast. Ken Miller for times. I would have to have a list in front of me, but fairly good representation. The Credit Union Association, or League as it was then, used to be able to nominate certain people. Other nominations came from other credit unions and then the Minister used to be able to nominate his own representatives, which were two and I was one of them.

Anyway, getting back to the way we were going and the need for the administration and everything like that. Mainly it was Maurie’s idea. I was sort of imbued with the idea from what I had seen throughout the credit union movement say with the Australian Federation and being on the Advisory Committee for State Government, credit unions were going through a pretty ordinary time at that time, they were administratively wise. In the early days they went into a deficit-type budgeting type of thing, which is just a business way of doing things.

Deficit budgeting?

JC:       Yes it was a deficit against the deposits of the people. Now many times it was a great success but a lot of people didn’t know how to handle it and got themselves into a hell a lot of trouble with it. There was talk in those days that we were going to go entirely into the community and take people off the street and everything like that, within the basis of some common bond. That time, from what I had seen and I think I was conditioned by many, they didn’t actually become quite absolute failures in the credit union movement, they managed to turn themselves around and drag themselves out, but it became to me an over-extension of the philosophy of credit unions in that is was for everyone and everyone is honest. Well everyone is, if they can afford to pay back, but unfortunately there were moving into areas where people couldn’t afford to pay back. It was causing a great deal of trouble around the countryside. At that time I wasn’t real fussy about our credit union and I had some influence because I was Vice-Chairman with Jack for fifteen years I think. Of course with the other things, I really thought at that time we should stay with the industrial type of credit union where we could have pay-roll deductions. I was very strong on this, and so was Jack Bannister at the time. Pay-roll deductions should always come in and that people could regulate themselves through their place of work and everything like that. Not go charging into the general community area because of the problems that existed. Many couldn’t handle it, didn’t know how to handle it.

Maurie actually thought differently and I have got to say he was thinking the right way at the time. But he didn’t think about it as a soft option, or as a soft over-the-top humanist theory, really, though that had a bit to do with it, but very little. I think Maurie’s idea was that for a credit union to reach a stage of stability of strength and ability to go forward in the future, you had to have more than just an industrial base. You had to have more than just the odd frame of a local government, you had to go further than this. He saw that pretty clearly and he pushed very strongly. He was supported very much by Dave Lawler at the time, that we should go into the broader community areas. Which he did and he won the day on. I believe that I was persuaded somewhat reluctantly, not terribly reluctantly, but somewhat reluctantly that this was the way we should go. It was proven to be right.

Of course when you go into broader, risky areas, by necessity it will cost your base members more, but not a great deal more I don’t believe. But then again it has got to be balanced off that if you tend to contract within yourself, which I believe is the problem the Sydney County Council Credit Union is having, contract within yourself. Then you contract on yourself and things that happen within your industry, that is vis was is happening in the Sydney County Council they are sacking them all over the place and they have got a bond that only says the County Council, then you contract and you tend to wither. I think it was very much the right direction and I very enthusiastically support the way we went. I think it worked out very well.    We came into some of our bigger mergers then. CIG was probably our biggest merger, which brought in a group of five thousand people.

End Tape 3A: 4405 Words: 1 hour 50 minutes

29 AUGUST 1989: SCU6: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

JC:       The directions that we have been going, and as I have said I think we have taken the wrong direction. The future as I said earlier I find it harder and harder to see. I think in many ways we are regarded by people as being something of the establishment, particularly the younger people. Let us face it we have been going for twenty-five years and we have got a hell of a lot of members between eighteen and twenty-five who weren’t born when the thing started. They take a little bit more persuading about what the ideals and the way of our credit union is. They generally find that we haven’t lost the initial drive, the striving for fairness, but we find it harder and harder in a deregulated atmosphere, which probably makes for very strong competition the way it works. I don’t think we have ever lost that innate fairness that we have tried to see. The education of course. If we didn’t do one other thing, we educated people in the use of money. We were the great force in this country that did it and I believe that very, very strongly.

How much do you think that you educated the banks to the fact that there was another market out there that they should go for?

JC:       Oh, I think we did. But I am inclined to think that the banks in Australia are incredibly conservative of course. Pretty well run as far as banks go, but very conservative. I don’t think the American banks every lost sight of this thing. Of course what happens in America happens in Australia a bit later in those ways, commercial ways and stuff like that. I think when we started they patted us on the head and didn’t think we were much of a threat. They didn’t think we were going to do anything because they had their own finance companies and everything like that. I don’t think they saw as a threat at all and our end of the market, as far as they were concerned, wasn’t and still isn’t incredibly profitable to them now. But now they see they have got to have it if they want the other end of the market.

So what market are you going to show them next?

JC:       I think we will evolve towards types of markets.

There is an incredible amount of money in superannuation nowadays.

JC:       I think the credit union movement as such recognises that very well. I don’t think the way the structure of it is now an enormous amount of that per se comes back to the individual credit unions. But I think it does a lot of good for the strength of the movement as a whole, which I must say is very good.

Mind you the credit union movement has been very good at bending the structure to its own ends?

JC:       Well that is the beauty of it, we weren’t terribly bound by dogma.

So what is to stop you bending a bit again?

JC:       Oh I don’t doubt it has been bent. But as long as we keep our basic drive towards the fairness and the attitude that the people are the important thing involved in it. Of course you never lose sight of the money, the money is incredibly involved too, important too. But as long as we see that people are the major thing involved, I think we will develop pretty well. You often see in say Germany things like all the German co-operative banks. I think people in Germany generally see the co-operative banks as a pretty good place to go. They are sort of on your side. They got to be that way. They had Raiffeisen and Schultze-Delitzsch and people who set out at almost the same time but in entirely different areas. Schultze-Delitzsch operated mainly in Prussia mainly through tradesmen and workmen and guys working factories. Raiffeisen operated in the area of rural credit. They started those same sort of things round about the middle of last century, then came together in a way in this magnificent thing, the German co-operative banks. Of course then back in about in 1935 a fellow name of Adolf Hitler passed a law that they should all belong to one organisation and they could fight amongst themselves as much as they liked within the organisation, but they could be out of the organisation. Now we have never had that in Australia, or anywhere else other than Germany. That law has never been repealed it is still there, still a statute. So the German co-operative banks have become incredibly powerful. As a matter of fact they can dictate to governments, particularly their State Governments. They have a fairly good say in the Federal Government too, as far as I can find out. They still exist to some degree, to what degree I don’t know because I have never been there, they still exist in East Germany.

Well your previous esteemed leader used to have a fairly good relationship with the Rural Bank.

JC:       Oh yes they were very helpful in the first part. The State Bank saw we were doing pretty well so they decided to become a competitor and took over credit unions which they absorbed into their building societies you see. They could see that it was a pretty good way of doing business. Guy came from a pretty bright family, the Whitlam family, he could see these things could happen. I suppose in some ways he thought it was good for the people and it probably is. The competition in itself is good. The way it is done, I didn’t think very much of the release of so many of the overseas banks into the Australian system because all it meant was that the same pie was there, it was just more people were cutting it up. While in a sense it became more competitive, you notice a lot of the overseas banks are getting out of it now because they realise the pie wasn’t as big as they thought it was and they have probably taken some pretty big losses. But some of those big ones could come in and they could spend a billion and it won’t hurt them to have a whack at you.

The overseas banks haven’t done very well though have they?

