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Farmers affected by floods facing loan difficulty or default could ask their bankers to give them 1 year’s complete repayment holiday followed by 2 years of interest only payments to aid recovery. That should be put in a formal letter of variation signed by the bank and borrower which does not vary any other term or the previous loan agreement.

Borrower Beware – one bank, in making a variation put a clause in the middle of the variation agreement reducing the term of the loan from 15 years to 15 months, spelling disaster for the farmers. Never trust the bank!

Bank multi-billion-dollar profits can well afford to support flooded farmers. In fact all farm loans should have a clause that allows a similar repayment variation after any flood, fire or drought with a proviso that every quarter of the loan term ( 4 years in a 16 year loan, 7 years in a 28 year loan) the scheduled repayments must have been made. That gives farmers flexibility in bad times and allows them to make it up in good times, whilst keeping the bank happy that the loan will be fully repaid on time.

Under no circumstances should any flood-affected farmers let the bank sell them up because they cannot make loan repayments on time.

If they try give me a call at GBAC on 0248417496.

Greg

Farm loans are much like farm fences. The make buying or running a place easier. They take a good bit of work to set up and if you look after them well they are very effective at doing the job.

But if you neglect them, just like fences, your finances can get all boxed up just like your stock can.

When a branch falls across the fence or a roo knocks it down, the faster you fix it the better.

With a loan, when a fire flood or drought makes payment difficult, the faster you get onto your bank and explain that the better. When commodity prices, government decisions or sickness strikes the same applies.

When the cattle know where they are headed they usually go there with little trouble and when the bank knows what you are doing it usually goes along with little trouble too.

It is when the cattle have no idea of where you want them to go and the bank has no idea why you missed a payment, that problems set in.

If you manage your bank as well as you manage your stock you will mostly have little trouble until you loan is cleared and you have the title deeds back safe and sound in your own hands.

If you do have problems give me a call at GBAC , 0428 417 496 and if I can offer a constructive suggestion over the phone I will. If you need more help than that we will be happy to give you our professional help as we have done for farmers throughout Australia since banks were de-regulated.

You probably know that banks are no longer the source of good financial advice and customer care. Today loyalty is out the door and everything is about profit for the bank and multi-million dollars salaries for bank executives, extracted from customers in fees and interest.

Banks trap farmers into unaffordable loans then financially abuse them, applying the heat of the old branding iron while the borrower is held firm in the cradle. Never be bullied by the bank and don’t think debt problems are your fault. It is the banker who is the expert in loans and does it every day. It is not the farmer who takes a mortgage loan once or twice in a lifetime that has the expertise.

I’ve run my own sheep and cattle and battled with my share of debt as well as running my own national  Chartered Accountancy practice which I converted to a bank debt consultancy when banks began to rob farmers.

Always happy to help where I can. 0428 417 496

Greg Bloomfield

How you judge a bank is very much dependent on what it is you want from the bank.

If one is investing in the bank by buying shares on the Australian stock exchange then two major factors are relevant. The first is the profit that the bank earns and the second is the net assets that back the share price. It’s prospects of earning in the future will also be relevant to how its share pricing is judged.

But if one is wondering whether it is a good bank with which to put one’s banking business or from which to borrow, then the lower the profit earned by the bank the better it is likely to treat its customers.

Best Bank is Bendigo Community Bank

I deal with most major banks in Australia and the one I have found to be by far the best is Bendigo Bank and specifically its Community Bank which tends to share some of its profits with the local community. Customers can own a share in their bank and that is a good investment because it earns money and respect. The service I receive from Bendigo Bank is so far ahead of the service I receive from the big four banks, that it is impossible to really compare them.

When I walked into NAB a while back I realised that I was not very important to them. Staff turnover is so great that there is no continuity of capable people in the branch with which I could deal. I have seen alleged appalling behaviour by a nab broker that does not seem to worry the bank too much. Commonwealth still looks after customers very well and does not seem to lend customers into trouble as much as it did when banks were first deregulated. ANZ has been good at executive level dealing with bad conduct that has damaged customers, but its local branch was so hopeless to deal with that I just gave up and left. Trying to deal with ANZ credit cards over the phone today was just a nightmare. Its phone service is as bad as its in-branch service. Computers doing the job people should, in order to cut costs and services to maximise profits.

