Newcastle Bus Credit Union held its place on the financial scene of the Hunter region of NSW from 1963 till 2005. It wasn’t always known as Newcastle Bus Credit Union of course. It was registered in 1963 as Belmont Government Credit Union with a bond to serve the bus drivers of Newcastle.
In 1983 its name was changed to Newcastle Bus Credit Union, which it kept until 2002 when it became Hunter Coast Credit Union. Today, if you stayed with Hunter Coast Credit Union all this time you would be a member of Beyond Bank.
In the first issue of CUSCAL’s Directions Magazine for the new millennium (January 2000), a profile of Newcastle Bus Credit Union was included. The article was centred on an interview with the General Manager of the credit union, Elaine Murphy. At the time the credit union was going through a period of “uncertainty and pessimism” after the closure of BHP’s Newcastle steelworks. With a membership of only 1,680 you can understand why. Murphy was quoted as saying:
“Many people will face a change in their financial situation and a lot of contractors will be out of work, and unemployment is fairly high here anyway. While it doesn’t affect our membership, the uncertainty in the region could mean that people are reluctant to borrow as much”.
Not that it was all doom and gloom at Newcastle Bus Credit Union at the turn of the millennium. They had just installed their first ATM in a partnership agreement with another Novocastrian credit union and they were getting out and about via other projects. Directions Magazine noted that “Newcastle Bus sponsors a number of sporting teams, raises money for Camp Quality through a Christmas raffle, and donates money to a range of causes including children living with cancer and the MS Read-a-thon”.
