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Mining Towns Debanked

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Bendigo and Adelaide Bank deny home loans to mining communities

Australian banks are the world’s most profitable, raking in $30bn in profits last year. Much of this was sent overseas to their foreign shareholders, including the usual suspects – Blackrock, First State, and Vanguard. In total, Australian banks paid $27 billion in dividends, of which 26% or around $7 billion was sent to foreign-owned corporations.

Every dollar which goes overseas in dividends is a dollar Australia never sees again, reducing our GDP and making us all poorer.

In this Parliament, One Nation will introduce legislation to create an Australian People’s Bank, with 100% Australian ownership and a Banking Code of Practice which gives customers rights and protections that have been removed from the code being used by Australian banks.

Rural and Regional customers will benefit the most, with many Australian towns no longer having a single bank branch.

Banking greed, dishonesty, and profiteering is something I have been working on since coming into the Senate in 2016.

In 2017 One Nation were successful in creating a Select Committee on Lending to Primary Production Customers. It was obvious to the Senate the banks were screwing over the bush.

Specific issues raised by the Inquiry have been substantially addressed although remediation has not occurred. The big banks are behaving more responsibly in their lending practices as a result of this Inquiry and the Royal Commission that followed.

While lending practices have improved, the banks have turned to other schemes to make their excessive profits.

One area of great concern, one which will be corrected by a People’s Bank, is the closing of bank branches, forcing customers online.

In the last 10 years 2,500 bank branches have closed

I have written about the effect this has before. Today there is a new scam I want to alert you to. I thank the fearless journalist Dale Webster for her work on this topic: link to her article titled “Burning Down the House”.

The culprit this time is the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Australia’s fifth largest bank.

Bendigo are refusing to give home loans to any town or region which hosts a mine. This includes any mine, no matter the purpose – gold, coal, iron ore, bauxite, rare earths needed for the technology – everything.

Yes, the Bendigo Bank is black-banning towns where the very materials are mined that are used to make the computers that run their bank. What folly.

Anyone applying online for a loan to buy property in a mining area is immediately denied. Home lending in all of Queensland’s mining regions – from coal, oil and gas to opal mining – is knocked back by Bendigo Bank. Yes, even opals.

Distinct areas separated from others by favoured postcodes include Moura (4718) in the Bowen Basin coalfield, home to the Dawson Coal Mine, Mount Isa (4825), site of one of Australia’s largest copper and zinc mining complexes, and the world-renowned opal fields surrounding Quilpie and Longreach.

Coal centres Moranbah, Dysart, Clermont, Emerald, and Blackwater are no home-loan zones, as is the Roma-Miles-Dalby district, the site of Australia’s first oil and gas discoveries. Weipa, built by Rio Tinto to house bauxite mine workers in Far North Queensland, gets an instant knockback as does Tieri, built to house coal workers north of Emerald.

In the course of this investigation, more than 1,000 locations across Australia have been run through Bendigo Bank’s online loan process to verify whether this is truly a mining blacklist or if these postcodes are part of a bigger cohort focusing on general risk.

The Australian Taxation Office’s 10 lowest earning suburbs in every state and territory for 2021-22 were reviewed. The top 100 riskiest suburbs to purchase housing in for 2024 according to Realestate.com were reviewed. Climate Valuation’s top 30 suburbs by ‘number of high-risk properties from all climate change hazards by 2030’ were reviewed. All were approved.

Bendigo Bank will lend for housing in the poorest, riskiest, and most isolated places in Australia rather than a mining area.

This is not about risk, this is about social engineering.

Bendigo and Adelaide bank are publicly-listed Australian companies. They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to act in their best interests, not indulge their own prejudices.

As Dale points out, the embarrassing thing is that Bendigo, the city from which Bendigo Bank takes its name and where it has its head office, was built on gold mining.

If people cannot finance their home purchases these towns will die. This is a deliberate and possibly criminal attempt by the Bendigo Bank to destroy mining in Australia by destroying the towns that support the mines.

Once an area loses housing credits and mortgages the bank in that area can be closed, using the lie that there is no longer the demand for the branch. The truth is the banks are creating the lack of demand by withdrawing key banking services and engineering the closure.

