Page 400 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 10 February 2021
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so-called financial literacy programs in schools run by big commercial banks are completely inappropriate.
Schools cannot be treated as breeding grounds for future bank customers. We must always be vigilant about the business world seeking to gain access to our children and young people, especially in their places of learning. The Australian Education Union commends us for doing what is right and proper by ending, once and for all, this longstanding, unpalatable, situation.
For all these reasons, in 2018 consumer advocacy group CHOICE awarded their Shonky Award to the Dollarmites program at the Commonwealth Bank. The Shonky Awards are handed out every year by CHOICE to call out and uncover companies that take advantage of their customers. According to CHOICE, they gave this prestigious award to the Dollarmites program because “employing subversive sales tactics under the guise of youth education is a particularly pernicious act”.
Banks and financial institutions like the Commonwealth Bank are not upstanding symbols of financial independence. The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry found that the Commonwealth Bank has charged more fees for no service than any other major bank. It sold insurance to people who were unable to use it and charged fees to dead people. Meanwhile, they are in our schools marketing their products to our kids and signing them up for bank accounts. These childhood bank accounts and the data and relationships that they generate for these banks lead to high-interest personal loans, mortgages and credit cards for young adults.
The most famous of the school banking programs is the aforementioned Commonwealth Bank Dollarmites program. As a kid I had a Dollarmites account, and I am sure many of my fellow members did too. Dollarmites has been running in Australian schools for more than 90 years. The Commonwealth Bank was only fully privatised in the mid-90s under the Keating Labor government. So, for a good while, the Dollarmites program had the responsibility of providing an educational function in our schools, by government, for the public. But by 1991, when it was sold off to private owners for private profit, the Commonwealth Bank well and truly had its grip in our schools.
I understand that people often have a nostalgic connection to the bank they signed up to as a child, but these relationships are one sided. Banks do not care about you; banks do not care about your wellbeing. They care about making money, and they do that by offering high-interest loans, often to people who cannot afford to pay them back. Indeed, our nostalgia is not coincidental; these programs are specifically designed to invoke brand loyalty. Dollarmites is one of the most prolific forms of marketing designed exclusively for children, that we have. As ASIC and CHOICE have both identified, school banking programs are very sophisticated and they are successful at achieving their aims of singing up kids and making them loyal to their products, including those high-interest home loans and credit cards.
A 2017 survey by CHOICE found that 46 per cent of Australians opened their first bank account with the Commonwealth Bank and that 34 per cent of those people still
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