JC:       No they haven’t done very well, not in our area. I think a lot of them are retreating and little branch offices. They will take their losses and get out.

I notice some of them are moving into other areas. For instance, Barclays Bank has moved into western Sydney there. Blacktown and places like that.

JC:       They will move if they can see a market there. They will try for it. I think it is a real challenge to the credit union movement to see that they don’t get too far into our markets and that we can provide the things the way we do, rather than let them in. The bottom line for those people, of course, is always the balance sheet. I don’t decry that whatsoever. Making a profit, as I said in one of the earlier tapes, if you are not making a profit you make a loss, and if you make a loss everything is lost.

But on the other hand you are making a profit for your members, aren’t you?

JC:       We are making a profit for members. We are making a profit to improve things for our members. Service, interest rates and all that sort of thing. Which is a different philosophy altogether. We are both using the same mechanism to make a profit, but we are doing it for different reasons. I think that is the very important thing of credit unions and while we can hang on to it, I think we have got a great future.

I am inclined to think that in time to come I don’t think we will do as we do it now in the credit union movement, looking it. We will go to something like the German co-operative bank system. I think it is inevitable that we will go something like that, but I wouldn’t say exactly the same.

But you won’t go for running other businesses of any description?

JC:       No, I don’t think it is our business. You have got to make up your mind. Father Ganey said to me once, he said, ‘Make up your mind what you are going to be. Whether you are going to be a grocer or a banker. Whether you are going to be a retail shop. You’ve got to know. Make up your mind whether you are going to be a store or a bank,’ he said, ‘and do one of them well because you won’t do both of them well.’ That is pretty simple, pretty good. I think that is why the co-operative movement in this country has been so very successful in our way is that we knew what we were. We weren’t all sorts of other things. We knew what we were doing. Now if you go into company things, go into housing things, be that, don’t try to be anything else. If you are going to be a banana growers’ co-operative, be that, don’t try to be anything else. The biggest co-operatives in this country are over in Western Australia, I think the Grain Co-operative and something like that. But that is just about as much of a co-operative as the Bank of America.

Farmers’ co-operatives. Well there is the local butter factory used to be a co-operative years ago for farmers.

JC:       But if you make your mind up what you are going to be, you do that. I think one of the problems of the co-operative movement is that it never knew what it was doing. It didn’t know what it wanted to be. It knew it wanted to be something good and I don’t decry it in any way. I think the Rochdale pioneers knew what they wanted to do, that is why they were successful. But then later on people to tended misinterpret the way they went and tried to be everything to all men. I don’t think those guys tried to be that and I think that is why they were successful. Then the interpretation of the thing as it got later on, the co-operative movement in Australia, now I am not talking about Britain where it has been in some parts incredibly successful, but in Australia I don’t think anyone was quite sure what they wanted to be. That was one of the big problems.

You may be right. In actual fact where it has been successful in England it has been because some area of it knew what it was doing and concentrated on that. Like as I was saying, the big store in Nottingham. They wanted to run the best store in Nottingham, so they did and that is what they stuck to.

JC:       That is how they worked it.

But of course, the only thing about them was where they were running a chain of grocery shops as well. Well that is a store, they were running a retail store as well. I think you are quite right in that sense. Who were the Rochdale pioneers?

JC:       Oh they were people in the north of England.

What did they do?

JC:       They pioneered the type of things, like a friendly society, a thing that provided in the very depressed areas a sort of credit. A store for people. Of course in those days in England it was illegal to do these things, to form these associations, and they became quite open about it rather than a secret society. Of course they were condemned for the things they did in a co-operative sense. They were condemned by the establishment, by the class system of the day that they weren’t entitled to do that.

That was before the repeal of the Combination Act, I suppose. Now, where should we move next?

JC:       I think there are a few things that are worth saying, particularly about some people I mightn’t have touched on that made great contributions such as Dave Lawler. He has made a great contribution in the area of overseas development of credit unions, from this credit union. He has been very single-minded about it. I think Brian Niven brought some great administrative skills to the Board. Indeed we have been very fortunate with the Boards we have had. We have had pretty level-headed people who seem to know where they are going. I think that has been one of our successes. Sometimes we might go crook about someone or other on the Board, but I think it is a passing fancy and generally compared to other credit union Boards I think we have been very, very fortunate that way. People have believed in what they are doing and what to go ahead along those lines. It is a most important thing to be that way.

Jack Bannister, of course, was a man of his time. Did during his time very well, because he was an administration man when we needed an administration. I was inclined to think he stayed a little too long. I have got pretty strong views on people retiring from work and I hope I can recognise it when it is time for me to retire. I probably won’t. But generally on retirement you opt out of the mainstream of what is happening and tend to rely then on the crutch, which is the dogma and what happened in the past rather than what should happen in the future. I think that happens. I think that happens to everyone. My father was on the Board of South Sydney Leagues Club until he was almost eighty. Now I was also on the Board and dad shouldn’t have been there, quite frankly. I supported him because he was my father, but I also thought the principle of it I don’t think was there.

Like Mum Shirl and the kids? She was hardest on the kids in some ways. We were talking about Mum Shirl earlier before we started the tape.

JC:       Yes, she can be harder on the kids than anyone else, but if anyone else outside tries to have a go she will stand up and protect them like a mother wolf I suppose. She will belt the kids around but don’t let anybody else try to do it. She will shorten them up in her way.

I also think in our credit union we were very fortunate with our staff. That is very important. We have picked well and we have picked in an odd sort of way. We have virtually known the people, or we used to until quite recently. With the size of the staff now you can’t do it. We used to select people from within groups of people that we knew well, we knew what they were like and the way they would go. The old Irish-Catholic thing, sort of like a closed society. But that has worked extremely well.

Might I make a suggestion? You don’t have to do anything about it, but I noticed when I was doing the history of the Railway Staff Credit Union that they sponsor disabled sports people, the credit union sponsors people, right.

JC:       We do things for schools.

Well the Mum Shirl Foundation has just been started, how about sponsoring that?

JC:       We will see how we go. We are sponsoring a hell of a lot at the present time.

Are you? What?

JC:       Oh we sponsor scholarships to schools, which we have told the State Government we won’t put forward any publicity on. That costs us a fair bit of money. We always in the past gave a great of assistance to new credit unions, but that is a long way in the past. But we did help some credit unions and one became particularly successful, Moe Credit Union in Victoria of all places. New South Wales-Victoria, we loved the style of these people, we thought they were a bit like us. They were trying to get something off the ground in Moe, which is a pretty big country town in Victoria. In their very early days we paid for people to go to seminars and to the AFCUL meetings and everything like that. They became very successful. As a matter of fact they are about the only bank in town in Moe now. Of course they always appreciated it and often said to us how could they pay it back and we said to them do it for someone else and they did. We have had a very close association with that credit union.

That is very interesting. Because Moe now is the centre of the whole industrial area down there. Mind you an incredibly smelly industrial area but they can’t smell it themselves.

JC:       That’s right, they don’t know it is there.

I have never smelt anything quite like that place.

JC:       I don’t know how many people in Moe, but they became a twenty-five thousand member credit union spread around the district. That is an enormous penetration for a credit union.

Well that is because of the union. The industrial area there now is very, very big. Of course it is the SEC which has been the power there.