Westpac offers ridiculously low interest rates on term deposits to existing customers compared to new ones, so we give it a miss for clients who have banked with it for years. I don’t deal with it now either.

When I walk into the local Bendigo Community bank most of the tellers greet me by name. They told me years ago that their aim was to know each customer’s name by the third time the customer came into the bank.

The service from Bendigo is absolutely exceptional and I cannot fault it. When negotiating with its subsidiary Rural bank its negotiators were again light years ahead of the counterparts of the big four banks and treated the customers for whom I was negotiating with great respect and fairness.

Profit is important but so is caring for people

Today I read in the paper that the stock market was disappointed in Bendigo and Adelaide’s profit margins. As a person who has bought a very small number of Bendigo and Adelaide bank and big four bank shares, I was not in any way disappointed. In fact I was delighted, because I knew that the reason the bank had not produced the gigantic multi-billion-dollar profits of the big four was that it cares more about looking after  customers, than it does about making money out of me. It does not pay its CEO $1m a month like some.

Competition is the key to the best banking service

People don’t ask me to advise them on which bank to bank with. When new clients come to me to find a bank loan I use our Loan Apps to contact every bank that I think will help the customer. Then the customer can negotiate with each bank that responds so that they get the very best loan that suits them and a banker with whom they are happy to work. It is better for everyone who is looking for a loan to ask every bank that is likely to be interested and then play one off against the other to end up with the very best loan. That is a system I developed in 1987 when banks were first deregulated and decided to put their profits a long way ahead of their customers. I remember one of the first people to use our Loan App system saved $300,000 in interest on their loan.

So, as with many things in life it is what one is seeking to gain that determines the criteria by which one should judge the various options. The fields in which I deal are banking and politics. In both, that system of judging is vitally important if one is looking for the best outcomes. Today many people choose the bank simply because they have been with it for years and it is not too bad. In exactly the same way many people vote for the same political party because they have been voting for it for years and it is not too bad.

In both cases I have seen that people get better results when they judge critically on actual past performance rather than tradition. Joining the Australian Voters Network puts most people into a winning position with banks and government due to the support they receive.

Prior to March 1986 the only voice Australian voters had to government was via their local MP. Even if those MPs were inclined to do what was asked, they often did not have the power to do so. Voters became very disillusioned with democracy. The “Yes Minister” bureaucracy ruled with an iron fist. Banks were about to be de-regulated and do the same to customers.

Then in March 1986, a Chartered Accountant by the name of Greg Bloomfield launched the Votergram service. That allowed every individual Australian and organisations of Australians to directly contact each and every Member of any Parliament in Australia. Suddenly “government by the people, for the people” became a reality.

Big business has over 1,000 highly paid lobbyists working full time to make government do what it wants and it spends millions or perhaps billions making that happen.

Yet for a relatively small $120 any Australian can still directly reach and influence each Member of Parliament to persuade them to do what is needed.

That way Australians have in the past got an operation or hospital bed for a sick or injured relative, respite care for someone disabled, a new facility for their child’s or their own school. Or on a broader scale they have had government enact environmental legislation, food safety laws, cut the road toll by 65%, stop smoking on commercial airlines, fund community pharmacies to the extent of $1.5 billion a year and keep the NSW snowfields available for community ski lodges.

What Greg and the Votergrams organisation did not know in 1986 but does know now, is that democracy depends on continuous input from the voters themselves. That is because they have elected to parliament “Representatives” not “leaders”, though some MPs with leadership skills will become leaders. To represent the voters well, each representative needs to know what is wanted because if they do not know what people want, they cannot do it.

Because parliament is a voting forum even though not all decisions require a vote, it is essential for voters to contact every MP individually to ensure that they do know what that voter wants done.

Democracy is a magnificent system of government, but unlike a monarchy or dictatorship, it allows  and depends on voter input to guide what it does.

If you do not do that, someone else will and their goals may be strictly personal gain rather than a fair society. Australian Government can be and is, guided by those voters who use Votergrams.

Politicians are not the rogues painted by the media to whip up controversy. They are ordinary Australians trying to do the very difficult job of pleasing the vast majority of 17 million people.

You can do your bit by using Votergrams to tell them what you, your community or Australia needs in respect of any matter or issue. Your power to guide government comes from your ability to vote in elections and to influence the votes of others where they count most.