Do you hear a peep out of the leadership of the Nationals or the Liberals about this? No of course not.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and Nationals Leader David Littleproud take their orders form the same predatory merchant banks that Bendigo Bank does. The Liberals, in particular, have overseen this destruction of retail banking in Australia since the time of Prime Minister Howard.

Only One Nation will fix this profiteering and control agenda by creating a People’s Bank.

Mining towns debanked by Senator Malcolm Roberts

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank deny home loans to mining communities

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Labor’s Dirty Power Play: PM Personally Axes One Nation Advisers in Attack on Democracy

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Just in case anyone in the Labor Party still believes they are the good guys, have a look at this political interference and discrimination. The Prime Minister directly and personally has taken the jobs of the two advisers who worked tirelessly on my re-election campaign. This is my speech in the Senate last night.

After One Nation’s strongest federal election result ever, Senator Pauline Hanson declared: “This is not the end of an election; this is the start of a movement.” And the people are responding—membership is surging, and support is rising. Yet this election wasn’t easy. Conservative micro-parties fought One Nation harder than they fought the left. Calls for a coalition sounded good—but in practice, it was chaos. Australia doesn’t have years to waste on political experiments.

One Nation has stood firm for 28 years—through media attacks, legal battles, and political sabotage. Every challenge has made us stronger, more united, and more determined to take back government for everyday Australians. Meanwhile, real issues are being ignored. Bendigo Bank is closing 10 branches—5 of them the last in their towns. Queenstown, Tasmania, will lose its only bank. Locals will have to drive 2.5 hours over icy roads just to access basic banking. The Albanese government ignored a 15-month Senate inquiry into regional bank closures. 14 months overdue. No response. No action. Just silence while communities are left behind.

And now, the PM is targeting my office—cancelling my advisers’ positions in a disgraceful breach of parliamentary convention. This is not democracy. This is control. One Nation will not be silenced. We will not back down. We are the only party with the courage, unity, and vision to restore Australia’s prosperity—for all Australians. This is just the beginning.

Transcript

Change is coming. Following One Nation’s best ever federal election result in May, our party leader Senator Pauline Hanson declared on national TV, ‘This is not the end of an election; this is the start of a movement.’ The public have already responded, with party membership surging and their post-election poll support increasing. This was a trying election, though. Micro-parties on the conservative side fought One Nation harder than they fought our political opponents on the communist left. So many called for a coalition of conservative parties, an idea that sounds great in theory yet created an unworkable Frankenstein, setting our movement back years to allow the organisation and recalibration needed to merge disparate political positions, if indeed it were possible at all.

Australia does not have years to lose. The lights are going off in this parliamentary term. One more term from Labor or the globalist Liberals and Australia will be past the point of no return. One Nation has been here for 28 years. Our party’s character has been forged in success and in failure, and in legal warfare, media bastardry, lies and party infiltration—even prison charges that were trumped up and ultimately struck down. Every development has made us stronger, more determined, more organised and readier than ever to take the government benches from those who do not govern in the best interests of Australia. Only One Nation has the strength of conviction, the unity of purpose and the courage necessary to restore abundance and opportunity to all Australians. Only One Nation represents the entire Australian people.

Let me give you an example that 12 Tasmanian senators ignored—none of whom are One Nation senators, which is why I’m having to raise this. There’s a new crisis in regional banking services because Bendigo Bank is now closing 10 branches and 28 agencies. Five of the branches are the last banks in their towns. For those communities, that is devastating.

This is happening because Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ignored the report of the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia. The government was supposed to respond within 90 days. It’s been 14 months, and the government has simply ignored it. The inquiry lasted 15 months and held 13 public hearings, with locals in town after town testifying that the banks were lying when they claimed people didn’t need branches anymore. The report observed:

When banks close their branches in regional areas, the impact on individuals and communities can be devastating and far-reaching, especially when it is the last bank in town.

This is what Queenstown in Tasmania is facing when it loses its Bendigo Bank branch in September. This is not only the last bank in town; it’s the last bank on the entire West Coast of Tasmania. The locals will have no choice and will be forced to drive 2½ hours over icy mountain roads to the next closest bank, in Burnie. On Tuesday night the West Coast Council passed a unanimous motion calling on the Albanese government to respond to the Senate inquiry—to respond!