JC:       Well the SEC is a very big powerful credit union in that area, and this Moe Credit Union developed within that environment. The SEC was there and could provide a lot of stuff for the people and Moe progressed to become, in my opinion, the best community country credit union, community-cum-country-cum-industrial credit union in Australia probably. We were very proud that we did send a lot of their people to various places and pay for them to be at places, to go to seminars all over the country and all that sort of thing, it worked very well.

But on the stuff that we support, oh gee, there was a great list of it in our last Annual Report. We have just given a couple of beds to St George’s Hospital. We support sporting things in junior sport, because we believe in it. Most of our Board have a sporting background and we believe sports is a great thing for kids. In the school scholarships we give the only stipulation is it must be to a disadvantaged family. I am just trying to think of some of the other things we support. Surf-Life Saving Association. We support the New South Wales Swimming Association. Of course if we want something back we become high profile, you see. We support the New South Wales Rugby League because it pays us something back. People watch that on television and they see Sydney Credit Union, Sydney Credit Union, Sydney Credit Union all round the place.

That is another smart thing you have got to do to. You support those things such as the scholarships and beds to hospitals and other things here and there, good charitable organisations, which you don’t really want people to say much about. You do it because you think it is right. But then again if you want to promote, then you have got to learn to go into the areas where people say you shouldn’t be in. Well I think that is a lot of crap. You have got to go in where you see, where your profile of members are going to see things. Now we work in the, and I hate to use the work class, anyway the middle- lower-middle-income areas. Let us put it that way, that is a much better thing than class because I am like all Australians I don’t believe anyone is better than I am. Lots of Australians think they are better than other people, but Australians don’t think anyone is better than them. I don’t think the English have really worked out what that one is about. No Australian thinks anyone is better than he, but lots of Australians think they are better than other people. Think about it.

They reckon they are better cricketers nowadays.

JC:       Of course it is a very interesting thing too, that the way credit unions have taken off in Ireland, although they have never taken off really in England. Scotland is a big chance, they might fire. I think it might be because the co-operative system is so strong in England itself, per se, they don’t quite see the need for credit unions. But of course the first credit unions were introduced by West Indians.

The first credit union was in Germany wasn’t it?

JC:       No, in England. The West Indians brought credit unions to England.

I didn’t realise that?

JC:       Oh yes my word. I don’t think the northerners as such, the northern mine worker doesn’t see himself as being a West Indian’s brother. So it might take a bit of time.

I didn’t realise that.

JC:       See the credit unions have been very strong in the Caribbean for many, many years.

Why was that?

JC:       Well it was introduced by the Americans down there and it took off. The Caribbeans grabbed hold of it. It was also introduced by a lot of the Catholic priests in the Caribbean. It is not a Catholic thing now, but it has gone very wide.

One of the Colonial Governors originally got Father Ganey down there didn’t he?

JC:       That’s is correct.

He was from was Canada I think, or was it America?

JC:       No, British Honduras. He was Governor and he went to Fiji and Father Ganey was down there working. Father Ganey was a very good friend of Bergengren as a young man. Father Ganey went to British Honduras and of course in the Caribbean area he set up a lot of credit unions which were successful. Caribbean credit unions are very successful, very powerful in the Caribbean. Then the Governor went to Fiji and he got Father Ganey to come to Fiji to set up the credit union system in Fiji. The Fijian credit union system of course is a bit different to ours. They run things a bit differently. That is one of the beauties of credit unions, you run it the way your country runs.

The first one to bring it to Australia was Kevin Yates?

JC:       Kevin Yates as far as we know saw the thing. I believe there was one operating in Victoria back in the earlier part of the century, but we have never been quite able to prove it. But yes I would say Kevin was the guy really. He saw it in Canada and they have done very well in Canada, credit unions. He saw it in Canada and he brought it back to Australia as a damn good idea. He started Universal Credit Union. You had to be a Catholic to be in it for openers, but it spread outside. I liked Kevin a lot. He used to speak in his very fruity voice. Very airforce. You can imagine Kevin with a handlebar moustache, about two foot wide. A very nice fellow, a very kind fellow.

Did Jack Bannister, and of course I will have to ask him that, anything in Canada when he was in the airforce?

JC:       I don’t know, he might of. He probably did.

The place where the pilots used to go through, where I suppose they might have stayed over for a little while, was St John’s Newfoundland. Or was it Nova Scotia?

JC:       Nova Scotia, yes.

They used to have a base there where they used to stay. They used to often get held up by the weather if they had to ferry a plane across the Atlantic.

JC:       A lot of credit unions in Nova Scotia, around that base.

Gander is Newfoundland. When they were ferrying planes across the Atlantic, and some of the pilot’s had to do that when they were going over. If they had done their training in Canada then they had to fly a plane to England.

JC:       Yes Gander was the northern base. They used to come across from there.

Yes I think it was. I will have to ask him though. I will ask him that. Now what do we need to cover other than what we have already covered.

JC:       We have been very fortunate with our staff. We have had very good staff. Now I am going to get on to something, one of the disasters.

All right.

JC:       Well it wasn’t a disaster as it turned out, but a thing that shook us up a bit. A couple of years ago, at the time we were having a bit of trouble with bad debts etc. We weren’t getting much joy from the people who were collecting the bad debts for us. It is one of those things, whether you like it or not, you’ve got to do it. At that time a guy was brought into the place, Maurie appointed him. I can’t think of his name now to tell you the truth.

You had better not mention it under the circumstances.

JC:       But anyway he was brought in as the person who was going to look after our bad debt situation. He had some background in it and Maurie put a lot of faith in this guy. He appeared to be achieving quite good results, etc. and everything like that. Then unfortunately we found that this person was falsifying his figures, not to rob the credit union but to make himself look good. So we came up a few years back with a bad debt situation that was pretty bad. It was also allied with several other things. None of the things standing on their own would have caused the problem, but the combination of things did cause us some severe problems. Back in 1984 we made our first loss because we weren’t making proper provisions for the bad debt situation. This fellow had been bodgying them using the computer system and in a very trusted situation, and you can only do these things in a trusted situation. We found we weren’t running as well as we were. What we were doing at the time, trying to spot some warnings that we should have recognised, trying to keep our interest rate artificially low because this was the time of the great deregulation and everything like that. We attempted to keep our interest rates artificially low from the best of motives and probably lost sight of the very thing that made us a real powerful credit union, you have got to be very commercially sound, totally commercially sound and often merciless at times if you want to exist. Well we weren’t prepared to do it. That reduced our operating margins down quite low, the falsification of the bad debt situation, which was getting pretty rough at that time. It was pretty bad. Obviously what the guy was doing he wasn’t following up in a proper way and he was falsifying his figures to make it look like he was doing very well. Suddenly the thing hit us on an audit and we went under the administration of the Savings Protection Fund. It was an incredible blow to us, an incredible blow to our pride.

Who picked it up?

JC:       In the first place Maurie. This guy went on holidays and Maurie had been letting him run his own race, which of course he doesn’t do for anyone now. He trusted that guy a great deal and it was a pretty big blow. That trust I think, in the growing up way, doesn’t exist anymore. No matter how much you trust a guy, you check him. Maurie started to find it and he realised the problem was there. Something was wrong. Maurie can explain it better to you. Something was wrong. This thing just wasn’t working out right. So he ran it through the computer an entirely different way and out came this result. Now that was a pretty big blow to us. We always thought we ran our organisation very well.

So you blew a whistle on yourselves?

JC:       Yes we did, because we had to reveal what it was. Then at the time the Savings Protection Fund, with their statutory authority came in, because we had gone into deficit in one year.

