Page 870 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 25 July 1989
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is a good indicator; it is a litmus test of this Government's resolve, really, to return to its Labor Party grassroots, its real function and duty to the community. The Keating move to suppress and oppress the home-owning people in this community owes a lot to the departure from the grassroots of the Australian Labor Party. In this Assembly now we see no abolition - if I have read the budget statement correctly - of stamp duty for first home buyers. That is a fundamental plank in any community response to home buying.
Mr Speaker, I have referred to the fact that the banks are encouraging unreal expectations amongst many people, and I now reserve my further remarks for the state of the business community. Many retailers in this city have mortgaged their homes as security and collateral for their businesses. When those businesses - shoe shops and small trading enterprises - crash in and around this Assembly, and as they will increasingly fall over in the suburbs, what we do not know is the horror and the pain that this is inflicting on those people who are losing their homes as well when their collateral mortgages are called up.
So we are not talking about just the normal suburban dweller, the PAYE earner; there is a much more bitter element, and a much more bitter pill to swallow from Mr Keating for many people. They, ironically, are the business people who look so much to Mr Keating. They are losing not only their businesses but also their collateral securities because the mixture of loans that they took out included their homes. Mr Speaker, we need, very clearly, a task force formed - if the Federal Government fails us - by this Labor minority Government in the ACT, to determine the legality of the interest rate variations being forced upon the many mortgaged home buyers in the Australian Capital Territory.
We have banks that now concede that a number of their procedures are such that they no longer wish to go to litigation, that they are willing to settle claims - and this has occurred throughout most of the superior courts in this country, starting with foreign currency loans but including the fiduciary duty of banks to give good advice and to ensure that people taking loans understand the full implications.
One of the double-barrelled effects at the moment, Mr Speaker, is from the easy-start loans that became fashionable in about 1983-84 in this town. I speak as a conveyancer and a solicitor who has seen many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of those mortgages go past me. In many instances, the borrower does not fully appreciate the potential for the interest rate creep to become non-sustainable.
The fact is that the great gambling instinct of the Australian people reflects itself in our mortgage practices. People are willing to sign on the square in the
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