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CATRIONA LOWE:

Good evening, everyone and welcome. It is wonderful as always to be here for the wonderful occasion that is the Ruby Hutchison Memorial Lecture. For those of you who I don't know, my name is Catriona Lowe and I am Deputy Chair of the ����ԭ��. Good evening, Wominjeka, welcome to everyone joining us online and in person for this important event.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that those of us here in Melbourne are joining the event from the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to the traditional owners, to their elders' past, present and future and to all First Nations people who are joining us here at the event today.

Unfortunately, Uncle Colin who was planning to deliver the Welcome to Country for today's event has not been able to join us. Fortunately, however, our very own Jayde Richmond has agreed to step in and share some extended words of acknowledgement of country.

Jayde is a proud First Nations Australian and a descendant of the Kamilaroi and Darkinyung people. Jayde is the first woman to be appointed as the General Manager of the National Anti-Scam Centre at the ����ԭ�� which promotes public and private sector collaboration to make Australia a harder target for scammers and from a personal perspective gives me the opportunity to work very closely with Jayde.

Jayde is a qualified lawyer and a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. Her legal and public service career has led to improved outcomes for vulnerable Australians through compliance, education and advocacy initiatives on consumer rights. She is also a member of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Law Institute of Victoria, the Office of Public Prosecutions Victoria and in industry ombudsman schemes.

Please join me in thanking and welcoming Jayde.

JAYDE RICHMOND:

Thank you and Wominjeka everybody. I'm honoured to be here and to begin by acknowledging and celebrating the Wurundjeri and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have been with us for the last 30 years.

I'm also honoured to be here and to begin by acknowledging and celebrating the Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation as the traditional owners of Naarm, this land that we gather on today. I recognise their enduring connection to the land, the sea and community and pay my respects to elders past and present.

I acknowledge my own ancestors and I extend my deepest respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here today.

I also acknowledge the strong commitment of advocates, community groups and consumer organisations who work tirelessly to ensure that the land is safe and secure for all. I also acknowledge the strong commitment of advocates, community groups and consumer organisations who work tirelessly to empower First Nations people.

I invite all of us to walk together, to uplift each other, acknowledge truths and listen to the voices of First Nations people in all that we do.

At the heart of this place is the Birrarung, the Yarra River. For the Wurundjeri people, the Birrarung is a living entity. It's a creator and teacher and holds stories, memory and lore. It reminds us that everything is connected.

For Aboriginal people, country is not just land, it is a living system of people, water, sky, culture and lore. It teaches responsibility. We don't own country. Country owns us and our role is to care for country, and it cares for us.

Naarm is a place of deep cultural, spiritual and historical significance. It holds a story that predates the city and structures that are all around us and is part of the stories of Aboriginal people going back more than 30,000 years.

While we celebrate these stories, we must also recognise and grieve for those cultural practices, languages and communities that did not survive colonisation.

This land is and always has been Aboriginal land.

This nearby river, the Birrarung, was never just water. It is a sacred living entity formed by the creator spirit Bunjil. It was a living system of knowledge. It taught Aboriginal people when to move and when to rest. It shaped how people related to each other and to country.

Naarm was also a place of gathering where different mobs came together to trade, to share knowledge, to resolve disputes and to maintain relationships.

For thousands of years, knowledge here was not rushed. It was listened to, carried carefully, passed on with the understanding that what you do today shapes tomorrow.

Country for First Nations people is alive and timeless. It is us. We talk about country like we would a person. It encompasses everything.

I want to read the words of Larrakia woman and activist Mililma May. This is a poem called Gulumoerrgin, My Country.

Gulumoerrgin is the trees, the red dirt and the blue seas.
Gulumoerrgin is the sun, the moon and the stars that infinitely surrounds me.
Gulumoerrgin is my family, my people and my community.
Gulumoerrgin is me.

For thousands of years, this land has been cared for and sustained through sophisticated systems of Aboriginal law, culture and responsibility. But many of the systems that exist today have excluded, enabled harm and eroded trust.

When country is healthy, people are healthy. When country is disrupted, people feel that too, socially, culturally and spiritually.

Truth telling is not just about the people. Truth telling is not just about acknowledging this history. It recognises that history shapes outcomes today. It explains why trust in institutions is not evenly held and that designing a system without First Nations voices will often fail First Nations people.

So, as we gather here today, we have a responsibility to reflect and ask ourselves, who are our systems designed for? Who do they protect well and who do they leave behind?

What would it look like to truly centre trust, care, and cultural understanding in the way we design and deliver consumer protection?

True empowerment requires the Dadirri. In the words of Auntie Miriam Rose, that is in a deep listening and quiet still awareness. It requires understanding. It means taking the time to hear the experiences of those who are most impacted and allowing that to shape what we build.

I stand here today not only in my professional role, committed to positive consumer outcomes, but as a First Nations person. For me this acknowledgement is not just a moment to reflect at the beginning of an event. It is a reminder of the responsibility we all carry and the opportunity for change.

Like many Aboriginal people, generations of my family learned to fear authorities and government and were isolated or removed from their community, from their family, and from their culture. But what always gives me hope is the incredible resilience that First Nations people show.

So, my acknowledgement today is probably more a call to action. Let us commit to truth telling, not just in words. Let us recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. And with that comes a continuing responsibility to work alongside First Nations people in ways that are empowering, respectful and inclusive.

And let us practice Dadirri. Let us listen deeply, patiently and with intent so that the systems we build can truly protect.

By doing this, we honour the ancient stewardship of this place, Naarm. And leave things better than we found them. For people, for communities and for country. Not just for some people, but for everyone.

Thank you.

ANDY KELLY:

Thank you, Jayde, for those really beautiful, powerful words and for stepping in at such short notice.

I too would like to acknowledge that we're gathered here on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and pay my respects to elders' past, present, and emerging.

I'd also like to extend a special welcome to all of our distinguished guests joining here tonight in person and online, including consumer advocates and regulators from Australia and across the ocean.

And of course, a very special welcome to Ruby Hutchison's family joining us online today.

Professor Ramona Parola, Mrs. Mavis Parola and Dr. Teresa Parola.

After our keynote lecture today, Catriona and Karen will be taking questions both from within the room and online.

We're using Slido to facilitate the Q and A.

So, you can check the back of your name tag to see the QR code to access the Q and A. And it's also up there on the screen as well.

Or you can go directly to slido.com and enter the code to participate in the Q and A. And hopefully I got that right, and you don't enter a random university lecture.

If you're in the room, we'll also have roving microphones available to ask your questions directly from the floor.

And here's the bit that everyone really cares about.

So, after the lecture, please join us for a drink in the Cameo Lounge. It's within the venue. It's located on level one. So just head down the stairs or take the lift and follow the signs.

In the case of an emergency, you may hear an announcement or receive direct instructions to wait or to leave. You must follow instructions from staff or emergency services who've been trained in what to do.