Ask the bank why it wants to approve your loan within 10 minutes. The likelihood is that your loan will be approved by a computer with very little human input. And you know what happens with computers when they play up!!! The fact is that the bank’s computer cannot tell with any accuracy whether or not you can cope with the loan for which you have applied. To some extent that is because the computer only gets to receive a small bit of information about you. The bank will rely on its ability to sell up your home, farm or business if you do not obey all the loan conditions it has signed you up to.  Aussie Loan Solutions are designed to put you on the winning side of the contract.

The real approval that is needed is for you to approve the lender as someone who will treat you fairly and to approve the loan contract terms as terms that you feel are fair and reasonable and with which you can comply. There are many unknowns in every long-term loan transaction, whether you are seeking a business or farm loan with a term of perhaps 15 years or a home loan with a term of 30 years. Those factors include age, health, weather, your income, family circumstances, the national economy and government regulations. For these reasons it is more important for the borrower to do the approving than for the bank. Whenever I have needed to borrow money I have been focused on the need to get the money and under those circumstances it is easy to forget to do my own “due diligence” to see that the loan is going to benefit me more than it benefits the lender.

The reason that bankers want to approve your loan in under 10 minutes is that they believe that will prevent you from going and checking out what is on offer from other lenders. When banks were first deregulated I invented an app we called a Moneygram which enabled borrowers to check with a number of banks to see what sort of loans were available. Today we call them Loan Apps and they are just as effective now as they were then. There is nothing like having three or four banks offering you the loan that you want, to enable you to see what they are offering, checkout the terms in each of their loans and decide which of them you feel will treat you most reasonably. There is only one time you can do that effectively and it is before you take out the loan and spend the money. Once you have taken and spent the loan you are captive to the lender usually for a very long time. You would be staggered at the loan terms we have discovered in some borrowings that have caused massive distress to the borrowers and threatened their mortgaged properties and their lives.

We have developed specifically Australian loan solutions and these can apply at the beginning when you are applying for an exciting loan to help acquire a substantial asset for the future and can also be applied when such a loan has turned into a life destroying debt that is driving you to despair. It is not necessary to take out bad loans or to suffer from overwhelming debt. But it does take some time effort and money spent on solving the problems. Problems mostly do not just go away and financial problems tend to get worse over time. Therefore the time to call for help with a financial problem is the moment it appears as a problem.

In the 35 years that we have helped people all over Australia deal effectively with their debts and borrow better than the average loan, we have learned a great deal. Perhaps the most important lesson is to understand that you do not need to “trust” the lender that you have approached. Trust is akin to laziness in that it expects the other side to do your homework. The banker’s job is to earn the maximum profit for the bank and if you look at the multi-billion-dollar profits of Australian banks you will see that they are very successful and you will realise that most of that profit has come at the expense of the bank customers. Your goal however is to get the very best loan possible that will enable you to own and operate an asset that will increase in value for the future. Loans are very long term. It therefore pays to check them out very carefully before you give them your seal of approval, because whatever is in that loan contract you are likely to have to live with.

When you want to enjoy good Aussie loan and debt solutions please get in touch and see whether we can make it work better for you.

We’ve lived in our house for 55 years. Most home owners will live in their “forever homes” for that sort of time too.

For a first home buyer where the land is worth $1.5m the current NSW stamp duty is around $67,500 paid over a 30 year mortgage @ $2,250  year.

The rate could easily be halved to make it $34,000 .

Under the new government proposal, annual Tax on Housing  for a first home buyer of a property with $1.5m of land would be: $400 plus .3% of $1.5m ie $4,500 = $4900 a year. Over 55 years they would pay about $270,000, or 4 times as much as they do now.

What a clever political strategy, painted as lowering the cost of housing by increasing it.

For richer people buying a home with a land content of $3m, stamp duty would still only be $150,000, paid over their mortgage term. $120,000 less!

The Housing Tax is heavily biased against younger, poorer people in favour of richer older people.

Good for government, bad for voters. A real win for property developers as the initial home cost plus tax is lower and  buyers will probably not think of  the nearly $5,000 a year in tax they will be paying for life on top of their mortgage.

I urge young and poorer people wanting to buy their first home to join Voters Network for lower, not higher home cost. There are many ways to cut home costs. Voters Network can help buyers understand them.

Greg Bloomfield, retired FCA, CPA

If you have a business or bank loan, and you submit your tax return through a tax agent don’t frighten the bank with a tax return that shows you are losing money.

