STATEMENTS BY SENATORS – Banking and Financial Services

Access to banking services is absolutely an essential right. Without a bank account people cannot really buy food, they can’t really pay their rent and they cannot basically live. Recently, I met with a Bundaberg local, Hans Jakobi, a self-funded retiree who has been loyally banking with the Heritage Bank for the past six years. Hans and his wife regularly withdraw cash to meet their ever-increasing expenses. In June this year they received a call from Heritage Bank, interrogating Hans and his wife on what they have been spending their money on and why they were consistently withdrawing cash from their accounts. Just last month, they received another call, explaining that, seemingly due to the fact that Heritage does not want Hans using cash, they would shut down all of his accounts, including his term deposit and family trust, and sent him cheques in the mail of whatever is left. Their reasoning for this was the way that Hans was using his account was inappropriate for Heritage’s business. I don’t think any bank in this country should have the right to interrogate customers about how they use their own money. It is their money, not the banks, and it should not be up to them to pry into the privacy of Australians about the use of their own money. I also welcome this week that the government has announced that it will seek to introduce a mandate for people to use cash. But if they cannot withdraw cash from their own bank accounts, there is not much point of that mandate occurring. We need to make sure that Australians can access their own money with their own privacy protected. And no-one should be de-banked because they have the temerity to withdraw cash from their own account, which was meant to be, under the terms of service, an on-call deposit account. The banks are meant to have the cash there to provide. It will destroy confidence in our banking system if this kind of behaviour doesn’t end.