There’s no doubt that, had the government responded to the report and its powerful recommendations, it’s unlikely Bendigo Bank would be closing these branches. It’s a scandal for this government to waste hundreds of thousands of dollars on an inquiry into rural banking services and then ignore the outcome because it might interfere with the banks’ cashless society agenda. I call on all senators to join me in demanding that the government take the Senate inquiry outcome seriously and fully implement all its recommendations.

I now make note of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s disgraceful attempt to sabotage my office over the last few weeks. The Prime Minister cancelled the positions of my two advisers and then this week arranged their notices of dismissal. I am their employer. They don’t work for you, Mr Prime Minister; they work for me. How dare you terminate my staff? What gives you the right to select my team? Using parliamentary staffing allocations to take all the staff of an Independent or crossbench senator breaks a convention, a trust, going back a hundred years. Denying me and Senator Whitten, Senator Stacey and Senator Payman any advisers at all is a disgraceful act.

One Nation has always welcomed policy debates and contests in the court of public opinion. This prime minister, though, would rather shut the opposition up than debate his rancid, divisive, wasteful policies with the one party prepared to provide real opposition, better policies and a real vision to restore Australia’s abundance—a vision that looks after the Australian people, instead of Labor Party donors, unions and globalist powers. What a bloody disgrace! This is not over.

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Government-Owned Bank Back on Labor’s Agenda

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On August 29th, The Australian newspaper reported that a government-owned bank, created out of Australia Post, may be back on the Labor government’s agenda. This move is seen as a response to the recent closures of numerous bank branches in regional Australia. If this report is accurate, I applaud the Government for this welcome development. 

Years of regulation have not succeeded in forcing the banks to act with honesty, decency, and compassion.  Additional regulation is not the answer, as large banks typically have access to superior legal resources compared to the Government.  The answer lies in establishing a People’s Bank that can provide competition to the Big Four banks oligopoly, or more accurately, the cartel. 

A People’s Bank could rewrite their Banking Code of Practice, restoring protections that successive Liberal Governments have removed—such as face-to-face banking, cash transactions and a guarantee of banking services to prevent the problem of political de-banking. People’s Banks worldwide have proven their ability to be secure and profitable, and to hold commercial banks accountable, as outlined in my speech. 

Transcript

The Australian newspaper reported on 29 August that ‘a government owned bank created out of Australia Post is understood to be back on the Labor government’s agenda’ and that it is ‘seen as a response to the closure of numerous bank branches in regional Australia’. I hope this report is well founded, and, if it is, I applaud the government for this welcome development. 

Years of regulation have failed to force the banks to behave with honesty, decency and compassion. More regulation is not the answer. Big banks will always have better lawyers than the government. The answer is a people’s bank offering competition to the big four bank oligopoly—or, more accurately, cartel. As someone who participated in the inquiry into bank closures in regional Australia, I attest that there is a desperate need for a public bank to revolutionise Australia’s banking system, the way the original Commonwealth Bank did, which the Fisher Labor government established in 1912. 

Today the big four cartel controls 80 per cent of the market and dominates banking. They’re acting together to remove face-to-face banking, which doesn’t stop customers from needing face-to-face services. It just forces customers to travel further. It’s not just in the regions; it’s as difficult for the elderly in the city to travel to the next suburb for their banking as it is for a regional customer to travel to the next town. 

We saw numerous instances of the banks’ dishonesty when closing branches, and we’re seeing it again right now with ANZ’s closure of its Katoomba branch. The ANZ treated Katoomba as a regional branch until it promised to not close the regional branches as a condition of its merger with Suncorp Bank. Lo and behold, suddenly ANZ claims Katoomba is not a regional branch so is proceeding to close it. The big four have concentrated close to 70 per cent of their lending into residential and investor mortgages, with more money fuelling the increase in house prices, while neglecting small business lending and regional communities. 

