Denise Brailey, “Bank Mortgage Fraud Explained” (Citizens Electoral Council, September 2018)
Denise Brailey of the Banking and Finance Consumers Support Association (BFCSA) gave a presentation to the Citizens Electoral Council in Perth in 2018 on the mortgage fraud currently being perpetrated on the Australian general public by the banking and finance industry with the connivance of the Australian government and the supposed industry regulator APRA. Brailey makes a case that this scamming by the industry is systemic and any consumer protection laws covering the mass rort are so inadequate as to be mythical. Her presentation is based on her experience as a consumer advocate on behalf of older and low-income Australians who have been the victims of predatory financial scams by manipulative banks and mortgage brokers, and who have received little or no help at all from unsympathetic lawyers and regulators who should have been working in the victims’ interests.
Brailey’s talk is very dense in terms of the information, backed up by anecdotes from her own experience in dealing with lenders and borrowers, and other examples, and summarising what she says is difficult without omitting important (and often outrageous) information about how bank lenders apply their agenda of asset-stripping their clients, in particular those clients deemed rich in assets but poor in income, such as retirees and pensioners who own their own homes. The banksters’ agenda, as she portrays it, is to seize borrowers’ assets by offering loans of huge amounts of money that are impossible to pay off: examples of such loans include interest-only loans, low doc loans (loans that do not require borrowers to present documentation showing their ability to pay, and which target low-income households), 30-year loans and loans tailored to the Henderson Poverty Index, forcing even middle class Australians into poverty by underestimating their basic consumption expenses.
Brailey’s conversational style, while clear and informative, can be rambling and irritating for viewers who want useful information about how the banking industry acts as a cartel in pushing a particular process onto its employees and sales representatives on how to market and sell loans that maximise the profits and benefits to the banks and pass on all costs to borrowers. Fortunately the PowerPoint slides featuring bullet-point summaries of what Brailey covers are a major part of her presentation.
At the end of her talk, Brailey provides a list of what prospective borrowers need to be aware of and what they should insist on. Unfortunately she and the BFCSA pin their hopes on a full Royal Commission that will expose the full extent of the corruption in the Australian banking and finance industry and the egregrious lengths they knowingly go to, to deceive borrowers, target vulnerable demographic groups with misleading information and deceptive practices, and blame borrowers when they get into trouble. Not enough is done in excoriating the Federal and state regulators who more often than not support the banks and other lenders, and do not enforce the legislation regulating lending or the punishments that apply when the law is violated. Above all, the very system of banking and the free market ideology and principles underlying it, the regulatory regime that supposedly polices the system and the lenders within it, and the politics behind the industry and the regulatory regime, all of which allow the banks to prey on and rip off people with dubious loan types, are not criticised.