Credit Line
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
During the late 1970’s while I was still in Melbourne anticipating coming to Sydney to become the Superintendent of Wesley Mission I was thinking of the special social needs the people of Sydney were facing and which would become problems in the community during the forthcoming 1980’s. It was at this time that un-requested a bank sent to me one of the new bankcards that was just being issued. I did not want it and had not asked for it. But it just arrived in my letterbox. I suddenly realized that in a city like Sydney with millions of people receiving bankcards that they had not requested that hundreds of thousands of people would go on a spending spree and very shortly personal debt would become a major problem. We had a whole generation of people that were not trained in using credit cards and the temptation to buy on credit would be too much for many people. I realized that vast numbers of people would not be able to control their spending going into debt even for groceries and household needs.
I was convinced that large numbers of people would end up the decade of the 70’s in debt and financial strife and much of it would be caused by the new credit cards.
I decided that Wesley Mission would need to be in the forefront of helping people with their debts. I had enough experience to know that one of the major causes of suicide was the inability to pay financial debt and the worry that that caused. I also knew that many marriages broke up foundering on the rock of financial debt. I conceived the idea in late 1977 of running a service at Wesley Mission that would be called “Debt line” to balance off our counseling service called “Lifeline”.
I spent sometime shaping up the thoughts and in September 1978 sent a folder to Sydney ahead of me to Stan Manning our then general manager, Arthur Oakly, the remaining minister in the pastoral department, Dr Jim Pendlebury and Keith Walkerton our honorary secretary. It contained 160 new ideas that I wanted to develop in Sydney when I arrived to keep WM growing and serving the community on the cutting edge of care.
This included resident funded units in retirement villages like I had developed in Melbourne, which have since made such a big impact on the life of the Mission. Another of my ideas was “the institute for World Evangelism to train ministers from South East Asia and the Pacific Region specifically in the areas of Church growth and evangelism “. This idea of mine was actually taken up and developed by Sir Alan Walker following his retirement many years later and is now known as the Alan Walker college in North Parramatta.
Item #152 on this 1978 paper read: “Plan through Lifeline, to develop a credit control counseling centre when we move Lifeline into Wesley Centre. Seek government assistance to employ a person to give counseling to people who have debt problems and who have an inability to control their credit especially on the new Credit cards.”
The Mission were accepting of these new ideas that I had and I very quickly began the work after my induction and re-ordination as the Superintendent at Wesley Mission.
I appointed a young research officer Clare Hogan to do a research report on personal debt in Australia in June 1979. Her report, received a few months later, made very clear that we were going to have a massive problem in the Australian community over people’s problems in handling debt.
In November 1979 I announced that Wesley Mission would establish “Debtline”. We started with a number of trained volunteer counselors from “Lifeline” and gave them special financial counseling to help people control their debts, repay them, and learn how to handle credit. We started with two volunteer counselors and opened the offices at night for families who worked during the day. In the first month we had 288 people come for counseling we were overwhelmed by the need. There was no other financial counseling service available in Australia at that stage. I commenced a series of training courses for other Lifeline counselors who could help specialize in financial counseling using bank officers, accountants and other people with specialist financial skills. I had specialists come in to lecture in consumer law, budgeting, consumer protection and financial counseling. Our volunteer counselors however were being overwhelmed and we needed full time staff. I advertised during June 1980 for a suitable leader of the work and on the 9th July 1980 I announced that Mrs. Betty Weule had been appointed. Betty had completed some training at Wagga TAFE and had good experience in counseling people. Unfortunately Betty had been in hospital for surgery and it took a little time for her to get underway.
By September 1980 I was able to report that the two experienced volunteer counselors had been persuaded to leave their jobs and to work full time with us in face to face counseling. Betty was at the helm and was starting off in fine fashion. In my first interview with her she persuaded me to change the name from “Debtline” which she believed had a very negative connotation to “Creditline”. That was a good move and Betty has worked with us ever since.
In the next few months Creditline received tremendous support from the Public Solicitor’s office, the Housing Commission, the Inner City Legal Service, Westmead Hospital, the Child Abuse and Prevention Service and many other organisations. A number of them have continued working with us over the past 21 years.
