'Arrogant' banks leaving bush residents at the bus stop

In the West Australian wheatbelt town of Carnamah, some locals could be forced to take a 120km bus ride to the closest bank and wait for two days before a return service can bring them home. The town’s post office should be an alternative banking facility after Westpac closed a decades-old branch in February, but its 1932 architecture is not wheelchair accessible. Seasonal workers critical to the grain hub’s harvest season can’t open new bank accounts and receive their wages without a branch. The local council says Westpac would have known about these “disturbingly negative” impacts on the farming region if it was obliged to do a social impact assessment before it closed the last bank in town. In a recently-published submission to the Senate inquiry examining the increasing closure of branches across regional Australia, Carnamah’s local council said banks had a duty to rural communities. It is one of nearly 300 submissions to the inquiry from country communities lamenting branch closures, which disadvantage farmers, small businesses, the elderly and vulnerable people. “It was the arrogance of the bank just to come up and say ‘we’re closing’ and no conversation beyond that that really irked the council,” Carnamah Shire’s chief executive Robert Paull told AAP. Westpac told the council the branch was serving an average of two customers per hour, mostly for transactions that could be performed at the post office. The bank said there were six larger transactions each month and business was down 18 per cent since 2020. But the council’s submission said Carnamah was one of many growing agricultural communities driving Australia’s economy. “Only when the banks are made accountable to their communities and customers will the banks be less keen to close branches at a whim.” The Local Government Association of Queensland told the committee ready access to cash was essential in Australia’s most disaster-prone state, where extreme weather causes power, phone and internet outages. Isaac council area, in central Queensland, had only two face-to-face banking services in an area the size of Tasmania, the submission said. “That is entirely unacceptable for a region that is home to over 22,000 residents and more than 12,000 non-resident workers ... in the 28 coal mines that produce around 80 per cent of the nation’s metallurgical coal exports,” its submission said. Indigenous Business Australia urged the inquiry to recommend banks strengthen their engagement with First Nations people before closing a regional branch. “Since colonisation, exclusionary policies and practices have created barriers and limited the ability for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to leverage assets, grow wealth and reach economic independence,” it said. “The closure of regional bank branches disproportionately impacts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, businesses, and communities, further excluding them from basic services that other Australians take for granted.”