I notice in recent months that some banks are advertising that you can really love a bank.  Er, no, you can’t.  Banks are corporations and legal vehicles, heartless and soulless, dedicated to making money for their shareholders.  Its senior officers are required by law to maximise returns, destroy the opposition, take money off anyone silly enough to let them and deposit it in shareholders pockets, and generally stomp on heads.  To get into the higher echelons of bank management requires a great track record of head stomping.  They are monster machines of human construct run by ruthless kleptomaniacs.

You may think this view a tad extreme.  I am just sorry that I haven’t the wit to present reality in bolder terms and in all its lurid details.  Throughout most of the last couple of millennium, the financial sector has been about 5-10% of the economy.  Ancient Egypt had bankers, and the Romans had more.  In the last few decades, the financial sector has blown out to over 30% of the economy in many western countries.  I would like to point out that banks don’t actually make anything essential to human happiness or survival, they just collect rent.  They take a percentage of any activity or action and many that you didn’t even know you are doing.  Paying for groceries, filling the tank of the family car, getting a haircut (how apt), or anything you do gives them a pay-off.  It used to be that there was a cut-off point where small fees were not worth collecting.  With the advent of computers automatically creaming off even tiny amounts, it can add up to billions.

A lot of what the financial sector does is totally in the realms of fantasy.  Bundling up other peoples debt, confusing, conflating and re-branding it as an asset, and then on-selling it with names like derivatives, credit default swaps, etc.  Millions of people world wide are extravagantly paid to play these on-line casino games with other people’s money.  This crazy virtual market is apparently worth 10 times the world’s GDP.  I mentioned money, but that too is becoming a very dodgy concept, being created by central banks out of nothing.  Just a few key strokes sends billions or trillions to the banks.  When you got a mortgage, did you think the banks had a pile of cash out the back to pay the seller?  Nope, the credit (not cash) was invented on the spot.  To pay back the phantom money, you have to labour for a few decades doing real work in the real world and donate up to half your income to a bank that never had the money in the first place.

You may be wondering how I came to have such a jaded view of banks.  Again, words fail me as I am well beyond jaded, and well into cynical, bitter and twisted and more than slightly miffed.  I bank with Westpac.  They shall be the nominal villains, but any bank would do as well.  Three decades ago I was in Cairns with baby Alice in my arms, my wife Hilary half way through pregnancy in Cairns Base hospital undergoing an operation to remove an ovarian cyst.  I attempted to withdraw some money from an ATM.  It swallowed the card.  I went into the Westpac bank to sort it out but they wouldn’t give me any money from my account without the card.  They couldn’t get it out of the ATM, fax down a copy of my signature from Atherton bank or verify my identity from my driver’s licence.  I had my wife’s card, but they wanted her signature to go with it, but she was being sliced and diced right then, so Alice and I were literally pushed out the door.  All I wanted was $30.  Fortunately a caravan park was more trusting or we’d have been on a park bench for the night.

I have lots of skills and I’m widely read on many diverse subjects.  Money and finance are not amongst them.  As part of a management course at uni accounting was required.  In the first lecture I soon fell asleep to the gentle, lulling, lisping tones of the pinstriped lecturer despite the seating being specifically designed for maximum pain to stop student slumber.  Never went to another.  No point risking permanent spine damage.  So when Westpac offered the free services of a financial planner, I naively accepted as I’d never come across the concept of planning one’s finances before.  So I trustingly bared the pathetic state of my total worth to him, confessing that I’d only ever earned enough to pay tax in two years, long, long ago and I earned a meagre living selling carved bowls at local markets.  I thought he might laugh and storm out in high dudgeon for wasting his time, but no, the wise and caring advisor had something for me called ‘superannuation’.  Sounded super as you apparently put a little bit in and later on get a lot out.  True to my usual form, it was several years before I even bothered to look at the bits of paper Westpac had been sending me.  From every payment I put in, 15% had been deducted as well as considerable monthly ‘management fees’.  Still the penny didn’t drop, even though my money was evaporating before my eyes.  Very slowly, (I mostly think very slowly), it dawned on me that there isn’t any management as my tiny bit of money is pooled.  One person can ‘manage’ the whole investment portfolio from a single desk and still get the afternoon off to get the hair done or play golf.  But each contributor is charged individually.  Outrageous!  Even more egregiously, the financial planner knew I was paying no tax but hooked me into a scheme where I was paying 15% up front.  He was either grossly incompetent or dishonest, or both.  Do not have anything to do with an ‘in-house’ financial planner.  They are foot-in-the-door, lying, thieving pedlars.  There are good financial planners out there I am sure, but you will have to seek them out yourself, interview them to be sure they understand what you require, and of course pay them.