Please take a moment now to familiarise yourselves with the exits. And I'll do my best flight attendant. Your nearest one may be behind you.

But this safety announcement isn't just required of me. Safety is actually very relevant to why we're all here today.

So, we gather every year to honour one of the founders of CHOICE and one of the true trailblazers of the Australian Consumer Advocacy Movement.

The Australian Consumers Association began as an idea, a watchdog for housewives. A term Ruby embraced, stating, I am only a housewife, but I know how the housewives of WA are being robbed.

I am not too learned in legal phraseology, but I would say that unfair trading practices would mean the taking of profits by big concerns up to a saturation point.

How relevant and timely those words remain today.

So, let's talk about the safe part of that mission a little further now.

The theme of this year's World Consumer Rights Day is safer products, confident consumers.

An issue CHOICE has been fighting for since the very beginning and a fight that continues today.

Back in the 60s, CHOICE tested the flammability of children's nightwear by placing nine nighties on a fireproof dummy, lighting each and recording the results.

In 90 seconds, the dummy was enveloped in flames, the May magazine of that year read.

CHOICE lobbied state and federal governments about the issue, writing, how many more children have to be burnt to death before governments will legislate to force manufacturers to label clothing, especially children's nightwear as to whether or not it is flammable?

By the 70s, protections were finally brought in, and now the mandatory sleepwear standard continues to impose safety obligations on suppliers.

Fast forward now to just about two years ago, news broke of a distraught mother who was left asking much the same question. Why her child had to be burned by a product for it to be recalled and investigated?

Daniella Jacobs-Herd was only eight years old when her hoodie from Temu caught fire.

Daniella suffered burns to 13% of her body, including her face, her arm and her chest.

The hoodie wasn't compliant with those mandatory safety standards. It took four months for that product to be recalled by Temu.

Hard fought consumer protections are never set and forget. They can be undermined and undone seemingly overnight.

The rise of online marketplaces exploiting gaps in the law to flood the market with unsafe products is proof of this.

A few months after that incident, a CHOICE test revealed that all 15 products we bought from Temu failed to meet at least one requirement of Australia's mandatory button battery safety standards.

Those mandatory standards took the deaths of three children, dozens of serious injuries and many years to be introduced. A major victory at the time, but at an unacceptable cost.

And yet children continue to be put at risk. We can do better.

We hear a lot of opposition to new laws that would make consumers safer. That the cost and regulatory burden is just too high. But we rarely hear about the cost and burden of continuing the way that we are.

We're all working so hard but playing a game of whack a mole with a patchwork of complicated regulations, the odds stacked overwhelmingly against us. Of it needing to take serious injuries and deaths for just a small part of the problem to be addressed, while the broken system continues to operate unscathed.

If the burden is not on companies with the resources to fix the problems that they create, it is on us. Everyone in the room, those online and everyone outside these doors, consumers.

I don't know about you, but I'm done playing this game. It's 2026. It's time to change the law so that it actually prevents us from doing the same thing. It's time to change the law so that it actually prevents businesses from selling unsafe products in the first place.

Of course, the fight for safer markets doesn't stop at the physical, obvious kinds of harm. Consumers deserve safety from financial and emotional harms too.

CHOICE is just one piece of the consumer protection puzzle among many other organisations, and we each have an important role to play. None of us can do it alone, but when we work together, we're truly unstoppable.

We work closely with other consumer advocates, financial counsellors and community legal centres, including the Financial Rights Legal Centre. Some of our proudest moments are when we came together to fix the banks during the Banking Royal Commission, save safe lending laws when they were under attack, and the Save Sorry Business campaign to right decades of wrongs repeatedly ignored by successive governments to get money back to First Nations consumers harmed by the collapse of predatory funeral insurer ACBF or UPLA.

Thank you for your attention. And now I'd like to welcome Catriona back to introduce the incredible Karen Cox.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you very much to both Andy and Jayde. I think both of your sets of remarks have really set a beautiful foundation for the conversation that we're going to have tonight. In particular, Jayde, your reminders that everything is connected and that history shapes outcomes, I think, is an enormously powerful reflection.

And Andy, I both join with you in welcoming Ruby's family, albeit online, but also in underscoring the importance of safety and fairness in delivering market outcomes, both in the physical world, but in markets beyond that as well. And I can be confident that that is a view that Ruby Hutchison would have shared.

As a staunch proponent for consumer protections, safe products and consumer choice, it is of no surprise that Ruby also advocated for better conditions more generally during her impressive career, particularly for those at risk. Some of those issues we can sadly still relate to all too well today.

In her opening speech to the Western Australian Legislative Council in 1954, Ruby highlighted the housing crisis persistent at the time and the widespread suffering which prevails. Ruby criticised Parliament for throwing out a bill on rents and tenancies, stressing the precarity of the risk of being evicted and urged for better protections.

Later, Ruby advocated for the provision of housing for single women, arguing that as women receive lower wages than men for equal work, they should not be expected to pay the same rental as men. She also fought for improved pension rights, including for widows, public health insurance and more affordable education.

Ruby saw education as the fulcrum from which real progress in a country is reached and argued that where conditions are very bad and unemployment is rife and people are crying out for something to be done, the government is denying the people who cannot afford to pay these university fees the right to study and serve their state.

Ruby was a pioneer. She recognised that investing in people and affording better rights to those at risk was not only fair, it was in the nation's interest.

As Andy noted, the theme of this year's World Consumer Rights Day is safer products and confident consumers. This theme is particularly relevant in the current climate characterised by a cost-of-living crisis, economic uncertainty, technological change and international volatility.

Andy powerfully reminds us that as the world around us changes, we need to make sure that we don't cede protections for consumers.

It is perhaps, therefore, no surprise that this year's Global Edelman Trust Barometer reports that distrust is now the default instinct. Only one third of global respondents said that most people can be trusted.

The income divide has more than doubled since 2012, meaning that people on low incomes are much less likely to trust businesses, government, media and NGOs than people on high incomes.

People experiencing vulnerability due to financial stress are therefore not only likely to be more greatly impacted by misconduct that exacerbates their financial precarity, they are likely to be more distrusting to start with and certainly afterwards.

The regional results for Australia to be released later this month are, thankfully, expected to be better than the global average. But this does not mean our work in building and maintaining trust is done, quite the contrary.

Where trust is compromised, it impacts how people engage with markets and with each other. It impacts whether and how messages are heard.

To work effectively, people must be able to trust markets, trust that products are safe, trust that prices are meaningful and trust that they will be dealt with fairly by business.

And of course, there is a role to be played by regulators in brokering this trust. We set standards of behaviour and we act when those standards are not met. We work to ensure pricing laws are accurate so consumers can trust what they are told, and we advocate for change when we see that markets are not working well — that is, that they are not delivering on their promise, not competition for competition’s sake, but in the interests of consumers.