Taxable Income
Taxable income comes from the receipts that the Tax Act says are taxable in that year less the expenses that the Tax Act says are deductible against that income in that year. One of the first things I learned when I started work with Price Waterhouse as a junior was that the tax figures did not necessarily reflect the profit of a business or a farm. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the biggest businesses and agricultural companies in Australia as well as running my own property development and equipment hire businesses, a Merino Sheep property in the centre of NSW and a beef cattle property in the Southern Tablelands as well as my national Chartered Accountancy/CPA practice and my bank loan solutions consultancy.

Net Profit
Profits come from what you receive minus what you spend running your farm or business during the year in question. That sounds the same as taxable income but in fact can be very different. The Tax Act is a political football doing  favour to some and disadvantaging others. Sometimes the accountant will burn the midnight oil to show that as far as the Tax Act is concerned, you earned very little taxable income during the year, while a true set of financial statements might show that you earned a fortune.

The Bank
The figures you show the bank up front should reflect the actual profitability of your enterprise and then be reconciled back to the tax return and assessment if you want to maintain a frank and truthful relationship with your bankers. They then are fully informed of how you a really going. It often happens when they are only given a tax return, that they get the impression that you are going broke and may not be able to repay your debt on time.

EOFY purchases
Many farmers and business owners heed the retailers and buy tax deductible equipment and supplies in the latter part of June just to get a tax deduction. To the bank that can make the figures look like a disaster. If you do that then your accountant should, in your Profit and Loss Statement, reduce the expenditure for the year by the cost of the stock of unused items that you purchased at year end to get the tax deduction. Again that allows the bank to see your true trading result instead of what your tax accountant or the EOFY sales pitch encouraged you to do.

Honesty pays
Always be honest with your bankers. But do get a qualified specialist accountant like those at GBAC to review your final financial statements for presentation to the bank. If you have had a bad year, and some will have this year, that specialist will spend some time carefully explaining what caused it and how it will improve in the years ahead. That particularly applies if you have been affected badly by Covid, drought, bushfires or floods . Banks will usually go out of their way to help you when you do the right thing and explain your circumstances to them.

Don’t panic about interest rate rises on your loan repayments. Quietly check the impact. One solution is to cut other spending. Another is to extend the loan period to keep payments the same. Another to refinance elsewhere. There are always reasonably good solutions to loan problems.

GBAC Advisory Pty Ltd deals with them every day. It is just the media that strikes fear into borrowers hearts.

For those business owners or farmers wanting the best finance or refinance   the business loan app  or the farm loan app make it easy.

It may also be time to review your budgets and see what expenses can be lowered without damaging revenue or what could be increased to make a far bigger contribution to revenue.

The certainty of interest rate rises has been discussed in the media for years, so as unpleasant as it may be for borrowers and pleasing as it may be savers, it should not be a surprise.

PLAN

So what can be done about it after I have borrowed. Lenders have been encouraged to ensure before approving a loan, that the borrowers could easily cope with a possible rise in interest rates. On top of that bankers have been skilled for hundreds of years in assessing the ability of borrowers to service and repay loans. So borrowers would be entitled to expect that the bankers carefully examine how easy it would be for them to cope with an interest rate rise. If the bank felt that they could not do so it would surely have not offered them the loan.

If the interest rate causes some borrowers to worry that they may not be able to cope with their loan in the event of further rises, they should immediately develop a plan for how they can cope with the debt. If they don’t they stand a chance of defaulting on the loan and losing the security property as well as any payments they have already made. The best solution to a current lender increasing the loan cost significantly, is to move to a new lender who is more likely to offer attractive terms in order to lure new borrowers into its client base. Of course any new lender will look at the credit record of the person approaching it for refinance. Therefore a borrower contemplating a future change in lender should make a very determined effort to keep payments with the current lender right up-to-date and if possible get one or two payments ahead. If they can do that for perhaps a year they should be in a far better position to negotiate a lower cost loan with a new lender at the end of that year.

 

This is not a time for knee-jerk reactions in response to a very small increase in the interest rate. This is a time for long-term planning and that applies whether the loan is for a home purchase, a business or a farm.