My last story is too complex to describe, but I was trying to send some money to a person in Indonesia.  I tried on-line and failed.  I went into Westpac and the manager herself tried and failed.  Two months of frustration could not resolve the issue.  The amazing thing was that the banks don’t communicate with each other.  Any information I could gather was by me e-mailing my Indonesian friend to see what could be seen at the other end.  The path in between is opaque.  I was being charged large fees for no service.  Here in fairness, I should state that I think most of the problem was with corruption in the Indonesian bank.  Westpac never did manage to make the simple transfer.  I went via Western Union who charge humongous fees (about A$370), but have obviously paid off the right people.

This post has rambled on beyond what I had in mind, because I find there is more to what I feel than I had supposed.  And I have a last word.  Don’t take out your frustration on the person in front of you.  In any organisation bigger than a few employees, you can’t even get near the heartless, conniving, rapacious plutocrats who are fucking you about.  The person in front of you is a long suffering minion of the system.  Probably quite human.  I have gone into an office really angry, fuming at the treatment and obfuscation I am receiving, but taken the time to tell the person I am seeing that my anger is with the system, not with you.  Maintain the rage, but don’t direct it at the innocent.

 

 

The Labour party and the Liberal party have in the last decade been engaged in the race to the bottom on the issue of responsibility towards refugees.  I didn’t think we could possibly get there, but I believe we have finally plumbed the depths in the pits of heartlessness and political cynicism.  We have finally reached rock bottom, with the most appalling policies my worst nightmares did not imagine.

I mean of course, settling refugees to Australia in Cambodia.  Australia has for some time neatly sidestepped its own laws and international obligations by keeping asylum seekers in legal limbo by ‘offshore’ processing.  Even if it did take some fancy legal footwork to give Christmas Island a different territorial status.  Then there is Manus Island as part of New Guinea.  Then Nauru.  Not to mention failed attempts with East Timor and Malaysia.  All these ‘Pacific Solutions’ smack of desperation in Canberra.  Not from the magnitude of the problem, but from the domestic political consequences.  We have both political parties sabotaging the other’s proposals to gain electoral traction.  It’s pathetic.

And now Cambodia.  One of the poorest countries in the world least able to look after its own people, let alone the refugees.  And don’t think for a moment that the money Australia hands over will go anywhere near the refugees or the Cambodian people.  The corruption in that country is notorious even by Asian standards.  It is still recovering from Pol Pot and the ‘Killing Fields’.  This policy is insanity on steroids.

And what is this policy costing Australia?  Heaps.

• The respect of our neighbours.  We are showing a heartless face to the world and seriously stepping on the toes of nations in our region, especially Indonesia.  I could see it on the face of Indonesia’s recent president SBY, after our impetuous leader Tony announced to the world he was sending boats back without even consulting him.  This will cost us greatly in the long run.  From tourist numbers to negotiation outcomes.
• The right to speak up about human rights at any forum such as the UN.  We can’t hope to be taken seriously when we have a rotten skeleton in our own closet.
• Big wads of money.  The government has allocated about A$4 billion to stop the boats in 2013-14.  It isn’t clear that this includes money for the incarceration of refugees in remote places, legal, and rafts of other expenses.  The $4 billion is about the same amount that the UN high Commissioner for Refugees spends to protect nearly 40 million people across the globe.  We manage to squander that on a few thousand people so we can punish them and keep them in limbo and squalid conditions without trial or promise of resolution.

The refugee problem has deepened in recent years.  In Syria 6 million are displaced.  Roughly 4 million internally and 1 mil to Lebanon and 1 mil to Turkey.  And we think we have a problem???  A million or two have fled South Sudan for refuge in places like Chad!!!  And we think we have a problem.  Iran and Pakistan are hosting millions from Afghanistan, and I can’t remember where the millions fleeing Central African Republic are going, but they aren’t doing it to seek economic advantage, they are just trying to survive.

Australia punches above its weight in many areas of international debate, but on refugees, we have turned tail and fled.  It is time to do some of the heavy lifting.  I really don’t think Chad and such places can take the weight any more.

So the solution is …..  I don’t know.  The problem is so complex and the possibilities are so conflicting, I don’t think any simple solutions exist.  I am pretty sure that the simplistic ideas and slogans our political leaders feed us are superficial and a distraction from any serious debate.  There are some very good journalists, but the longer and more thoughtful the article, the less it gets read.  The worst commentary is as usual, provided by the the radio ‘shock jocks’.   stirring emotions without activating the brain.

So I am commenting on the process of the debate and the appalling lack of compassion rather than suggesting solutions.  The solutions will be as messy as the problem, but will require serious debate within Australia and with our neighbours.