The ����ԭ�� has worked to improve transparency and trust in financial services, and I’ll briefly cover some examples in acknowledgement of the fact that this is an area that has been a primary area of Karen’s advocacy and work.

As of course many of you know, ASIC has the primary responsibility for regulating financial markets and I welcome our ASIC colleagues here today. But our roles do intersect in some important respects.

To give you just a couple of examples, in 2019 the government asked the ����ԭ�� to conduct an inquiry into home loan pricing. Our inquiry found, amongst many things, that borrowers with older home loans continue to pay interest rates significantly higher than new loans, that switching to a new product can be cumbersome and without seeing the benefits of switching, people are unlikely to expend the effort to move to a different product.

To address this, we recommended steps to be taken to ease switching, improve transparency and in turn, competition.

Another example comes from our work in the Retail Deposits Inquiry. In that inquiry we looked at how banks were making decisions on interest rates for deposit accounts and barriers for consumers getting a better deal.

We found that engagement with retail deposits is low. And because bonus rates are heavily conditioned, many people are missing out on earning more from their savings. In fact, we found that 71 per cent of bonus interest accounts did not receive the bonus interest rates over a six-month period.

Again, several recommendations from that inquiry are directed to improving price transparency and empowering consumers through making it easier for them to exercise their rights to make the system work.

On a day-to-day basis, our work administering the Consumer Data Right means that consumers who choose to participate can compare products and understand what is particularly suitable for them based on their own data, and it protects consumers from unsafe practices such as screen scraping.

Similarly, our work through the National Anti Scam Centre plays an important role in protecting consumers from the financial crimes known as scams.

Which brings me to our keynote speaker for this year. A dedicated consumer advocate and lawyer with over 30 years’ experience working for a stronger financial services consumer protection system to make financial markets fairer and safer for all consumers, but particularly the most vulnerable.

Most recently, Karen Cox served as CEO of the Financial Rights Legal Centre, where she led a team delivering legal advice, financial counselling, policy advocacy and research. The centre and its clients have benefited from Karen’s invaluable insights and dedication for an impressive 23 years, including her tenure as CEO from 2018.

Karen has been a long-standing advocate for the introduction of responsible lending obligations and was instrumental to their development when the global financial crisis of 2007 prompted reform. In her opening testimony at the Royal Commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry, Karen powerfully highlighted systemic failures and informed the reforms that followed.

Karen has supported First Nations voices through her involvement with the Save Sorry Business Coalition and is a non-executive board director at WayForward, a not for profit that provides debt solutions for people experiencing financial hardship.

There is a lot more that can be said about Karen’s impressive and tireless work, however I am very keen that we get to hear from Karen. So, I will stop there and ask that you join me in welcoming and celebrating Karen Cox.

KAREN COX:

Thank you.

Hi everyone. It’s lovely to see you all here. I’m desperately looking for friendly faces so that I don’t feel completely overwhelmed.

Thank you for those wonderful words, thank you for that wonderful acknowledgement, Jayde. That was fantastic and I’m hoping it will actually link to some of the things I want to talk about tonight. I really appreciate that. Thank you Andy and thank you Catriona.

Yes, I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of Naarm, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Bunurong Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nations and pay my respects to Elders past and present and to welcome all First Nations people here today and joining us online.

And I would particularly like to acknowledge and thank our First Nations people and their ancestors for their continuous care for country over many, many generations.

And from my heart, I apologise for what we’ve done to this country since we arrived here and hope that we can work together to restore some of what has been lost.

Every time I come to one of these, and I have to say I’ve been to a few, I am absolutely amazed and overawed by Ruby and what she managed to do, and managed to do it in the 50s when there were no washing machines or dryers or dishwashers or numerous other things, online shopping, things that we actually take for granted today.

And there’s always one fact about Ruby that completely floors me. Now, for those few of you who don’t know, I have four children. I had to manage four children throughout my career as a consumer advocate.

And every time I read that this is six of her seven children, I just can’t — I can’t. My brain just can’t come to terms with that at all. How she did anything, I don’t actually know.

I remember when in the early days at Consumer Credit Legal Centre, as it was then called, we used to have a few kind of semi joking intake criteria that we would apply to who we would apply help to. And one of the intake criteria was you definitely got in if you had more children than Karen.

Now, Ruby doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who would need much help. Very good advocate in her own right. But it gives me strange comfort to know she would have qualified.

Okay. Just a little preview.

I am going to talk about responsible lending, because it has been one of the overarching themes of my entire career.

I also want to speak very briefly about why consumer advocacy, from all the different causes we could be championing, and then just a little bit about what I’ve learnt in that time.

And I’m very intimidated by actually saying what I’ve learnt to this audience, because I look around the room and go, wow, these people know everything I do. They know so much more than I do. They’re such a wonderful, amazing group of people.

But I will try and be brave and venture to share in case some of it strikes a chord, or maybe even a slightly fresh perspective on some things.

Responsible lending.

I started at Consumer Credit Legal Centre back in 2000. In fact, I had been there on secondment in 1999, a long time ago.

And in those days, it was not uncommon for us to have clients who were pensioners who had $20,000 or $27,000 in one credit card debt, and who had actually been managing for quite some time by putting their entire pension onto their credit card and then using the credit card to go and buy their groceries and whatever they could, and just getting to the point where that just wasn’t quite working anymore, because there wasn’t anything left.

At the same time, we had other clients who had four or five credit cards — I think up to $70,000 or $80,000 in debt — and occasionally eight, ten or twelve cards all held at the same time.

There were lots of high interest payday loans and endless new schemes to get around the 48 per cent interest rate cap that then applied in New South Wales. We used to joke about the evil lab that was out there concocting the latest scheme that would apply.

And even before the GFC hit, we saw so much mortgage hardship, so many repossessions through the Supreme Court of New South Wales in those days, that it was quite amazing.

A lot of the people who came to us for help in those days either were being sued or had caveats over their homes for brokerage of anywhere between $5,000 and $30,000 because they had refused to go ahead with a quite unsuitable loan that had been proposed to them.

And then a bunch of other people came to us because they had gone ahead with the loan and a year had gone by, or maybe two years because they’d refinanced the whole thing on the same terms at that point, and they were now completely out of equity, having lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity through predatory lending.

In those days we had very few tools in the law. We had what was known as “little l” in the unjust contracts provisions, which basically said that one of a great list of things that the court could take into account in determining whether a contract was unjust was whether, at the time the contract, mortgage or guarantee was entered into or changed, the credit provider knew or could have ascertained by reasonable inquiry that the debtor could not pay in accordance with its terms, or not without substantial hardship.

There was no guarantee of an outcome, even if there was a positive finding on that count. It was only one factor among many. There were no guaranteed remedies and no penalties for non-compliance.

