Our first shared oral history interview of 2024 is with Kevin Dupe. Kevin’s career in mutuals began in the 1980s with the Australian Federation of Credit Unions Ltd (AFCUL) where he worked as the National Government Affairs Manager. Some of what Kevin relates about his time there is quite extraordinary.
Kevin was CEO of Regional Australia Bank for 20 years and retains a link to mutuals as a board member. The full transcript of our talk with Kevin will be available on our website soon but in the meantime, here are a couple of snippets from the interview. First here is Kevin is talking about getting the job with AFCUL:
I got the job. It was National Government Affairs Manager, very fancy title, but it meant I got to do all the things he [General Manager, Graham Loughlin] didn't want to do. He would do the bigger picture things like the enabling legislation, and later the credit code, and he and a fella called Dave Taylor worked on that. I would do tax file numbering, privacy, dealing with people like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, so I got a lot of the routine things, but I got to deal with the bureaucrats, and I really understood them because I'd been one for 14 years and they liked me so I could get a lot more for us out of the bureaucrats than he could get out of Ministers and he really appreciated that. We got a lot of concessions particular to credit unions, in relation to things like tax file numbers and privacy. More in terms of extra time to comply and a sort of broad understanding that we were different, and we were smaller.
While Kevin was with Community First Credit Union (now Community First Bank) they helped a section of Sydney’s Korean community begin Korean Community Credit Union in 1993 via what was known as the ‘incubator model’. Here is Kevin talking about that experience:
It started before I got there. It was based around the church. I think it might’ve been Baptist, Korean Baptist. But anyway, a lot of Koreans in Sydney are self-employed, particularly in the cleaning and window cleaning industries. And they are very religious, and many go to the particular church that we were in a relationship with. So, we had a guy Joseph Kim who was a pastor. And he was also our business development person with a Korean incubator and it grew quite strongly. The trouble was we didn't put the capital aside in a separate balance sheet. It should have actually had a dedicated balance sheet. It had to be part of a consolidated balance sheet. When the time came when they wanted to leave, we couldn't afford to let them go. The capital that they’d accrued, we hadn't maintained their capital at the same sort of rate. So they got very disillusioned and just went, I don’t know where. It was a disappointing end, but the model was very creative, of incubating. And that may come again, down the track. It's possible that we could do that again, if we wanted, I mean Teachers Mutual Bank have spawned all the different brands but I’m not sure that’s the same intent, they never intend to hive them off. But it was innovative, and it was good to be a part of.