End Tape 3B: 4783 Words: 2 hours.

29 AUGUST 1989: SCU7: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

You were saying that they directed you. So who was the authority?

JC:       It was the statutory authority, the Savings Protection Fund.

That as only for credit unions?

JC:       Credit unions only. It is a statutory authority which we all contribute to. It is there to protect credit unions that may, through no fault of their own, go down. Since that has been there no credit union has ever folded.

It is a national body?

JC:       State body. That has been developed into every State now, being run by the laws of every State.

How many people are involved in it? What size of organisation is it?

JC:       It is run by a Board of I think eight from various parts of the credit union movement.

Does it have any auditors or employees?

JC:       Yes. They have a computer system set up. The fund I can’t tell you exactly what it is, because I don’t know I would only be guessing. Perhaps somebody else can give you that information. They have their own inspectors, if you like. You check these things out and they apply these things to the computers. So we had thrown up a deficit. As I said before, they changed the rules somewhat. We thought we shouldn’t have been put under administration, we thought we should have been under notice that we would be put under administration unless we smartened it up and turned it around very quickly. But we were put under administration.

Which year was that?

JC:       1985, my first year as Chairman. I needed it like a kick in the arse. Anyway I went to lawyers, I checked all the stuff out, what rights we had by right of appeal. There was some change we could have won an appeal but it would have been costly. Then with the Executive of the day, which was Dave Lawler and Brian Niven and Maurie Dailey of course was a member of the Executive. We had some long hard talks about it and we decided that the way to go was, we were under direction, let’s accept it. Let’s accept all the tough strictures they were going to put on it and let’s come out of it with flying colours. We as a credit union, and I think some fifty or sixty credit unions have been placed under direction in this State, let’s face it big and small, we came out of it quicker than any one. Because we just said that was what we were going to do. We knew what the problem was, because it had been found by our own people. We knew what the problem was and we knew we could come out of it. But we would have come out of it in a three-year rather than a single year term, because we would have taken the attitude instead of having to raise the interest rates we were charging, which we had to do under the rules of the Savings Protection Fund, we might have raised them a little, but not as dramatically as we did. For a couple of years, for one year sorry, we raised our interest rates enormously. We did enormous write-offs. We built up our provisions enormously. Generally the credit union didn’t try to duck one issue on that, we just went ahead and did it whether it made us popular or not. For some people I guess it made us a bit unpopular while we built up our reserves, built up provisions, etc., but it cost our members a lot in terms of higher interest rates and that hurt us a lot. Anyway we got through it. We were the quickest one out of it ever in this State. We came through it. While we will admit we were ever in bad shape, because we had build over the years very good reserves, we had to say, ‘Right a mistake has been made.’ A mistake had been made by a very good credit union so we rectified that mistake very quickly. I think while we always had a very good administration under Maurie. What I personally liked was that Maurie came back, Maurie and I talked personally. We have been very good friends for many, many years. Maurie then resumed a very much hands-on operation to everything. He will trust people but he will check them. He will never trust anyone again and not check them.

Since then, and we came out of it very quickly, we have just gone from strength to strength. We built it in a very adverse, if you like, climate. We keep building. We keep going better. It is getting harder and tougher to do it. It is getting harder and tougher to make your margin. Often you can’t charge as low as you would like to. You’ve got to pay more than you like to to get the money to keep the organisation going.

But you are still working as a co-operative bank?

JC:       Oh yes we have never lost sight that people are what we are all about. That’s what the whole thing is. What we look for is an economic fair go in what is happening.

Incidentally, and I mention it earlier when the tape had stopped, you made a loss once before, one year. There was a little argument with the auditor.

JC:       That is an old story. Ask Dermot and Frank about that one. That was back in the old wild, roaring days when we were putting the thing together and we had to do all sorts of odd things.

You didn’t have a statutory authority looking over your shoulder.

JC:       Well maybe the vast amount of money, well it is not vast in the terms of a finance organisation, but it is a big amount of money. $56 million is a fairly large amount of money.

What’s that?

JC:       That is our assets.

Assets now, $56 million?

JC:       Yes.

That doesn’t include any buildings either.

JC:       We don’t own any, we sold them. We took the attitude, what is the buzz word today, rationalisation of assets. We had a real good look at what we were doing with the properties we owned. A couple of properties over the road from here have just been pulled down, they had to be redeveloped. We had a lot of money invested in those properties. Then we had to have a look at ourselves and take this idea of rationalisation. Now should we sell those buildings, which we did, and not repurchase property again but use our money for what it is there to be used for, which is actually the advancement of you membership. Let’s have a real good look at the whole situation. Now we came out, after we had done our sums we found out we were actually making it tougher for ourselves by owning property. Now if you are in the real estate business, it is one of these things you have got to learn, if you are in the real estate business, you are in the real estate business. If you are in the money business, you are in the money business. Say this building we are in now, we could have purchased that for say something like $2.8 million, no about $3.8 million I think it was. Now it was very tempting because it was a pretty good price for this building we are in. But when we had a look at it, by doing that we would be costing ourselves, charging ourselves rental of about $700,000 a year, where by renting the place we have been charged a rental of about $250,000, $300,000 a year. Now they are big gaps. They are things you learn as you go along the track. Back in the early days we thought we knew everything, now we are learning how much we don’t know.

But all that means is that banking is better business than the real estate right now. Banking is doing very well thank you, isn’t it.

RC:      Always was.

It is better now than ever. Interest rates.

RC:      Banking in the sense of banks, we are not in the sense of banks. We call ourselves a co-operative bank, but we don’t access into the big incredibly lucrative areas of financing and development and all that sort of thing. That is really great big money is. But we are working with people and we are financing the people of the middle to lower income areas. Now we certainly use some of those people, associate with some of those people, and we certainly use some of the money that is available on the open market that doesn’t belong to those people, to finance those people. You must have access to that. You have got to have access to the system as a whole. On that top end of the banking market it is incredibly lucrative. The end we work in, and that is why the banks didn’t want to go into in the first place, it is much tougher to make a quid. You will make a quid, don’t get me wrong on that, you can do well, but it is not as easy to make the big bucks that they make because of their commercial investment and lending. I don’t think really we, credit unions as such, should aspire to be in that part of that. We are financing something else and while ever we finance it will be a fair go for people. Now there won’t be a fair go if they don’t have to give it. People in banks are in the business to make money, that type of bank. That is right that is what they should do.

So what are credit unions there for?

JC:       We’re in the business of making a top service organisation for our membership. We are in to make money too, so that we can pay for that service organisation. To keep down by good management the interest rates we charge and when you take into account the way we do it, we are pretty honest in the way show it. I don’t think banks are. A lot of people don’t read the fine print of banks. Banks will say they will charge you this, but you read the fine print. ‘If you’ve got $4,000 here.’ A whole heap of conditions attached to it. We don’t make our things conditional.

So what about the travel department and the retirement plan, they are just services for members are they?

JC:       Services for members. We don’t expect to make any large amounts of money out of travel, but an enormous amount of our people travel. Australians are great travellers so an enormous amount of our people travel. We are like other Australians. So the idea of that was to set it up as an organisation no so much to make money in any way, but to set up something where we know and can control that we are giving them a fair go. If they are going to pay for their fare overseas, they will get there and get back again. It has taken a while for what to really build up, but it is building up and staying together rather nicely now, thank you. In that we will be able to give people better fares and of course within what we are doing, the money is working through our system for the betterment of our people, rather than working through someone else’s system for the benefit of someone or the shareholders of something else.