We approached the National Bank and they agreed to set up consolidation loans to help clients. The Commonwealth Bank also provided joint name savings accounts with the Mission as a joint signatory and people who were hopelessly in debt began to put part of their wages each week into these bank accounts but could only withdraw the money when we were a joint signatory. We went to their credit providers and to the people to which they owed large debts and indicated that we would handle their accounts and that the debts would ultimately be paid but we needed time and cooperation form the providers. In most cases we received that co-operation instantly. What I didn’t realize was that in years to come there would be people who’s debts would run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and many well over the million dollar mark and who would never be able to repay. We had to develop for these people, a new service to help them realize the significance and seriousness of bankruptcy.
In those days credit counseling was in its infancy and Betty Weule and I were interviewed on a score of television and radio programmes. One of our young staff Ian Garvin made his first Supreme Court appearance to help a bankrupt and to explain to the court exactly how we could help them get on their feet again.
By November 1980 the courts were beginning to ask Creditline to do a report on all cases going before them and the official receiver was holding over some Bankruptcy actions to enable Creditline to work out an alternative solution. Mr. George Cady the official receiver has worked with us consistently for the last 20 years in helping people find their way out of debt. His retirement in the near future marks a wonderful period of co-operation with the official receiver.
We were convinced that we had to help educate people in using the credit cards although this really should have been the responsibility of the credit providers, the banks and the lending companies. So we started lectures on consumer education in schools. We lectured social workers in how to help people and with the co-operation of the Housing Commission and the Prison Authorities have lectured to people in Housing Commission areas and to prisoners in jails.
We also decided to take head on some companies that were creating big debt problems for people. I went on radio and television over Easter 1981 and announced at that over 950 of the 1000 clients who had come to us with impossible debt, had credit hassles with Walton Stores. In those days Waltons had a business buying bad debts from other companies. They would raise the interest charge and through door-to-door salesmen would encourage people to purchase more goods far beyond their capacity to repay. Having brought this to the attention of the public through radio and television, the Waltons company threatened me with a $250, 000 defamation writ. There was a jail sentence also hanging over my head if I didn’t recant and take back the accusation and apologize. However I refused to do that because the facts were right. Betty Weule came with me and we confronted the Waltons company in their store, meeting with the managing director of Waltons and the chairman of the board with our evidence. John Walton chaired the meeting. When we presented our evidence Waltons stores backed down, apologised, withdrew the threatened writ and agreed to six areas, which we had drawn up in order to help their customers.
This made good newspaper and television copy at the time and Creditline was on its way. This led to thousands of people coming to Creditline for counseling. Wesley Mission had a tiger by the tail.
We rapidly increased the staff at Creditline and the number of professionally trained and competent advisers. People by the tens of thousands each year received credit counseling and were helped with their debt problems.
The support we have had since from the finance industry, form the courts and banks and from governments has been outstanding. We started to open other offices at Westmead, Macarthur, Bathust, Castle Hill, and then in an amazing floury all over Australia including places as remote as Alice Springs and in the middle of the Simpson Desert.
You might wonder why we would have a Creditline counselor in the middle of the Simpson Desert?
Well one of our guys drives a four-wheel drive through the most remote areas of Australia to tribes of Indigenous Aborigines. You wonder why they have debt problems? Well I’ll give you an example: Not long ago he was involved with our Wesley Legal Service which has four professional solicitors working full time taking companies to court over gambling and debt problems, in taking three companies to court for their actions of selling products to Indigenous Aborigines in the Simpson Desert.
These three South Australian Companies had sent sales people into the remote camps of Aborigines in the Simpson Desert to sell them products. One was our largest seller of Encyclopedia. Apparently since moving on to CD ROM there were large numbers of Encyclopedia Britannica sets available for sale and a salesman had traveled through the Aboriginal communities selling sets of encyclopedia on low deposit but long term repayments for very high prices. Another company had sent a salesman selling second hand Holden cars to Aboriginal people in the camps on low deposits and very high interest charges. Another company had sent vacuum cleaner salesmen to sell vacuum cleaners valued at more than $2000 each to people who had neither carpets nor electricity. Our legal service set up to tackle such companies took them to court and in each case won and in all cases had the contracts cancelled.
