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Ooops! I praised one of Australia’s banks while on a speaker’s panel last week at the Global Business Banking Summit in Sydney. Given all the heat coming on the banks from the Royal Commission maybe I should have been more cautious?

I was on the panel with Small Business Ombudsman Kate Carnell and economist Stephen Koukoulas discussing banks and small business lending. The room was full of bankers. More...

We’re mighty proud of our achievement in securing unfair contract protections for self-employed, small business people. It was a campaign we started in 2009. Here’s our campaign history. It was tough work.

The Australian Bankers Association strongly opposed us and we had several polite but unsuccessful meetings with them. They fought to kill the Bill in 2015, but thanks to some hard work and the Senate our campaign succeeded. The laws started in late 2016. More...

Yes, we have to feel sorry these days for employees who are forced to attend the staff Xmas party. All the merriment has changed.

First, employees have to undergo HR training and briefings on how to behave or not behave. Hugs are banned. Be careful who you smile at and how! No sitting on Santa’s lap. Conversations and greetings must be religiously diversified and non-judgmental. Champagne is replaced with sparkling non-alcoholic lolly water. Sorry, no jokes! More...

First we said that NAB had ‘trashed its own small business brand’. We said this in March this year because of NAB’s lie that it had made its small business finance contracts comply with the unfair contract laws.

Last week we expressed tentative praise for NAB after it had ditched its bad contracts and come up with new ones. NAB’s self-congratulatory PR seemed to indicate a major step forward. But we said we’d check its standard form contract first.  More...

More good news on the unfair contract front! But first some background.

Back around 2009, when we were talking to big businesses about having fair contracts, the chief legal counsel for one of the big banks said to us, “We’ll do what we’re made to do.” We realized then how difficult our campaign would be. But we succeeded. The new small business unfair contract laws we pushed for started at the end of 2016. More...

We’re mighty proud of the work we did, over close to a decade, to achieve the 2015 unfair contract laws protecting small business people. Here’s the tracking of our campaign from 2009. And it’s pretty fair to say that, without us, the laws would not have come into existence.

In that long struggle the banks consistently opposed the unfair contract laws. During that campaign one bank, NAB, was found by the courts to have engaged in ‘misleading and deceptive conduct’ in relation to a business mortgage. In our view NAB’s bank officers arguably behaved as they did because NAB’s small business finance contracts seemingly gave them unfair power. More...

Readers might recall our news alert headline, “we’ll only do what we’re made to do!” This was a senior counsel from one of the banks responding to our efforts about eight years ago asking them to support the unfair contract laws.

Then in March this year we said that NAB was trashing its own small business brand because it had, in our view, lied about changing its small business contracts to comply with the now operational unfair contract laws.  More...

The National Australia Bank (NAB) has been caught out, in our view, in bald-faced lying to its small business customers. In so doing, it has trashed its own brand. Again, our view is that, for small business people, NAB has just declared that it can’t be trusted.

The issue arises from NAB’s issuing arguably false advice to its small business customers that it has amended its loan contracts to comply with the new unfair contract laws. We obtained a copy of the NAB advice and its new 100-page contract and forwarded them to Robert Gottliebsen of The Australian, initially thinking that this was a ‘good news’ story. But NO!! More...

The Australian banks tried hard to stop unfair contract laws for small business people and they nearly succeeded. Fortunately, the banks failed. Now the laws have been proclaimed and come into effect on 12 November 2016.

Here’s the new Act. Here’s what makes a contract clause unfair.
Here’s ACCC information. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is now checking contracts. More...

The Banks are opposing unfair contract protections for small business people. Here’s their submission. But NAB were recently found to have engaged in  "…misleading and deceptive conduct … through its bank officer…" and had a mortgage guarantee set aside.

Extracts from the case National Australia Bank Limited v Smith [2014] NSWSC 1605 (13 November 2014) appear below— More...