Now what about the retirement plan, the financial services end of things? Who gets the commissions from that, the people who sell it or the credit union?

JC:       The credit union.

The credit union gets the commissions.

JC:       That is why our people have got no axe to grind, and they are very low commissions by the way compared to others. That is why our people have got no axe to grind. They are not putting things into favoured things to get the better commission, or do the deals that we all know they do. We are in it to put it into the best that is possibly available because they are not living on the commission. We pay them well to do that. So they are not living off a commission, they are living off what we consider doing their best for our membership. This is a different thing.

So you have come a long way.

JC:       Yes, we have come a hell of a long way. It has been great. I am quite optimistic, although I say I can’t clearly see where we are going to go. I would be telling lines if I said I could. But I have got a gut feeling we are evolving into something better. While we keep our basic principle, which is not destroyed by dogma, that what we are trying to do is give a fair go to our membership, they are in the area they are.

What area are they that is the query?

JC:       Well what is the area?

Well, I have been querying co-operative housing as a possibility. I am suggesting that it might even be viable now, because there are a lot of people who can’t get into it at one hit. So why not get into it quietly, you understand, by a gradual process? What you are saying in actual fact is that you don’t see that any credit union would be involved in that. They might be involved in lending to people who might.

JC:       On the basis of a good deal that these people have come to us with.

Right.

JC:       They have got to come up with the thing. I don’t think we should do it. I don’t think it is our business. You have got to have the guys who want to do that. Now they are going to concentrate on doing that. We will concentrate on money. You’re a concentrating on housing. It works a hell of a lot better. You can’t be all things to all people. You know what you are doing.

But you have still got to be looking at new markets, haven’t you, where the markets are. You’ve got be finding them.

JC:       Yes, we have just said that. As a matter of fact, two of our people Barry Ratcliffe and Peter Cuff, who is our Loans Manager, Brian Niven sorry, who is Vice-Chairman of City Council.

He told me about that, yes.

JC:       We sent them to Canada where they have been going into commercial lending. We sent those people over. We don’t believe all that we are told. We don’t believe anyway very much. We don’t believe what we are told, we want our people to go there and see and get the feel of the thing. Know what it is about, see it warts and all, find out where the problems were, what the successes were. Now all the Canadian credit unions didn’t have a bad experience with them, but some of them did and they lost enormous amounts of money in them. Because they tried to be too the developers and the bankers.

But don’t you think there is a need for some leadership?

JC:       In the co-operative area.

No, not necessarily. I am talking about leadership in looking for possible markets that haven’t been spotted yet. The credit union has led the banks in actual fact, from what I see and from what you tell me, the credit unions have led the banks. I know the economic climate had something to do with it, but the credit unions have led the banks into giving credit to the smaller people. I know the economic climate and the fact there are better wages and such like have also helped, but they have led. They have got in there somehow and they have been successful because they stuck with what they thought was a good thing, and they have stuck to it and it has been a good thing.

JC:       I think where we are going into a situation here, you are talking about something that could be every bit as exciting as long as it is put together by the right people. I don’t think the credit union per se should be in that. It should be other people who have got this thing. Now this is something we can develop and this is what we are going to do. We will put together these schemes which we would want to finance in that way. We would take our pick. You would have to come to us in very much the same way as anybody else and say we have an excellent scheme. We would look at it with our beady eyes, like a cocky looking down a bottle, and we would say, ‘Yes, we think you guys can do this. We think it is a good idea and we are prepared to finance it.’ If those guys get in it and do it properly, they will do it well because they are not trying to be everything to everyone else. ????????? would say, ‘You can’t do it that way, you will go broke in a year.’

That is a good financial adviser. OK. Well I suppose I should ask you firstly, as this is a subject we have just been talking about, when you were President of AFCUL. I should ask you first about Dermot and his departure from AFCUL, or should I start with your role in AFCUL? How was it proposed that you be President?

JC:       Oh I think Dermot was mostly an instigator of that. I had I believe strong support from Ken Miller. At the time I believe Ken was the logical person who should have been President of AFCUL. At the time, because Ken was so heavily involved with the New South Wales League at the time, with all the various battles and everything that were going on I think Ken could clearly see that to try and take on both roles would be incredibly difficult. So I think I was seen as the person who may have been along the lines of thinking that Dermot may have been adopting and Ken may have been adopting at the time, I think more particularly Dermot.

Did Stan Arneil resign unexpectedly? Was that his resignation to join CUNA Mutual, or what?

JC:       Stan resigned sometime before that, to my memory. See I wasn’t on the Board of AFCUL until about 1971. So I never served on the Board of AFCUL with Stan. Stan resigned to take the position of General Manager, Australian Representative of CUNA Mutual. There was some legal problem that he couldn’t be named as the Chief Executive Officer of them because of some qualification that you had to have under their Charter. Stan eventually got it later on. But Stan was at CUNA Mutual at the time.

Before Stan went to CUNA Mutual had the League already allotted the insurances, no I mean had AFCUL allotted the insurances to CUNA Mutual?

JC:       Yes. Definitely. They had come to an agreement with them. In the early days I wasn’t part of it, of how it came about. It was seen that CUNA Mutual would have some very great insurance benefits for us. I think we were with MLC at the time, carrying our insurance with them, it was seen that it was not particularly in our interests to be sending our insurance money to someone who wasn’t necessarily part of our organisation. I think in those days we sort of saw that CUNA Mutual was a part of a credit union organisation and that is where events rested. I think the early negotiations went on along the line that while it was to be attached to CUNA Mutual, it was to be a completely separate operation. They would provide the back-up in the initial instance, but all the premium income etc., would be allocated strictly to Australia and Australia would have a self-experience thing. I think most of us thought that was happening. It was later on that Miller and Ryan, etc., found out this wasn’t as true as they liked to make it out. Actually it was lumped in with some sort of a system which I think was based in California, which was owned by CUNA Mutual. It was certainly not as completely separated as we thought.

Stan said at that stage there was no money. It was just theoretical.

JC:       It was theoretical in a sense, but there was premium income, there had to be premium income. The premium income was definitely not separated in its own little box. It was sort of tied in with other stuff. That was seen as probably the thin end of the wedge, as the thing became bigger it would stay in that box. But the main problem I think a little later on, and I still think they are a pretty good insurance organisation for credit unions really, but they spend an enormous amount of money on the development of the movement, particularly in the early days. I must CUNA Mutual their due they did set up the first proper seminars and everything like that in this country and provided their people. But of course as an organisation they could see some benefit to themselves, you know a sprat to catch a mackerel sort of thing. They could see we were growing. They had some extremely good people with them, very good organisers etc. It didn’t become obvious, and we were pretty naive. I guess we still are but in those days we were very much so and we saw them as really the guys in the white hats and they presented themselves that way too. They were providing all this development money and everything like that and it was supposed to be with no strings attached, but that was wrong. If they were providing the development money, I suppose if you are in the situation where you are doing so well he who pays the piper calls the tune. We realised that they were very interested in calling the tune as well.

Just the Foundation at present, the Australian Foundation, does that call the tune as well when they provide money and input?