We were lobbying as a consumer movement for a comprehensive broker regime, with positive licensing requirements and a clear obligation on lenders to assess capacity to pay, with serious enough consequences to impact conduct.

In 2009, the National Consumer Protection Act came into effect, the case for regulation having been boosted by the impact of the global financial crisis.

In that law, we got a whole chapter on responsible lending conduct, applying to both lenders and brokers and intermediaries, penalties for non-compliance, and a range of potential remedies for consumers, including compensation.

The requirements on lenders were both, it seemed, principles based enough to feel like they would remain fit for purpose despite evolving business models and technology, and specific enough to ensure practical enforcement. Or so we thought.

Early signs were good, with a few wins on the board for the regulator in the fringe lending space. But then things got difficult, most notably with the Westpac Wagyu and Shiraz case.

That case says, among other things — and this is a very loose paraphrase — that while lenders are required to make reasonable inquiries about a person’s financial situation, it’s up to them how they use that information in their suitability assessment, including potentially not using it at all.

It also made the point very strongly that borrowers can choose to reduce their discretionary expenditure to pay a loan, casting doubt on even the relevance of current expenditure patterns to any lending decision and to any legal decision on that.

Despite this disappointing reading down of the responsible lending obligations, pressure to wind back the regime has still been considerable.

I’ve selected just a few of the very, very many publicly available statements opposing the responsible lending regime.

Philip Lowe, then Governor of the Reserve Bank, said, “The pendulum has probably swung a bit too far to blaming the bank if a loan goes bad. We can’t have a world in which, if a borrower can’t repay the loan, it’s always the bank’s fault.”

Now, I suggest that perhaps reading a few of ASIC’s cases, the outcomes from those, and looking at even AFCA decisions, shows that the suggestion that it’s always the lender’s fault under the current regime is fairly inaccurate.

We’ve also got the statement that “as Australia continues to recover from the COVID 19 pandemic, it’s more important than ever that there are no unnecessary barriers to the flow of credit to households and small businesses.”

Small business isn’t actually impacted by the responsible lending obligations, so that is completely and utterly irrelevant. I mean, we do have the continuing exclusion, you know, the one little bit where there is an overlap. But in terms of the actual flow of credit to households, I’m not aware of any real evidence that there has been an impact on the flow of credit, and I think there’s a lot of public information supporting that.

This one is more recent. “Responsible lending laws are horribly complex and duplicative. One bank told me recently they have next to no delinquencies. It means that first home buyers are missing out on getting a mortgage.”

Now, I don’t know which bank he’s talking to. Most of the ones I’ve spoken to do continue to have delinquencies. Yes, delinquencies have been quite low, particularly in the period where interest rates were going up quite quickly, certainly compared to previous times of raised interest rates. But there certainly have been delinquencies.

Spend a day on the National Debt Helpline and you will hear about plenty of people who are struggling to pay their mortgages.

And then we’ve got Shane Elliott also saying that “as a society we have swung too far in the direction of safety. We want people to be safe. We want nobody to lose their home or their business. All laudable objectives. But they come at a cost.”

That admittedly is the argument that Australia gets locked out, and I’ll return to that point.

This was in the Treasury submission to the Royal Commission back in 2018. “There’s little evidence to suggest that the recent tightening of credit standards through APRA’s prudential measures, and all the actions taken by ASIC, have actually had any material effect on the overall availability of credit.”

And to my knowledge, there has been no change in that assessment in the years since then.

I think overall the courts have been very conservative in their application of the law, only finding against lenders where the most obvious failures have occurred, and being very careful not to impose on lenders the need for a crystal ball.

A review of the AFCA decisions also shows that many cases are not made out. Of course, the determinations that are published don’t include the many cases that are actually settled prior to getting to determination. And I know as an advocate that there are many wins that consumers do get through the settlement process.

The laws do have a positive impact. They give consumers opportunities for redress. But they don’t have the sweeping effect that they have been alleged to have.

I’m going to put up two quotes from a couple of people who are hopefully in the room, my esteemed former colleagues Fiona and Nadia from Mortgage Stress Victoria. I think this sums up, in many ways, why the law is so important.

And I think when I read Nadia’s quote in particular, it’s really important to remember that behind default statistics and discussions of risk are real people. Real people who struggle and who suffer, and families who are impacted when this goes wrong. It’s not a very simple mathematical equation where we can just tilt the balance without particular consequence.

A lot of the analysis and criticism of the law is in the context of locking people out of the mortgage market. I could devote another whole lecture to the drivers of unaffordable housing, and indeed people have written whole books about it.

It was great to see the launch this morning of Australia’s Broken Mortgage Market by Mortgage Stress Victoria and CPRC, exploring options for actually making mortgages cheaper rather than loosening lending laws to enable people to take on expensive ones.

But responsible lending is not just applicable to mortgages. I’d like to have a look at the responsible lending regime through another lens, and that is through the lens of the deregulatory, pro-growth agenda proposed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book Abundance, which has apparently had a warm reception in parts of the current government and has been reflected in some aspects of the current domestic policy agenda.

Klein and Thompson wrote in the introduction to their book that in 1950 the median house price was 2.2 times the average annual income, and by 2020 it was six times the average annual income. An uncanny economy has emerged in which a secure middle-class lifestyle receded from many, but the material trappings of middle-class success became affordable to most.

In the 1960s it was possible to attend a four-year college debt free degree but impossible to purchase a flat screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was closer to the reverse.

They go on to talk about how America has been catastrophically successful in building a consumer republic. We have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house and a shortage of what is needed to build a good life.

To a certain extent, this is also true in Australia. As in the US, we’ve been guilty of tinkering with the demand side and not doing enough to address structural supply side issues, particularly in relation to housing affordability, although in Australia this has at least as much or more to do with taxation than it does with building regulations and other things covered in Abundance.

Klein and Thompson do reference the mountain of debt that has accompanied the rise of the consumer republic, but they don’t explore the issue much further.

Of course, there have been many contributing factors involved in the increasing availability of cheap consumer goods, from improvements in industrial processes to multinational trade, coupled with uneven national labour laws allowing exploitation and massive environmental degradation, to name a few.

But there is no doubt that the increasing availability of consumer credit has also played its part, particularly in the democratisation of access to goods that my parents and grandparents would never have dreamed of or saw a need for.

The credit that sustains this consumerism often leads to debt, which causes financial stress, negatively contributing to emotional wellbeing and individual productivity. It reinforces socioeconomic divisions because the poor pay more, including for credit, and it inhibits people’s ability to save from income for other things, to pursue long term goals such as saving for a house, education, travel or investment, with ramifications for social mobility and intergenerational wealth transfer.

Opponents of responsible lending obligations argue that what is required is improved financial literacy and greater personal responsibility for borrowing decisions. But this is to deny the structural reality and the context in which those decisions are taken.