All four are aggressively pushing customers away from cash and into digital banking and transacting so they can surveil and harvest your data and collect fees on all non-cash transactions. They now gouge Australians out of more than $4 billion per year in transaction fees and surcharges. In short, the big four serve only themselves and use their oligopoly power over a captive market to exploit their customers. 

There’s a dire need for a public bank that can set standards of service and break up the banking cartel. A post office bank is the perfect way to do it, operating under a modified banking code of practice to restore protections to customers that successive Liberal-National governments have removed and guaranteeing cash and banking services, face-to-face banking in a branch, best interests of the customer and protections against politicisation of banking. 

The Commonwealth Bank originally started in post offices in 1912, from which it provided banking services to all parts of Australia, even remote areas. It raised loans for the government at one-tenth the cost of the private banks. In the panic of 1914, it protected deposits in all the banks. It supported Australia’s agricultural production in World War I and funded the emergency purchase of a fleet of ships in the war, which became Australia’s first national shipping line. It made development loans to local councils all across Australia for crucial infrastructure, and it made affordable housing loans to returned soldiers. It accomplished all of this in its first decade, before its political enemies reduced its ability to compete with the private banks, until later when another Labor government unleashed it again in World War II. 

Public and post banks are very successful around the world. The Japan Post Bank is one of the world’s biggest banks and was the secret to Japan’s postwar economic miracle, funding their government’s investments in infrastructure and industries. France’s post bank, La Banque Postale, started in 2006 and is already Europe’s 18th biggest bank and the biggest lender to local councils in France. Kiwibank started as a post bank in 2002, quickly growing into New Zealand’s fifth largest bank and the only bank that can compete with New Zealand’s big four banks, which Australia’s big four banks own. Its first achievement was injecting competition which stopped all branch closures in New Zealand for seven years. In the global financial crisis, Kiwibank was the only bank to increase lending while the private banks all reduced lending. Listen to this: the Bank of North Dakota, not a postal bank but a brilliant state owned bank, supported North Dakota’s public finances and its farmers for more than a century, making a profit in every year of operation. In the 2008 financial crisis, North Dakota was the only United States state to stay out of crisis. 

I applaud the news that the government is in talks with Australia Post on this solution, and I urge the government to have the vision to create a powerful bank that can once again serve the people of Australia. 

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Senate Hearing Into Bank Closures in Regional Australia

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for attending today. My questions initially go to the Reserve Bank and, if there’s time, to the ACCC. To the Reserve Bank, cash is legal tender. Isn’t it part of a bank’s social licence and a
duty of a bank to provide access to legal tender?

Ms McPhee: The banks obviously do provide cash services. They’re services that they provide to their customers in their own business models. The Reserve Bank doesn’t have any mandate to legislate or to regulate
access to cash services, so that’s really a matter for the banks, as is providing those services to their customers. Banks will usually provide the services their customers are looking to access, and, as long as customers want to access cash services, banks should provide them.

Senator ROBERTS: I’m not experienced in your area, but I would’ve imagined that, as part of being a bank, it would’ve been a requirement to be able to provide legal tender, such as cash. Is that not correct?

Ms McPhee: There’s no obligation to provide legal tender services that I’m aware of for the banks, but I’m not an expert in that space. But, certainly, the position that we see is that many members of the Australian public still want to use cash as a means of payment, and they access that cash from their banks. Consumers still want to use cash, although a much smaller proportion of consumers wish to use cash. But there are still consumers who do use it and need to use it, so that is a product that the banks need to provide to their consumers because the consumers demand access to it.

Senator ROBERTS: Okay. I would’ve thought it was a responsibility, almost a condition, of having a banking licence, but let’s continue. In your submission, you state:

  • The cash share of payments by consumers in regional areas fell from 35 per cent in 2019 to 14 per cent in 2022 …

What is the measure you used for cash share, please? The Reserve Bank isn’t notified when someone buys a cup of coffee at a cafe with cash, for instance. How did you arrive at these figures?

Ms McPhee: I might hand that to my colleague.

Mr Fisher: I believe the numbers that you’re talking about most likely come from our Consumer Payments Survey, which is something that the Reserve Bank does every three years where it asks people to essentially fill in a diary of every payment that they make over the course of a week. So we have quite detailed information spread across different demographics and different locations of how people are making their payments. I don’t have those precise figures in front of me, but, when we’re talking about the cash share of payments, then most often we’re referring to the results of that Consumer Payments Survey.