JC:       The Australian Foundation is pretty well separated now, in a way. But the Australian Foundation directs its money in certain ways and they have the choice of saying which way it is going to go and everything like that. Because of taxation and government considerations, it really must come through that world-wide fund. It is pretty sensible to do, because you find you can tap the big funds around the world which are set up for these type of things. Like Catholic relief, to name one, which pours an enormous amount of money into credit union development in the Pacific area. Not only that, the Australian governments, American governments.

So they are not the same in any way?

JC:       No. No. They are quite different. The Foundation and CUNA Mutual have got nothing to do with one another really, except that CUNA Mutual did put a fair bit of money into development.

I didn’t mean that, I mean the world body. Before hand you said they did a lot of development. CUNA Mutual did the development of was it the world body that did it surely?

JC:       CUNA Mutual provided the money. CUNA Mutual provided an enormous of money for development. I don’t think we didn’t really get anything from the world fund at all. We did get some in the very early days, not in the terms of money but in the terms of personnel. They provided some pretty skilful personnel to come to this country and provide some directions.

Who were they?

JC:       Well Carlos Matos readily springs to mind. I can picture the other guy.

In what way did he help?

JC:       More in putting forward the way, the possibilities, the way you should go. How things worked, how it was done. What sort of things you could expect in the future. I had a lot of time for Carlos, as a matter of fact.

Did he have any input towards this credit union at all, the Sydney Credit Union?

JC:       Not in a direct sense, no. Except that we liked Carlos and used to talk to him a bit, because he would give us some of the ideas of what the possibilities were. America in those days was a very large organisation, very big. Staggeringly big in our terms. To us in those days a million dollar credit union was anonymous. I think it was more, not in the technical sense exactly, in getting across to you the possibilities of what you can do. They used to fund the School at Newport and provide some very good speakers on various aspects of economy and ways and means, etc. But of course the piper was calling the tune, we got a fair bit of their insurance too.

Now going back to the time when Dermot became Chief Executive of AFCUL. Had there been a Chief Executive before him?

JC:       No.

He was the first. Who had been assisting Stan Arneil before that? There was a time when he became Chief Executive was Stan Arneil President, or did you become President straight away?

JC:       I think Beresford Calverley was President. That is in between Stan Arneil and you. No, Graham Benson was President before me.

Right. So it was Stan Arneil

JC:       I think it was Stan Arneil, Beresford Calverley, I don’t know exactly which way that went. Was Stan ever President of AFCUL? I don’t think he was. I think they put Beresford up, because they thought Stan was too controversial to be President of AFCUL, if my memory serves me right. I could be wrong.

There was Beresford Calverley, then I think it became Graham Benson.

Who put Dermot up as Chief Executive? Or was it just advertised around?

JC:       Well it wasn’t advertised. Dermot was the original Treasurer of AFCUL. Which was a fairly good balls up for a start anyway, because he was supposed to be Secretary and Merv Callaghan was supposed to be Treasurer and the nominations came out the wrong way. So they didn’t think it mattered much in those days, because it was just a group of people who had decided to do something. It grew from there.

Really Dermot wasn’t the Treasurer, or was he?

JC:       Yes, he was the first Treasurer. I think he did most of the Secretarial work to.

So how did you become President of AFCUL? Who suggested it to you?

JC:       Well I had come through the New South Wales League, when there were some problems there. I think my first or second year on the Board of the New South Wales League I was elected Vice-Chairman. Miller was the Chairman there.

End Tape 4A: 4534 Words: 1 hour 45 minutes.

30 SEPTEMBER 1989: SCU7: RICHARD RAXWORTHY TALKING TO JACK COYNE

JC:       When Dermot went to AFCUL, I came in on a casual vacancy, that is right I did to. I followed Dermot’s resignation to become Chief Executive of AFCUL, which would have been 1970 I suppose. Then I quickly became Vice-Chairman. They I was elected delegate to AFCUL. I think on my first year as a delegate I was elected Vice-Chairman of AFCUL. Twice to, because I think I did two years. One year as Deputy-Chairman and the next year I went on as Chairman. Did I put it on this tape, I don’t know. I think it was basically it was Ken, because of his commitments to New South Wales League, they could pretty clearly see he couldn’t be President of AFCUL, because of too much work involved. So they seemed to think I was the man, so I got some support from various places. Obviously New South Wales, I had a weighted voting from them. I got support I believe from Queensland. Certainly didn’t get support from Victoria.

Why?

JC:       I think they thought I was Dermot’s man. A few other things. They didn’t like my style either. I think they thought I was a bit undignified.

What about Dermot?

JC:       Dermot organised in effect my election. There was no risk about that. He was the campaign manager.

So what was the first battle?

JC:       Getting there.

Right you got there, yes. Who was up against you?

JC:       I think it finally finished up, it is hard to remember, I went in unopposed after a hell of a lot of negotiation and smoke-filled rooms etc. That was down in Adelaide in 1973. At that time the most important thing we were doing, we were negotiating with the Federal Government for the taxation exemption for money earned from the membership.

Who did the negotiating?

JC:       Dermot was the major negotiator in that.

Were you with him at all?

JC:       I was with him most of the time. I went with him to most of the negotiations, particularly when I came to the Chair. I was with him on some of them when I was Vice-Chairman to Graham Benson. Graham Benson and I didn’t like one another very much. Dermot might have caused a few of the problems between us because he used to cut Benson out of some of the negotiations. I know his reasons, I don’t think that Graham as being associated with the groupers in the Labor Party in Victoria was very popular with Federal politicians.

Was Dermot involved with the groupers at all?

JC:       No, he was on the other side.

Well clear of it, right.

JC:       He was on the other side. He wasn’t a DLP man at all. We had negotiations with all sorts of Ministers to be and Ministers of the time. It was a Liberal Government when we first went into negotiation with them. They used to give us a lot of sympathy but no action. They would say we had a damn good case and we had this and they would have a look at it but not to ring them they would ring us, sort of thing. But they never actually said they were against it. As a matter of fact the approved, at least they were honourable in that fashion that when it did come to the poll they didn’t vote against it, they voted for it. But I don’t think they were that prepared to initiate. We took the view that with Labor there was a fairly good chance of getting government and so the negotiations were then directed at people who would probably be the Ministers in government.

Frank Crean of course was our great friend in all that. Frank believed that we should get the taxation exemption on it and told us first that we had to go to, I am not sure which is the higher, the High or Supreme Court, anyway the top one. That hearing was held in Adelaide before , I forget the name of the Justice anyway. We put forward the case to the High Court that the money wasn’t taxable on the grounds of mutuality. Now it had to do either one of two things for it to go to parliament we had to prove we were a mutual society, but if we won it in the Court the parliament couldn’t do anything about it without changing the law anyway. So we directed most of the money that was available to AFCUL at the time into this thing, because we could see the importance of it. It stood a fairly good chance because Canada in particular, being a Commonwealth country, had had this type of thing for many, many years and the United States had it. I think the Canadians were more what we were hanging our hat on. So after long hearings, which I remember very well, down in South Australia.

You went down there did you?

JC:       I went down with Dermot and we had a fairly good representation from the credit unions around. Australia-wide to some degree. Of course the judgement was that no we weren’t tax exempt as a mutuality. So then the running had to be taken up in the parliament and it was taken up very enthusiastically by Frank Crean. He was an enormous friend to the credit union movement. He liked the idea of what we were doing and I think he saw, being a money man himself, that it was a bit more than just an idea it had a very sound economic basis. So he became our great friend Frank. He was a bit of a godfather to us in many ways.