In Johan Hari’s book Stolen Focus, he writes of the overwhelming forces behind the CHOICEs we make. Every time you put down your phone, there’s a thousand engineers behind the screen trying to get you to pick it up again. Every time you give up processed food, there’s a team of expert marketers trying to get you to crack and come back to it.

It’s the same with consumer lending options. They’re ubiquitous — in shop windows, at checkouts, online, bricks and mortar, on social media platforms, in personalised messaging.

I was searching for an old message on my phone recently and found a chain related to a line of credit I had when I purchased appliances for my kitchen. In between overdue notices saying “you’re late, you owe me this much, you’ve got to pay this much by this date” were a whole bunch of offers encouraging me to spend more and spend up big again on the available line of credit I had left from what I had paid back.

Data points and behavioural insights are accumulated at exponentially increasing rates, targeting people right in the soft belly of their vulnerable moments. These practices are harder to target by regulators than traditional advertising because they are less publicly visible and more akin to dark patterns than misleading and deceptive conduct.

I do note the continuing fact that we are not covering financial services in the unfair trading prohibition laws.

In ASIC’s recent enforcement action against Cash and Go, they allege that the lender retained consumer banking logins obtained during the application process to debit the accounts of people in default the moment any funds appeared.

At Financial Rights, we often had clients report that they felt they were targeted with credit offers at points where their accounts were low or even overdrawn. We could never actually establish that this had happened — it’s a very difficult thing to prove — but in a 2023 submission by Financial Rights and Consumer Action in relation to banning screen scraping, which still hasn’t happened, we were able to identify several lenders whose terms included the right to retain logins and access banking details throughout the life of the loan contract for a range of purposes.

These are logins taken for responsible lending purposes to view transaction data on your bank account, not your loan account with the lender, and their terms and conditions allow them to retain those details and use them for other purposes throughout the life of the loan. One lender specifically mentioned using them for the purpose of making credit offers, and that could equally mean using them to check that you are financially sound before making an offer.

Research in multiple countries now supports correlations between materialism — thinking happiness comes from accumulating stuff and superior status — and higher levels of depression and anxiety. They also suggest that extrinsic goals, goals pursued for rewards rather than being rewarding in themselves, cannot improve happiness even when those goals are attained.

Yet we are primed by advertising from birth to spend our way to happiness through material goods, clothes, beauty products and more recently surgical enhancements, because it keeps our consumer economy churning.

Credit is the grease that keeps the wheels turning. It is the bridge between people’s extrinsically motivated desires and their means. Consumer debt feeds our unsustainable economy and fuels the illusion of social mobility.

We are told that consumers need to exercise better judgment and take responsibility for their own financial decisions, but the success of our consumer product driven market economy depends to a great extent on the contrary.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a consumer advocate trying to explain why personal responsibility as a policy setting doesn’t work. We need to recognise that personal responsibility is preferable in some quarters precisely because it doesn’t work, and they know it.

Responsible lending obligations are hardly going to undo the unsustainable consumerist capitalist economy, but they are a valuable circuit breaker in the machine and well worthy of protecting.

Importantly, in the current political climate, dismantling them would get us no closer to the kind of abundance Klein and Thompson say they aspire to — tackling climate change, more affordable housing, higher median wages, cleaner air and mass public transport systems. Arguably, dismantling them moves us in the other direction.

Having said that, the pressure to wind them back is not going to go away. It will be a recurring theme. It’s just a matter of time, and it would be wise for us to be prepared and even willing to reexamine our orthodoxies, which I’ll return to later.

Right, enough on responsible lending for now.

Just briefly, that’s a short list of all the things we could be doing with our time other than consumer advocacy, and I’ve got to admit it’s pretty compelling. I look down there and go, yeah, I’d like to achieve all of that.

So why did I spend 30 years in consumer advocacy?

I think the first reason is that consumer activism is a really important part of fighting many of these things. And consumers, in order to be activists about how they spend and to choose to spend in ways that may impact the world, need to have proper consumer laws that prevent misleading and deceptive conduct and that promote transparency in product content and supply chain transparency.

Whether it be organic produce, fair trade, ethical investing or preventing greenwashing, it’s hugely important that we remain vigilant in keeping those things in place.

A lot of the work of my former colleagues at Financial Rights, CHOICE and other consumer organisations is at the cutting edge of the intersection of insurance, climate change and equity, and I think it’s important to recognise the importance of that work.

I think in terms of privacy, electronic surveillance, data sovereignty and AI use and impacts, there’s so much potential, so much that could and should be being done in the consumer activism space, if only we had the resources and the people to do it.

The second reason I think consumer advocacy is important is that it saves lives.

Andy gave a very powerful story of how product safety does save lives and has the potential to save more. But also, in the financial services space that I know so well, there are so many examples where people have told us, both metaphorically and very literally, that the work done to help them has saved their life.

There are so many people who contact the National Debt Helpline with financial issues that have accompanied or followed other traumatic experiences, such as serious illness, disability, family breakdown, catastrophic losses from extreme weather events or family violence.

For many people, it can be the final straw when their stores of resilience have finally been sucked dry.

Sometimes it is a sudden and devastating blow, like callers who have just realised they have lost an eye watering amount of money in a scam and have not yet told their partners, and the fear is palpable.

Talk of self-harm is a regular occurrence on those helplines, and I’m sure it is among the client offices of many face-to-face services. The people who do that work and talk people back from the brink do an absolutely incredible job, and we should recognise that.

Actually, before I do that, the third thing that I did want to call out has been mentioned by I think everyone who’s spoken today, and that is that the consumer issues we deal with usually involve the exploitation of existing structural inequity.

Most of the cases we see are about high interest rates that are not paid by those on good incomes and with substantial access to the public sector. Junk insurance products are most commonly sold to those who can least afford them. High-cost debt and poor-quality debt management options are only taken up by those with insufficient income to meet their liabilities.

People living in well served cities and regional centres with good connectivity are less likely to pay through the nose to find out their bank balance or lose their super because they can’t prove who they are. These are issues which magnify the effects of income and wealth disparity and entrench inequality through generations.

While it’s important to address income disparity and other structural issues head on, until those problems are solved consumer advocacy will remain key to mitigating their impacts.

Now I’m running out of time, so I’m going to have to make my lessons short.

The first thing I want to say is obvious, but important to emphasise: we are stronger together. I think the consumer movement has done an amazing job in recent decades of being a very united force.

But I want to make the point that unity doesn’t come easily, and it’s not just an attitude. It’s important that people put their egos aside and make sure that the outcome is more important than who achieved it or how we got there.

It’s also a practice. In order to make unity work, you’ve got to put in the effort and the resources to talking. You’ve got to have the pre meeting before you go and talk to industry or before you sit down at the government round table. You’ve got to be prepared to disagree respectfully behind closed doors.