Since I started Creditline with Betty Weule as our first full time staff person there has been a change in Bankruptcies in Australia. For many years most bankruptcies were big named, highflying businessmen like George Herscu, Laurie Connell, and Christopher Skase – high flying multimillionaire corporate losers. Most people in those days going into bankruptcy were corporates who had debt beyond their capacity to repay. However in the 1980’s we detected a new trend, most bankruptcies were not as a result of a business but were personal bankruptcies. And that’s when Creditline came to the floor. When I commenced Creditline the 1978/79 financial year showed that 52% of bankruptcies were personal but by 1988, 70% of bankruptcies were personal. Bankruptcy was becoming common among those who had no property and now among homeowners bankruptcy is increasing even though under bankruptcy laws any saleable asset including the family home is liable to be sold to pay creditors.
I began to see also that there was a problem compounding these bankruptcies because most of them were not matters of personal extravagance in living, but was due to an increase in gambling. That is why in 1984 I started a gambling counseling programme and trained people who specialized in gambling counseling. How that developed is another story of incredible timing! We were the first professional gambling counseling service in Australia and the first person I appointed, Mitchell Brown today heads up Wesley Gambling Counseling Service. It has grown to become the largest gambling Counseling Service in Australia. It trains gambling counselors for scores of services throughout Australia and provides information, support and back up for every gambling counselor in the nation. In the same way Creditline has trained financial counselors and we find them in centers all over Australia. We run an ‘1800’ number and counselors anywhere in the nation can ring for help and guidance from our expert counselors.
Unfortunately the problem of debt through credit cards expenditure and debt through uncontrolled gambling is continuing to increase. Both of our services are the largest of their kind in the nation.
I soon realized that we had to do something on behalf of some of these clients, to save them from unscrupulous operators. Like the big licensed club near us in Pitt street where a grandmother in her 80’s had stupidly spent all of her money on the poker machines. The first time a member of her family knew about it was when she discovered that mother was unable to leave them anything in her will. The manager of the club had provided credit facilities for the grandmother to continue playing the poker machines. He had then introduced her to a bank manager in North Sydney who took out a mortgage on her home to give her more money to gamble. We took both the bank and the licensed club to court and won. The ladies debts were cancelled and the two managers were sacked. This led us to helping the government write new legislation and Betty Weule has been a wonderful asset to governments as they have written more restrictive legislation to help control companies to provide a duty of care to compulsive gamblers. Many companies throughout NSW have now been taken to court by Wesley Legal Service and in every case that I can remember we have won. Wesley Mission’s Creditline and Gambling counseling service have been the lead organisations in sticking up for the battler and for those who through their own stupidity have over-spent and over-gambled.
We discovered that we should also support the families and children of such people and so many programmes have been developed to help people going through such trauma. I remember for example, one young family with 5 children, including a baby with a hole in the heart, who came to us for financial counseling. The Father had been sick for three months. They had a finance company loan of $3000 but with the sickness were unable to repay that $3,000. They took out a consolidating loan which increased the debt to $11,000 but this did not give them one cent more but only covered interest and repayment charges. They then took out a George Adams loan at 140% per annum to pay the finance company. They then took out a Walter Pew loan at 162.4% per annum interest to pay the George Adams loan. Bankruptcy seemed to be the only alternative. Yet for ten years this family had stayed home. They had no car and enjoyed no outings. It was ten years since the parents had had a night out alone. Credit line re-established them until they had a small balance in a credit union bank account we opened for Christmas. We sent the family on a holiday without cost to Vision Valley. The children were excited, the parents were tearful. The children’s reaction as they were being driven to the valley was hard to believe: “look at the horses”; “There’s a cow”. On Sunday afternoon we collected the family from Vision Valley to drive them back to their own home and four young cannonballs threw themselves at us “We rode the horses. We were in the canoes. We didn’t find the cave. We had scones and cream and chicken for dinner.” The parents looked dazed but ever so relaxed and happy. The mother said “I haven’t cooked a meal for days. I just can’t believe it’s happening.” To help people re-establish themselves, to educate people in handling their income, to renew their lives, that was our aim. If as Christians we would have them live according to the teachings of Jesus they would never get into such financial or gambling difficulty.
It has become popular among some trendy people to sneer at the protestant work ethic, but those who follow the teachings of Jesus Christ are saved from the traumas of financial disaster. He starts not with our consumer greed but with our commitment to Himself. He calls us to a complete re-ordering of our priorities including our finances. This past week Betty Weule retired after 21 years of service with Creditline. She was the first full time staff member I employed and she has been a faithful employee ever since. Her commitment to helping people in need has been enormous and we praise God for her life and for her ministry through Creditline.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.