So were the negotiations all with Frank Crean from that point on?

JC:       No.

Was Dermot still conducting them?

JC:       Oh my word. Dermot was an extremely good negotiator.

Who was he negotiating with?

JC:       Mostly you realise Frank Crean was the guy to go to, but we had to go to other Ministers. The one that gave us the toughest time was Bill Hayden.

You actually saw Bill Hayden?

JC:       Yes, we saw him.

Where did you see him?

JC:       Parliament House.

What Minister was he then?

JC:       Social Security or something like that. Pretty hard to remember because they shifted around a bit in the Whitlam days.

So it was a matter of ensuring the numbers was it in the Cabinet?

JC:       Yes. Bill wasn’t sort of prepared to accept it. I think we were pointed to Bill by Frank Crean, because he must have obviously be giving him some problems in the Cabinet. He sort of sat there and said, ‘Go on, convince me.’ That type of thrust, which I suppose for a Minister is a fairly good attitude to take. He was pretty hard to convince and his senior public servant was even harder to convince. I can’t remember his name. Dermot has got a marvellous memory for these sort of names. Bill didn’t say no, but he didn’t say yes we had the support. However, it appears Frank Crean must have won the day. We saw other Ministers. The guy who used to be in charge of War Pensions and all that sort of thing.

Did you see Tom Uren?

JC:       Tom was with us all the way. Tom was very much on-side. Tom didn’t need any convincing because Tom was virtually a credit union man. He was a great friend of Stan Arneil’s. He knew what it was about and he believed in it. We did see Tom several times, Tom was a great back-up to us. I am just trying to think of the other guys, I can picture them but I can’t think of their names. If I saw the list of Ministers I would be able to tell you.

Stan Arneil and the rest of them weren’t actually directly involved at this stage?

JC:       No he was with CUNA Mutual.

So it was just you? Just Dermot and you?

JC:       No, Ken Miller was very much involved. Les Robertson came on several occasions. Of course Les being the finance guy he had to have those in, and Les was very much involved in it.

Finance guy at?

JC:       New South Wales League at the time, he was the General Manager. Les was down quite often. Ken. As I said before, Dermot used to duck taking Graham there because it was a bit touchy. Basically that is the story of it. It was a hell of a lot of hard work. Going down to Canberra  time after time, speaking to public servants. We got a great hearing from most of the senior public servants who were involved in the thing. The senior public service you didn’t really have to explain to them what credit unions were because most of them were in credit unions. They knew what it was about and they knew the idea. They were very, very helpful the senior public servants.

What about the bet that Dermot made?

JC:       The two bottles of beer?

Can you recreate that time? Were you there?

JC:       Yes I was there when he made the made the bet and I was there when he paid the bet. A senior public servant, I can’t remember his name, in the Treasury we were speaking with him and Frank Crean. He took a different view and he kept saying to Dermot that he was shifting ground. Dermot said, ‘I am not shifting ground, I am providing you with an argument you can’t answer.’

Was this in Frank Crean’s presence?

JC:       Yes, Frank Crean’s presence. He said, ‘Well you may have a case and the Minister believes he has a strong case. Far be it from me to say that the Minister won’t prevail.’ He said, ‘But I don’t think you will.’ Dermot said, ‘I bet you two bottles of beer he will too.’ After he had prevailed well we had had a bit of fun with a few of the public servants in the Treasury where they thought they were under a Liberal Government and Dermot kept on reminding them they weren’t. They kept on saying to us, ‘Mate you are not going to get this.’ Dermot said, ‘But the Treasurer has promised me we are going to get it.’ They said, ‘Oh but he wasn’t the Treasurer then,’ and Dermot used to say, ‘Well he is the Treasurer now and we will get it.’ That was the sort of thing that goes on. Anyway we came in, and I don’t know if he was the Head of the Treasury by he might have been his number two or something. He was one of the mandarins anyway. We went in to see Frank Crean in his office and we knew it was on before the announcement. Dermot walked in with bis briefcase and the Treasury Chief came down and Frank Crean was sitting there. It was the other way around, Dermot said, ‘I’ll give you two bottles of beer if we win it and you give me two bottles of beer if we lose it.’ I think that was the way it was. I think this guy had forgotten about it. So we were sitting in Frank’s office and Dermot pulls up his briefcase, opened it up and pulled out two bloody bottles of beer. Well the lousy bastard only had two stubbies. He didn’t have two full bottles of beer. He said, ‘Here’s your beer.’ The guy was a senior public servant and he sort of sat there. Frank was sitting there with a big smile on face. He looked at Frank and Frank said, ‘Well you’d better take them.’ That was a good one.

You know that was a great thing. The credit I give for that negotiation I think is to Dermot. No risk. He got a lot of support, a lot of able support from very, very many people, but the thrust of it and the win I think rests with Dermot and Frank Crean.

Right. You were at AFCUL at that time, you were the President. Dermot is the Chief Executive Officer. When did things go wrong for Dermot?

JC:       That’s right. Well in the sense that things went wrong, it was definitely in political and some sort of financial movement of money round the country. There were power struggles going on all the time in those days. Dermot had some unusual methods of moving money around, because he could clearly see that for something to start, such as a national central movement of money, he could see that this was a thing that had to be important to us. If we wanted to grow in Australia we had to be able to shift money around, provide start-up, back-up to credit unions and this type of thing. He wanted money deposited by all the various associations, or leagues as they were all known as then, with the exception of Victoria, they were the first association, but still a League. The money had to be on deposit and it had to be available and it had to become available for development money on a loan or investment basis to the other areas. Now what some of them didn’t like, particularly Victoria, the way the think worked. These deposits were made on a type of a handshake thing rather than a contracted thing, even though AFCUL had mortgages over the assets of these various leagues. Not really applicable, but they were there for things.

So who set up this central banking system?

JC:       Oh it was Dermot’s idea.

Right.

JC:       Well actually Les Robinson really ran it through the New South Wales League. There were arguments developing as administrators that really what Dermot wanted to do with the money you couldn’t do.

This business of a central, I mean it was set up at the New South Wales League originally wasn’t it. What was it Central Banking Service?

JC:       Oh a central banking service.

What was it actually called?

JC:       Oh Central Banking. That was Les Robinson’s brain child. That was excellent. A great thing that we had. That was really one of the big things that happened here. It was very important. But then Dermot had the idea to set up a national central as apart from the League central that we had in New South Wales, but along similar lines.

Well reading the papers, this is what baffles me, reading the papers on it it seems to me that the battle was on between the State Government in New South Wales and they wanted to be able to shift money to Queensland where they could take better advantage of the situation. They first started when they got a central between New South Wales and Queensland. Then eventually Victoria joined and then when AFCUL started up, then it became a national one.

JC:       No, I think it was actually national before that. It was run by New South Wales. New South Wales was running it as an inter-change of money, if you like, as a national central on behalf of AFCUL, because AFCUL just didn’t have the resources to do it. Dermot and a secretary I think it was at the time, so it couldn’t be done any other way. I would have to look at it to see the reasons why but I am looking at it more in a political sense than actually getting down to fine tooth detail about the money and that sort of thing. Dermot was a very stubborn man, still is a very stubborn man, and he could see a certain way for this to be done. Victoria didn’t like it at all because the old Victoria-New South Wales bit was on. Queensland, well Merv Callaghan and Dermot had a very good relationship. The relationship with Graham Benson wasn’t so hot, representing Victoria. I think at stages there Les Robinson saw himself as being the meat in the sandwich in what was essentially some sort of political struggle. I doubt if Dermot ever saw it as a political struggle, he saw it as the way to set up a proper national central organisation for the free movement of money between credit unions per se rather than between States.