You’ve got to have the post mortem where you ask: who said that? Why did they say that? Why did it go wrong? Should we change our minds? And I think sometimes we forget to do all of the groundwork that keeps that unity alive.

The next point I want to make is another obvious one, but it really has to be said: First Nations voices speaking for themselves is absolutely essential, and Jayde made that point really well.

What’s really important is making sure we allow First Nations advocates to speak for themselves, even when we disagree with what they may be saying.

The Save Sorry Business campaign, which Andy already referenced, led by First Nations advocates and backed by allies, was very successful where previous attempts to bring the plight of existing ACBF Youpla members to the attention of government and regulators had completely failed to gain traction.

Similarly, while it built on decades of advocacy by others, it was First Nations advocates linking Centrepay to ACBF Youpla that finally shifted the dial on Centrepay reforms.

They can also add incredibly powerfully to issues not only affecting First Nations communities, but many disadvantaged and marginalised communities.

Strategically, there are many examples where non Indigenous advocates are in difficult territory trying to dispute the views of a bank’s own Aboriginal Advisory Group, even when we think they’ve made a call based on incomplete information.

Similarly, it is difficult for non Indigenous advocates to refute the claims of predatory businesses when they accuse us of being racist and paternalistic. First Nations advocates can far more easily overcome these barriers and present a proud alternative First Nations case.

More importantly, First Nations advocates need to be fully empowered to speak for themselves and set their own agenda, because it is right and long overdue.

I’ve recently embarked on a new adventure studying botany, as many of you know, a field in which much has been written about the value and importance of First Nations led research and advocacy. I’d like to draw on some of that experience.

This is a quote from a Wiradjuri man who is also a paleoecologist living and working here in Naarm, although his family is originally from New South Wales. He did some fantastic work here, where he drew huge cores from under the Bolin Bolin Billabong, a billabong cut off from the Birrarung.

Using scientific techniques, he demonstrated how the land had been managed prior to the arrival of British settlers. Effectively, it went back to when the billabong was first cut off around 300 years ago.

Originally it was overtaken by rainforest. Then you see a very serious charcoal layer where burning was used to manage the land and return it to grassland. That encouraged animals that provided food, made the billabong more accessible as a gathering place, and enabled flooding so that the Birrarung would refresh the billabong with marine life that also served as food and kept it alive.

That continued for a very long time. From the pollen, food and residue in the cores, you can see it right up until more recent times, when it became urbanised, the river was choked back, and the billabong died and is no longer the thriving source of abundance it once was.

It’s fantastic work, but in describing it, Michael Shawn Fletcher makes some very valid observations about supposedly objective Western science. He talks about Western scientists looking for things and having their own biases reflected back at them, because it’s not quite as objective as we think.

He talks about how when the British arrived, they saw our lands, but they did not see us. They could not see past the missing fences and farmhouses or the absence of familiar farming equipment.

These are my words summarising the rest. They did not recognise grasslands managed by fire, yam fields enhanced by countless seasons of rock removal and replanting, trees with edible fruits sown by seed along songlines, or age-old aquaculture infrastructure such as the Brewarrina Fish Traps in New South Wales and the World Heritage listed Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in Victoria.

I think there are important lessons for us in that. When we were talking about Youpla and non Indigenous voices were in the lead, we spoke of a marginalised and disadvantaged people with little financial sophistication being duped and ripped off.

When First Nations voices took over, the narrative shifted to one of a resilient and financially responsible community making provision for the future, and fulfilling cultural responsibilities, and being let down by a government that lent its imprimatur to a shonky and exploitative operation through the Centrepay system.

It was a small, subtle but powerful shift, and it made all the difference.

I know I’m out of time and could go on and on with many examples, but when we set the hypothesis, we often just find what we think we’re looking for. It’s time to let people look for themselves.

Now, I’m on a zero. Does that mean I’m out of time or I’ve got a little buffer? I’ve got a little buffer. All right.

What of the many things I want to say should I say?

Look. One thing I want to say is that when it comes to responsible lending, I do think we have to be careful about showing any chinks in our armour. But we also need to actually take the time, while there is a lull, to actually look at the facts.

And I think as much as I have learnt that there is not, you can't just sit here and do a wonderful report about something and expect the world to change.

I think we've all learnt, to our detriment, that you can have a very logical and compelling case and get absolutely nowhere with it. I do think there is value in a good report to inform advocacy, but also to make us make sure we constantly retest whether what we're saying actually meets the facts and is current. And I think that in the responsible lending space, it would be really good to see someone do a really good analysis of the cases that we're actually seeing and where it's going wrong. Because I hear, I see the wonderful guidance of ASIC has, I see the evidence presented in cases like Money3 about what should be done. And then I look at the cases. I remember the Financial Rights Centre these are so far apart that it's laughable, really, in some cases. And I think it would be really good for us to ascertain where the real problems are, so that we can be confident next time around that we're not fighting for something we don't need and that we can actually look straight to and say, no, this better. this bit and this bit are important.

I think when we had the debate around the Buy Now Pay Later laws, there was a real opportunity for us as consumer advocates to actually go, OK, we think that regime should apply. The whole thing should apply. It's ridiculous that we're going to distinguish. But given the government is intent, sorry, on applying responsible lending light, what is the core that we think should have applied? And I think by not doing that, we allowed industry to kind of dictate the terms to a much larger extent than they should have been able to.

And I think that if we were able to look at the facts really carefully, something like HEM, we've often said, you can't use HEM, you can't replace actual expenditure with a benchmark like HEM. But the truth is a lot of the worst cases we've seen, they're not using HEM at all. They're using some other really dodgy benchmark that's completely inadequate.

So, let's look at HEM and say, well, when is HEM inadequate?

I think there are cases where it's not enough, but if we could actually articulate that in a way that would be more effective, and how to identify them from the others more clearly, then maybe we could actually present a case that is defensible and arguable. Because I know that the ideologues who are trying to wind back responsible lending because they don't actually want it to work are not going to be swayed.

But there are people within industry, people within government, people within the regulators that I think we could have a really constructive and sensible conversation with. But we can't do that without some really good facts.

So that was my little thing on actually doing deep research and being able to challenge our accepted truths.

So let me just go back before we get to John. The power of repetition.

You can just keep saying something often enough that people eventually accept it as truth.

I remember, and Colin Neave will remember this well, the days when Cat Lane, people remember Cat, used to turn up to nearly every EDM, ER function and ask when FOS was going to start making decisions on hardship rather than just looking at the process. And poor Colin had to fend her off every single time. And what we have in hardship now, not only is AFCA empowered to actually apply remedies, but hardship is so much. I mean, we like to criticise it, but we have so much more than we ever had.

It applies in so much broader situations. And we have a regulator that does reports that actually calls out where it's going wrong. Look at the stuff we would have dreamt of. We would have done it 20 years ago. It's been quite amazing. And I was talking to Julia today. I think Julia and my former colleague Alex Kelly first brought up component pricing in insurance in 2013 and were laughed at for suggesting such a thing. It was recommended in the flood inquiry. And there's at least one insurer in New Zealand who's doing it now.

