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.