There were some pretty difficult battles in that. Victoria were demanding their money back, their deposits. Dermot wouldn’t give it to them because they had promised that it would be there for a term. They claimed it wasn’t, there was a contract they had. He said it was lack of good faith on their part. The New South Wales League was a great supporter of this concept at the time, they had a great deal of money involved in it. I am sure that Les Robinson in particular was getting very worried about it. There was arising a pretty powerful group at the time, which was to some degree a marriage of convenience with say Bill Howe on the one hand, Helen McIntyre, her name may have been O’Keefe, or Jones or something like that. Then Helen got married a few times. She was a very vocal and bright woman too. Didn’t always agree with her, as a matter of fact I often disagreed with her, but very bright. They had a certain influence with Les. Les was having this problem of all this infighting. I think we were trying to sort out how we were going to settle the thing down and I think it might have been 1974, 1975, we tried to settle the whole bit down. We certainly weren’t getting any support for the administration from Victoria. Queensland was starting to get a bit iffy. South Australia had its critics of it, but were sitting a bit flat. Western Australia were getting a bit odd. Tasmania didn’t know what they were doing, so they went with Victoria. So it became obvious that the national central and the way AFCUL was going administration wise it was no longer sustainable. I remember not with a great deal of joy the time I spent, half a day or nearly a full day I think it was, with the people from the New South Wales League. It became obvious that support for Dermot as an administrator, not support for him as an idealist or anything like that, but support for him as an administrator had gone. Without New South Wales the position was untenable. I think a lot of things that Dermot did, in hindsight, were very right. He was battling against introducing something. He certainly had his own way of doing things and he didn’t suffer fools gladly, or what he thought to be fools, he didn’t suffer them very gladly. The situation was that there was just no way he could go on. It was a pretty sad day then.

I can remember it was in the afternoon and we I it just bluntly to New South Wales. I don’t know whether one of the other States was there. I said, ‘What you are telling me now, is that you cannot accept the way that Dermot administers the financial side of AFCUL?’ They said to me, ‘No we can’t accept the way he administers any part of AFCUL.’ I said, ‘That means we have lost New South Wales?’ They said, ‘Yes.’ So you had to accept the inevitable. I had to go and see Dermot. As I told you the other day, it is not the greatest day of my life. I had such an honest respect for the man. I also recognise that he was a very difficult customer to deal with financially. I don’t know if you have had a chance to speak to John Richards, Frank as we call him. Well Frank has a great deal of time for Dermot, a great deal of love and he thinks the man is a genius, but Frank had a lot of trouble with him financially. Not that he was doing anything wrong with the money. He wanted to do things in a different way.

Can you give an example of the way he wanted to do things?

JC:       It was a bit complicated. I would rather look at something a tell you, rather than try off the top of my head.

You don’t really know now? It was more of his style you think?

JC:       More of his style that had a lot to do with it.

Can you relate what happened between you when you actually went down to see him?

JC:       Well I went up there. I went from Burwood out to Lidcombe and I walked around Lidcombe for about an hour.

From the League at Burwood?

JC:       Yes, up to Lidcombe. I walked around Lidcombe for about an hour and then I came across a bottle shop that was open. I walked into it and got a bottle of Para Port, which was all the go in those days. So I bought a bottle of that. Walked up to Dermot’s place. Knocked on the door with a bottle of port in my hand. Walked in. He said, ‘How did it go?’ I said, ‘Well,’ and I put the bottle of port on the table and said, ‘you can hit me on the head with it, or you can drink it with me.’ I said, ‘But no way.’ So we drank it together. It was a pretty sad day as far as I was concerned. But Dermot accepted the inevitable with a toughness that he has got. He didn’t do a lot of kicking and screaming about it. He said, Well that’s on. How do we sort it out?’ So we sat down and sorted it out. ‘Where do we go from here?’ Kevin Murray, who was a bit more orthodox in the handling of money, Kevin came in for an interim period. We walked by from that. I stayed up there for quite a long time. But it was a very sad day as far as I was concerned. But the way Dermot accepted it was incredible. He knew what it was. He never made any public statements about anyone getting him or whatever. As a matter of fact he remained supportive and never, really ever said anything against AFCUL or any of the people involved in it publicly, whatever he might of thought or what he might have said privately.

Did he go back there at all? What did he do then?

JC:       He resigned.

Did he retire then did he?

JC:       Resigned and retired, yes. He got some sort of a severance pay. It wasn’t a great deal of money, but for those days I suppose it was reasonable. Wasn’t a lot of money. I think it was enough to get rid of the mortgage on his house, that is about what he got out of it. Of course he worked in different ways. He never missed going to credit union meetings. The Murray Credit Union always paid for him to go to the AFCUL meetings. That is another story which I think I have touched on earlier. They had great respect for him and his ways and they things he did for the movement. But never, ever did he ever say anything against those people, publicly, which I thought was a pretty graceful way to handle it. He always spoke to the people, never ignored them. He was as friendly. He just sort of accepted it. That was an incredible thing.

Anyway that is about the bit of it.

That is an era?

JC:       Oh yes that was the end of the beginning I suppose.

I suppose I have got to let you go now have I/

JC:       Well I could stay for a little while.

Yes, well the rest of the time you were a President there still after that period weren’t you?

JC:       Yes, I was President. I did three years, 1973 to 1974, 1974 to 1975, 1975 to 1976. I didn’t stand in 1976.

So was there anything in particular? You got the central going during that period did you?

JC:       Well we did establish the central on more conventional lines, one may suppose. I think Kevin Murray should be given a great deal of credit for that. He worked under pretty heavy and close supervision, but he accepted the ways that the various leagues wanted things to be done. I suppose it was the way it had to be done. It certainly didn’t take into account the grand view that Dermot may have had, or the possibilities of it.

Things were put in writing more, into contract form?

JC:       Into contract form. It was done a fair bit tidier and the way the money was placed was a fair bit tidier, I suppose although the money was always placed very correctly as far as I know. It is just where the end result of it was. I remember the time when Dermot went and I got a call from, it wasn’t long after I don’t think, Victoria said, ‘We still want our money.’ It was about $100,000 at the time. In those days it was a hell of a lot of money. So not knowing the mechanics of it I went to Kevin at the time, which Kevin would accept and I don’t think Dermot would have accepted. I said, ‘Kevin I don’t care what it is, or how you get it, whether you have got to beg, borrow or steal it, give Victoria their money back.’ ‘Oh shit.’ So Kevin did a fair bit of work around, made some accommodations with banks etc., and gave them their money. Which I think they put back in.

After all that?

JC:       I think they had achieved their goal. They had got Dermot.

Who was the Chairman down there at that time? The President down there at that time?

JC:       I think it was still Graham Benson.

So it might come down to as much personalities as anything?

JC:       It would have a fair bit to do with it. It might have been Graham or Bob Moffett, I can’t remember. I always get on well with Bob, but he never thought I was dignified enough to be President of AFCUL. I still get on very well personally with Bob, I like him as a person. But Graham was certainly the power behind the scene there, at the time, very much so.

End Tape 4B: 4437 Words: 1 hour 40 minutes.