We're having a very—well, not we. I've got to stop saying we. It's not me.

They're having a very constructive discussion at the moment with industry about ways in which it could be made to work. So, I think that—sorry, I've got so many bits of paper here now, I'm completely lost.

I think that if you're prepared to just keep saying something as if it's true, and particularly if you're prepared to actually let people think it's their idea and not have to hold out and get the credit for it, you really can make a difference.

I might skip over a couple of these, but I'm going to talk about trust and credibility being the source of our power. I think as consumer advocates, we are very dependent on being believed, both individually in our casework and systemically when we make statements. And I think that puts a really big responsibility on us to make sure that we don't say things that we cannot back up and that we don't have examples and evidence for. And that can be very much at the individual level. I know caseworkers struggle all the time. They're meant to put the client's best foot forward, but should they disclose this, should they disclose that? And I do think that's sometimes a tricky question, but I think you need to say to yourself, how bad would it look if they found out? Would it actually really undermine their trust, and would it create problems for other people in my sector who really need people to take what they're bringing to them at face value?

The don't make it about us was simply about sometimes I think that we forget and put forward things like examples of industry speaking to us really badly as reasons why they should be regulated. And I think, yep, that's annoying, they shouldn't do that, but we really need to keep the focus on the clients. We can present that material as if to say, if they're that rude to us, what's it like for a client actually trying to deal with these people?

But that's a different thing to making it sound like we're complaining because it's us.

All right. I couldn't help it. I just had to do this.

This is John Oliver from about 2011, I think, talking about payday lending. If you've never watched it, it's really worth a watch. Don't watch it if you're easily offended. Don't watch it if you're a payday lender. But otherwise, I thoroughly recommend it.

At this point in time, he's singing the cycle of debt to the tune of the Circle of Life from The Lion King and calling this little piece from a payday lender's lending manual. A recycling symbol for human misery.

It's fantastic. And I think sometimes we forget that humour can be a really powerful tool in our work.

What am I doing now? That's a little snapshot of my life.

I'm spending more time with my wonderful grandchildren who are here in Naarm. I am studying botany and every single chance I get; I get out in the bush to see it close up.

And I just wanted to take this opportunity to say in the last six months or so of my time at Financial Rights, I was working what we called compressed hours, which basically meant I worked just as long as I always had on every other day, but got recognised for it.

And then every second Friday, I had a day off. And I got, sadly, too close to the end into the habit of planning a really long bushwalk on those days off, somewhere within a two-hour sort of radius of Sydney. And I had spent my entire time at Financial Rights, particularly the last 10 years, I think, with my family, my partner, my kids, saying to me, Mum, you've got to slow down. You've got to rest. You've got to... You're just not functioning properly.

And I would arrogantly, I think, I just can't... You don't understand. I have to do this, and I have to do that. And then I found when I took these walks that not only did, I get more energised and better able to come back to work than I did, I did my best thinking, like actual thinking about myself.

I did my best thinking. I did my best thinking about my actual thinking about real problems and work stuff and was able to come back on the day afterwards or the week afterwards and do my job that little bit better.

So, I just wanted to make a call. Don't be dumb like me. Take some time to, like, feed your soul and get a bit of perspective.

Anyway, thank you for listening. Thank you.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you, Karen.

Just while you get settled, I think I speak on behalf of all of us when I say that humility and wisdom is an extraordinarily powerful combination. Thank you very much for all that you've had to say.

Just a few of the things that particularly echoed with me amongst many, many of the things that you said to begin where you ended, the value of time and taking time for ourselves, I think is something that probably resonates with every single person in this room. And I fear that there are all too many of us who are still in the pre Karen, not the post Karen mindset in that regard, but we will endeavour to take your advice.

Also, how our experiences and our biases shape how and what we see, I think, is something to reflect long on.

And lastly, but certainly not least, real people and families seeking a good life and the profound impact that hardship can have on the things that make a good life, family, relationships, physical and mental health, safety and security.

So, thank you very much for so powerfully reminding us of those things.

And just perhaps turning to that last point first, you put up the quote from Nadia on the screen, linking the incidence of extreme financial stress with relationship breakdown, family violence and health problems.

And I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit more about how your early work in relationship and family violence influence your direction or your approach to the work that you went on to do next.

KAREN COX:

Well, that's a question from left field.

Yeah, look, I did do a lot of work in family violence at Campbelltown Legal Centre before I ever came over to specialising in the financial sector.

And we did have at Campbelltown a small consumer practice in addition to doing the family violence list.

And I have enormous admiration for that. And for people who stayed doing family violence as a specialty because I think I had probably some sort of post traumatic syndrome for many years after that.

I used to have to get up to do the DB list on a Friday morning and I would vomit before I had to go to work because the work was so difficult and confronting.

And you had to deal with not only seeing people in court but running into perpetrators on the train station and down the street when you got your lunch.

And, you know, it's really, really hard work. And it's something you absolutely never forget.

But the other aspect was one of the early things I was involved in at Campbelltown was the Home Fund crisis in New South Wales, which if everyone here knows about Home Fund, it was basically a government scheme to try and get people into housing.

They went horribly wrong because, once again, they were tinkering with ways of manipulating loans and things to make people afford something they basically couldn't afford.

And we ended up with an absolute disaster.

And there were a group of people in what were called low start loans that started with really low payments and then their payments increased over time, which, one, meant they were locked in negative equity for years while they were in the low payment phase, but it also meant that if their incomes didn't increase in line with the modelling, they were in trouble.

And a lot of these people were single women who were on sole parent pensions and, of course, their income didn't increase. Well, both. Not very much.

And then eventually their kids turned 16 and left and they didn't actually qualify for the pension anymore and they had less income.

And then they were left with a debt because the house hadn't...

It was a disaster.

The other group of people were people who were trying to buy their own government housing, and the payments were so low that they were never actually making any inroad on it.

In fact, all that happened was instead of paying 20% of their income for public housing, they were paying 27% of their income for housing that they would never own but were now responsible for the maintenance of, which isn't that much different to the government being responsible, I have to admit, but, you know.

So, I was involved in that work and one of the things that really struck me were the family violence victims who were trapped because if they left that situation, they had this terrible negative equity situation.

Anyway, I don't know if that answers your question, Catriona, but yes, it's been a very powerful experience and has informed everything I've done since then.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you.

Thank you for the work.

Now, I've got other questions that I could ask. I will just observe that you are not usually a shy group of people and I don't yet have any questions on Slido.

I'm happy to keep asking the questions but I do encourage you, if you have them, to make use of the app.

I can see that some people are taking that advice right now.