LIAR LOANS and DEBT TRAPS

Today’s media carries a large story which claims that a significant number of borrowers have told lies in their loan applications. However the head of ANZ counters with a claim that bankers are required to verify the information provided in support of loan applications. There is a big difference between telling a blatant lie like “I earn $100,000 year” when in fact I earn $50,000 a year. But finance is not everyone’s cup of tea. Many people are highly skilled at their trade, profession or job but are not in any way skilled in matters of money. So it is very easy for them to make mistakes. For instance when asked how much money they spend weekly on any particular group of expenses, many would have absolutely no idea. They simply take a guess at what it might be and that guess can be a long way out. The bankers however have access to massive amounts of data on what people in each pay bracket and suburb and age are likely on average to earn. They have teams of experts in finance and access to well tested computer software for analysing loan application data and situations where defaults occur. So when people talk about “liar loans” it is more likely that the borrowers simply did not know the correct answer and either made their best guess or just said anything in order to not ignorant.

What is far more likely is that bankers and their brokers are deliberately lending money to people who simply cannot afford the amount that they are borrowing or are so close to the wind that the slightest increase in interest rate would financially stress them. This is quite a common practice with moneylenders including Australia’s banks and it is a very profitable.

Many readers may have read the comment by Mr Ken Henry, former Treasury Secretary and chairman of NAB, who said that “the only responsibility businesses should have is to maximize profit.”

The debt trap helps banks maximize profit, because it locks borrowers in and allows debts to be increased by unpaid interest, which allows penalty interest to be charged and makes the interest and debt grow even faster.

The implication of what Mr Henry said is very important for borrowers to understand. It is up to them, not the bank, to make sure that they are treated fairly. Many people treated badly by the bank or a lender tend to go to Afca, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority in the hope of receiving justice. The fact that Afca is owned by the banking and finance industry, should indicate to those concerned about their bank debts that they are unlikely to get very much help from Afca.

Robo-advice, you’ve got to be kidding!!

When banks were deregulated I converted my Chartered Accountancy practice into a banking consultancy GBAC. That was over 30 years ago and in that time we have assisted borrowers all over Australia to obtain better loans, increase their earnings to better service their loans, to have banks compensate them financially for mistreatment and negligence and to enable them to get refinance or original loans by making banks compete with one another for the business, so that the borrower gets the best deal.

For businesses to obtain the best competitive loan we have provided a Business Loan App to attract a number of banks to put forward what they can offer by way of affordable and suitable loans. Then the borrower can choose the best. Having the best banker available as well as a loan that is suited to the business, is one of the ways for businesses to thrive.

Being myself a 4^th generation farmer, familiar with the various unique factors that influence farming profitability, we also provide a Farm Loan App so that farmers will obtain suitable loans instead of the very inappropriate ones they frequently end up with. From all over Australia farmers bring their loan problems to us for suitable solutions. We have some unique tools to give farmers a fair go.

As soon as banks were deregulated in 1987 it became apparent that they would put ultra-high profits way ahead of service to customers. However we have seen that those who come through the GBAC borrowing facilities put their own profits ahead of the bank’s. Many banks use computers to assess customers for loan. It is no wonder their customers get treated so badly. Whilst my firm has been computerised since 1972 I can assure readers that in GBAC we give a personal service and do not in any way adopt the modern virtual robot trend, to deal with our clients.

If you don’t want to be accused of obtaining a “liar loan” or to be caught in a “debt trap” from which you cannot escape, please give GBAC a ring and join our long line of satisfied clients who are profiting from their loans, rather than simply boosting bank profits and their CEOs’ multi-million dollar pay packets.

 Debt Stress

Today’s media also carried a large story based on a UNSW study devoted to the number of people living in certain areas who are said to be under increasing debt stress. The article did not define debt stress. Anyone feeling unable to cope with the level of stress that they find themselves under should seek helpful solutions.

Financial counsellors can be very good at helping stressed borrowers to plan their way out of stress and getting the bank to back off a bit. However, it is important to know that they are partly funded by the banks, so if the bank has caused more serious grief, cheated or defrauded the borrower of large sums of money, the counsellors are unlikely to be able to help. GBAC really began on referrals from Rural Financial Counsellors who could not go past a certain point in helping borrowers. We, on the other hand, are happy to help borrowers recover what has been stolen from them by bankers in the scale discovered by the Banking Royal Commission. We are quick to report delinquent bankers to Federal Parliament with a suggestion that the banking licence of that lender should be cancelled.