Senator ROBERTS: Could we get those figures on notice, please?

Mr Fisher: Yes, of course. The numbers I do have in front of me are that the cash share of payments in 2022 was a little under 10 per cent for people living in regional and remote areas. Actually the 2022 survey showed that that wasn’t all that different from people living in the major cities, but that’s not to say that some people don’t use cash much more intensively, including in those regional and remote areas.

Senator ROBERTS: And it doesn’t show the severity of not being able to access cash. For some people it is crucial, because they do everything in cash.

Mr Fisher: That’s right, and one thing we do from the Consumer Payments Survey is that you can classify people into how intensively they use cash. What that shows is that something like one in 20 people during that
survey week use cash for all their in-person payments, and it does show that certain demographic groups tend to use cash a lot more intensively than others, even though those shares have been declining over time.

Senator ROBERTS: The evidence is clear, from previous hearings of this committee, that banks are trying to drive down the use of cash, destroy the use of cash. That’s quite clear. Cash could be circulating more than you state, without your knowledge. Does this figure provide air cover for the banks’ war on cash, without having a solid basis in fact, apart from a survey?

Mr Fisher: I can’t comment on the issue of whether it’s providing cover for the banks. What I can say is that the survey is designed to be very comprehensive. It’s the best measure of cash use that we have. It surveys a
significant number of people, and a lot of effort by the survey firm goes into making sure that it is representative of the Australian population so we have a reasonably good picture, a good snapshot, at a particular point in time, of how people are using cash across the economy.

Senator ROBERTS: I understand, just as a side point, that the Reserve Bank of Australia has done work on establishing a digital currency. That’s correct, right?

Ms McPhee: Like many central banks around the world, we are doing some experiments and some analysis of a digital currency, but we are still working through that, and there are no direct plans to establish a digital
currency.

Senator ROBERTS: Let’s go back to the cash figures. A merchant who can’t deposit cash in their bank because the bank has been closed, and who can’t deposit in an ATM because their ATM has been ripped out, is
not going to accept cash they can’t bank, can’t use to pay suppliers, insurance, advertising and rent. Isn’t it true that regional merchants are no longer accepting cash because they can’t use that cash in their businesses?

Mr Fisher: What I might speak to there is the analysis that we do, some of which I believe might have been in our previous submission. Our overall assessment is that access to cash, in terms of the distance that people have to travel for withdrawal and deposit services, hasn’t changed a great deal in recent years. The nature of those services may have changed, though. If a bank branch has closed, people may have to either travel a little bit further to access full branch-style services or switch to an alternative source of cash access. I think it is reasonable to say that the elements of what you can call the cash cycle are interrelated. Cash use, cash access and cash acceptance are all, I guess, pieces of the total cash-use puzzle.

Senator ROBERTS: That’s a very important point you’ve made. If the banks want to drive people off cash so they can get fees and greater income from handling digital transactions then they can use what you just said.
Mr Fisher: I can’t really speak to the motivations of the banks, but I think it’s reasonable to suggest that there are different elements of the cash-use cycle that are related. We’ve published some analysis on the different
elements of the cash-use cycle in one of our bulletin articles, which I’d be happy to provide to the committee if that’s of interest.

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you. Let’s get back to the alternative sources of cash to banks in some towns. Isn’t it true that post offices have a role to play in providing cash? But they are not banks. They do not have after-hours ATMs, when most people take out money.

Mr Fisher: In the analysis that I referred to a moment ago talking about the distance to cash access points, one of the reasons that the distance most people have to travel on average—we say ‘on average’, but it’s different the further remote you go—hasn’t changed a great deal in recent years is the strong geographic coverage of alternatives like Bank@Post outlets. I think it is a relevant question as to whether those offer full branch services. I definitely think that’s a relevant question. Those alternative means of accessing cash that I mentioned a moment ago might not be perfect substitutes for full banking services, for example.

Senator ROBERTS: So there is a need for potentially a post office or a people’s bank to have a greater role than they do right now to provide full banking services.

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