But whilst that's happening, Karen, you spoke about regulatory backsliding and the risk that hard earned reforms are later weakened or undone until there's a need for those reforms effectively identified and you, usually after enough problems again, start manifesting.

And you touched on this in your remarks but particularly given that you went through more quickly than perhaps you intended some of your lessons, I just wondered if you wanted to talk a little more about ways out of that cycle, if you can see them or what you've found most effective in maintaining the momentum to keep those reforms in place.

KAREN COX:

Goodness me.

I don't know the answer to that question. It's a really hard question, Catriona.

Look...

I think that would be magic if we had the answer to that. I really...I don't know what it is.

CATRIONA LOWE:

I guess if I can perhaps reframe the question a little bit.

You put up a list of lessons

KAREN COX:

Yes

CATRIONA LOWE:

Which I found to be very powerful

Is that perhaps in part your answer to this question?

KAREN COX:

Yes.

I'm just trying to even remember which ones I didn't get to on that list. I think I'm sorry. I'm drawing a complete blank.

CATRIONA LOWE:

No, that's all right. I don't have the list with me either. I can't help you.

KAREN COX:

Actually, it's not in my notes.

It was only on the screen.

So, I can't even remember what there was in there that I didn't get to.

CATRIONA LOWE:

So, we've got one now come through in terms of from Slido.

And it is, how do you balance protecting individuals and organisations facing emerging issues with the need to inform regulators and decision makers about these problems so that people are aware of the issues in the system?

KAREN COX:

How do you balance that? We're literally talking about balancing casework, obviously, with policy work.

That's the age old question, isn't it?

I think it's really. It's really difficult. At Financial Rights, I think, over the years that I was there, we did prioritise client work a lot. But I think we still had quite a powerful policy team. They were a small policy team.

But I also spent many, you know, there was many a time I sat there admiring bigger policy teams in other organisations and going, oh, I don't know, have we got this right? Because it is so hard.

It really is that age old question, isn't it?

Do you keep people picking people up at the bottom of the hill or do you go and do something about the top of the hill even though in the meantime people are just going over? And the truth is, if you don't do that work, or at least a substantial amount of it, you don't have what you need to do the policy work. So you really have to be looking at both.

But I think it's almost unjustifiable to not at least try and do the policy work because you can't sit there with all that knowledge. And it's almost like an issue of trust that people have come to you and told you and you need to do something with that information and pass it on and try and get that systemic change.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you.

I can recall Nicole Rich writing a report about reclaiming community legal centres that made that point, I think, very powerfully as well, that you need to do both. Or all you're really doing is delivering cheap legal aid.

We've got another question, this one from Nadia Harrison from Mortgage Stress Victoria.

Karen, you mentioned chinks. Do you have thoughts regarding the role of responsible lending rules for those in debt already wanting to refinance, particularly big debts or mortgages?

KAREN COX:

This is such a big thing.

I've had a thing about this for a long time.

I'm sure Nadia is also particularly referencing a thing that I know is on a lot of people's minds, which is to do with women who are going through family breakdown and who are trying to hold on to a family home, particularly one that they've been paying for and are then running off against difficulties under the responsible lending regime in actually being qualifying to refinance and keep that loan.

And I do think that's a problem. But I think it's part of a broader problem, which is that we really need to see a difference between people who have existing debt and doing something that might help them deal more effectively with that debt and people who are taking on more debt.

I think that there is an argument for applying a much higher standard for giving people more debt than to actually looking at the situation where what they've essentially got is existing debt.

It's always bothered me slightly that we apply responsible lending to a kind of hardship situation. Because I'm like going, well, can we just give them a chance?

They've already got the debt. The debt's not going away. It's either keep the house or not. And what is the harm to be done by giving them a chance, particularly if they have been demonstrating some sort of repayment capacity?

So, I do think that is one of the very clear chinks in responsible lending. And it's also something that is a weakness that can have it shot down. It's one of those things that people can pull out to go, oh, responsible lending's terrible because it's doing this. Well, it doesn't need to do this because this is not the problem we're trying to solve.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you.

Now, I'm conscious that we have promised people refreshments, and I promise we will get to that shortly.

But we do have a couple more questions.

The first one, I can't resist asking you, do you think one of the drivers of responsible lending issues is that brokers are only remunerated when a loan is approved?

KAREN COX:

Oh, absolutely.

So that's potentially creating an incentive to proceed to client's financial position in a more favourable light to lenders.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have absolutely no doubt about that.

I think that clearly, it's one of the really difficult problems to solve, I think, because I think not only are brokers, but consumers are also addicted to free brokers, which is dependent on this whole model we've got where they are remunerated by the lender.

But while ever we have that model, it's really difficult. It's really difficult to get away from that basic incentive. I think it is a problem.

CATRIONA LOWE:

OK, I've got two very good competing last questions.

KAREN COX:

I hope they're not as hard as yours.

CATRIONA LOWE:

No, they're not. I think I will go with the one that's advice for all of us in this room.

And it says the question is, so many of us are in the pre Karen era of working harder and harder for our cause, if you were starting out as a consumer advocate again, what would you do differently to care for yourself?

KAREN COX:

Yeah. What would I do?

I have to admit, I'm struggling now and I have no one job now. I've got potentially lots of things that I'm doing and already I find myself waking up going, why did I say yes to that?

But I just think you have to make it a point from the very beginning to say that this job will not be at the cost of my health and that I will not do better by destroying myself. And find something that works for you to make you stick to that.

CATRIONA LOWE:

Thank you.

I'm sure that we could continue to talk to you all night, but as noted, we have made promises about refreshments.

KAREN COX:

I'm keen to have refreshments.

CATRIONA LOWE:

The other question which people can pick up in discussion was about reflections on the Banking Royal Commission several years on, which I'm sure is a topic you would be happy to talk about over a drink.

KAREN COX:

Aren't we due for another one of those?

CATRIONA LOWE:

We'll pick that up and other issues over refreshments.

Please join me again in thanking Karen Cox.

Thank you.

ANDY KELLY:

Thank you so much for that incredible lecture, Karen. You know, that's just a lifetime of learning.

So, I hope everyone was taking notes for that list, so you don't have to, you know, learn all of those things yourself, and I think we almost need a second lecture to hear. I saw a lot of paragraphs on your speaking notes that I fear you didn't get to but thank you so much.

So now I'd like to invite our CHOICE Interim CEO Fiona Jolly to the stage now to present a plaque to Karen in recognition of her tireless service and incredible legacy.

FIONA JOLLY:

Thank you.

KAREN COX:

Thank you.

ANDY KELLY:

Fantastic. And did we get the photos that we needed?

Thank you all so much for joining. I know everyone works so hard, and I thank you for your passion and continued dedication to the cause.

So please join us now at the Cameo Lounge. As I said, it's level one. Just go down the stairs. Just follow the crowd. You'll find it. Thank you so much.