The earlier that stress can be dealt with the better. Anyone borrowing who does not have very substantial income and liquid assets is well advised to make debt reduction the first priority in their lives. When my wife and I bought a house after years of searching to find anything that was affordable, we eventually found what we wanted at our price. Then, with no money of our own, but $1,000 from the government managed to borrow 95% with housing loan insurance. We stopped going out anywhere that cost. No coffee shops, movies, restaurants, take-away or holidays were on our agenda for the first 5 years. Our furniture was all second hand gifted. The car was second hand, small and oldish. It was tight, but we had a home. It is a reasonable model to consider because we learned to live light and eventually our income rose and the repayments became easier.

It was really forced saving. In our first 3 years of marriage we rented and saved nothing. From then on we saved hard in home repayments which gave us a roof over our head and potential superannuation that was completely under our control and not subject to substantial management fees.

If borrowers come to us stressed over a home, business or farm loan, we suggest that we do our research on their finances, then calm the lender down with assurances that can be met. That gives us time to refinance the borrowers through our loan apps with the very cheapest and best loans available and suitable to those borrowers. Unlike mortgage brokers, we do not take any commission. We generally persuade the new bank to give the borrowers a fee reduction from the money not paid in broker’s commission.

If a borrower just ignores a bank’s plea to get a loan back in order, that annoys the bank and it gets madder and madder the longer the default continues. At that stage the good relationship has broken and it will never be repaired. Nobody can afford to have a large loan with a lender who dislikes them. It can cost the borrower dearly. Once problems arise, deal with them, then once they are sorted out move to another bank that will have no memory of any disputes.

At GBAC we do not handle a large volume of borrowers. We just work hard to look after the ones who come to us. We are happy to invest substantial time and effort into each person, because borrowing is dangerous and we do not believe that is fair for banks to bully borrowers as they so often do.

Most banks are good if the borrowers follow the loan terms to the letter. The problem is that most borrowers do not even read or understand those loan terms. When we help anyone borrow we work through the loan terms with them to ensure they are happy with them. If not, we ask the bank to delete the offending clauses. Mostly they will if it is fair to them too.

Remember that a MORTgage is literally a “death pledge”. The lender is deadly serious about getting the money back in the agreed time frame and being paid interest on time too. Talk to them or us if there is a problem. Talking takes the heat out of dangerous loan situations.

Because democracy is a society in which voters are key.

They elect representatives (MPs) to a forum called parliament which controls the government.

Because they vote to choose who represents them, their voices carry great weight in parliament – if done politely, persistently and persuasively in the privacy of parliament rather than in public.

Businesses, banks and public servants do not have to show members of the public any consideration because members of the public have no authority over them whatsoever.

In the 1980s FairGO discovered that people being abused or neglected by government could get very effective help and satisfaction from parliament.

It had been found that many people had not received help when they wrote to the minister or contacted their local Member of Parliament (MP).

A special communication system called a Votergram was invented to take a person’s request to every Member of Parliament. It was an overwhelming success.

It was discovered that the more people who contacted the MPs on a given topic and the more good reasons for change that were put forward, the more the politicians would do.

It was also discovered that the quality of the message and strategy behind it made a big difference to success.

Voters Network was formed to assist interested voters to influence government easily and effectively by Votergram.

Voters Network Members are supported by skilled political persuaders in their requests for government assistance whether on personal matters (eg Hospital treatment or bank loan), community matters (eg school facilities) or matters of national significance (eg climate change). Membership is free.

Voters Network has no party-political affiliations or favourites. Its overriding concern is “Fairness for all”. It helps voters deal with THEIR issues, not its own. It empowers voters, not itself.

Voters Network is the place for nurses, doctors, patients, relatives, students, parents teachers and headmasters to come together to guide government to sensible, effective and fair policies and programs to make our hospitals and schools provide the best possible services to the community.

It is the place for all interested Australians who wish to see our society grow as a nation with a focus on fairness for all. Australians need to lead the people they elect as their parliamentary representatives, support and work with them to achieve the desired results.

MPs are not all-powerful kings, queens or dictators leading their people. They are there to work for and with the Australian people and in particular the people who elected them. They are very helpful.

Without that prompting from the people involved in delivering or receiving those services, improvement will not happen. More than with fairness and justice, democracy works like a tug-o-war with those who do most to persuade the politicians, receiving the most attention. That is not surprising as politicians depend on pleasing voters for re-election. But many rich and powerful organisations compete with the voters for political favours, in order to increase their wealth.