More Australians are having difficulty accessing emergency funds through mainstream financial services.
More than 300,000 West Australians do not have adequate access to day-to-day financial products such as a basic banking account, car insurance or even a credit card, a landmark study has revealed.
The research by the Centre for Social Impact - backed by the University of Western Australia - shows the ability to secure as much as $3000 in funds for an emergency through the mainstream financial system is becoming increasingly out-of-reach for Australians.
Instead, more people are relying on family or friends or turning to fringe credit products, such as payday lenders, who regularly charge substantially higher interest rates than banks.
Such products have seen a surge in uptake in recent years.
The report, to be released today, and partly funded by National Australia Bank, found even a moderate amount of credit was crucial to accessing key household goods that go beyond a monthly budget, such as a washing machine.
The lack of access to banking services impacted on people's ability to pay for basic household items such as electricity, telephone, food, clothing, car-related expenses, repairs, rent, education, health and repayment of other debts.
The report reveals 12,500 West Australians have no financial service products and an additional 293,000 are severely excluded, with only one service.
Residents in south east Perth are among the nation's top regions for financial exclusion, with more than one in five without access to basic banking services. That was 33 per cent more than the national average.
Regional West Australians also rated highly, with 20 per cent unable to access appropriate and affordable financial services.
South western Perth (18.7 per cent) and central Perth (18 per cent) also were below the national average.
Eastern Perth (11.9 per cent) was among the nation's most well-off areas, followed by northern Perth (13.3 per cent) and south western Perth (15 per cent).
Wollongong in NSW tops the nation with almost 7 per cent of adults without access to basic banking services.
The cost of basic financial services was the prime cause of financial exclusion, according to the research. The average annual combined cost of banking, credit card and either car or home insurance is $1794 annually.
A survey of financially excluded people also found the level of official identification needed to establish an account was often a hurdle, while many banks denied personal loans of less than $5000 as a personal loan, instead steering customers to credit cards that they were unable to access.
The distance to a bank branch, language and literacy challenges and poor credit records also were hurdles.
The report found capital city areas tended to have higher levels of access to credit, but lower levels of access to insurance, while country areas have lower access to credit, but very high levels of access to insurance, particularly car insurance because public transport is limited.
Many financially excluded people were reliant on government services such as Centrelink and also used fringe credit providers, such as payday lenders.
NAB chief executive Cameron Clyne accepted the banking industry was partly to blame, conceding it needed to lift its game by providing affordable products to more people.
''The absence of access to mainstream financial services does preclude people from advancing socially and economically,'' he said.
''Often it's the unexpected expenses [such as] if the car breaks down or someone needs to get to a job interview.
"There's an obligation for the banking system to improve financial inclusion."
The report comes just days after the federal Treasurer Wayne Swan brokered an agreement with the banking industry to provide free ATM transactions for Indigenous people in remote communities.
The study found the number of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders severely excluded from access to day-to-day financial services is more than double the national average, with 43 per cent operating outside the mainstream banking system.
While there are efforts to improve access to basic bank accounts and efforts to promote low cost credit products, there is a substantial gap in general insurance where there is little movement about delivering affordable insurance products.
- with Eric Johnston
Business women to channel power of Athena - miltonkeynes.co.uk
The Athena Network is launching in Milton Keynes on Wednesday at the Doubletree Hilton Hotel, MK Dons Stadium.
It is the premier women’s networking organisation in the UK comprising of 26 franchises and over 2600 networking members across 30 regions nationwide.
Established in 2005, The Athena Network was founded to provide women who were unable to commit to early breakfast networking meetings with opportunities to meet business women from a wide range of industry sectors from large corporates to sole traders. The monthly meetings are from 12 noon until 2 p.m, alongside a good lunch, there is open networking, a ten minute networking training slot, 60 second presentation on your business, a ten minute presentation given by an industry expert on different aspects of business development, and unpressurised referral and recommendation sharing and more.
Sylvia Baldock, Regional Director of Athena in the West Chilterns and National Sales Director for Athena, says: “Networking is the most powerful, effective and rapid way to grow your business and our groups also offer a warm, fun and supportive environment whether you are just setting up your own business or are part of an established business looking to expand further.”
“We have been so successful because we provide opportunities to make strategic connections with professionals in a wide range of industry sectors, encourage women in business to inspire and support others for greater success whilst also developing women’s business skills”
The business women of Milton Keynes and surrounding area are invited to come along to the launch on 30th for a lovely lunch followed by an afternoon of new beginnings, great connections, inspiration and a celebratory glass of pink champagne! There will also be a special membership offer for anyone joining on the day.
To find out more or reserve a place please contact Sylvia Baldock at sylvia.baldock@theathenanetwork.com more information at: www.theathenanetwork.com/new-athena-group-launching-in-milton-keynes-30th-may-doubletree-hiltonmk-dons-stadium
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Print this pageColumn: Damn the money, Olympics renew east London - US News and World Report
By JOHN LEICESTER, Associated Press
LONDON (AP) — In August of 1944, when the tough east London neighborhoods of his childhood lay smoking in bombed-out ruins, a Nazi German V1 rocket packed with one ton of high explosives "fell just where you're sitting," David Gold says.
Comfortably seated in the bar of the 117-year-old east London soccer club, West Ham, which he now co-owns, Gold is not trying to be melodramatic.
He is simply making a point: This part of London has long had more than its share of foul luck, and it was high time that changed. The 2012 Summer Games are helping do that.
The Olympics are focusing the world's eyes on what used to be a derelict, polluted patch of industrial land near Gold's childhood home but which now is a shining advertisement for east London: the immaculate, landscaped Olympic Park with purpose-built sports venues that smell like a new car. So damn the expense.
"What is happening is immense for east London," Gold says. The Olympics are "bringing the pride back to this part of the world."
Those London Mayor Boris Johnson once described as "Olympo-skeptics" have beaten a steady rhythm of complaint about the $14 billion Britain is spending in an economic recession on games many people couldn't get or afford tickets for. And Britain being a vociferous democracy, critics aren't locked up and shut up as they were in Beijing in 2008.
The Big Brotheresque Olympic security — up to 13,500 soldiers, plus police, security guards, fighter jets, helicopters, warships, surface-to-air missiles and even a "sonic weapon" crowd-control device that emits a dissuasive, ear-piercing beam of sound — also doesn't come cheap and, to some, is a scary reminder that Britain is a target for terrorists.
Street graffiti artists complain their work has been painted over in London's Olympic beautification. Police around the Olympic Park have been given powers to disperse "anti-social" teenage loiterers. Oficers have clamped down on prostitutes and cleaned out their calling cards from London's famous red telephone boxes. And plans to whisk Olympic VIPs and athletes through London traffic on reserved lanes sit uncomfortably in a class-conscious city where opponents dismiss the games as a corporate-sponsored shindig for the rich.
"The Olympics are being used to beat people over the head with," says Joe Alex, who owns a small house next to the Olympic Park and claims that games-related property development, "like social cleansing," is squeezing and pricing modest families out of the area.
"There's a real seedy underbelly. Corporate Olympics have taken over the whole thing," he says. "I don't know anyone who knows anyone who has a ticket."
But finding east Londoners who are thrilled is easy, too. When you look at east London's history, it is not hard to understand why.
The British capital has, in some ways, long been a city divided. Wealth, political power, bridges over the Thames, posh shops and night life were concentrated in its west. The east was where the city sent its filth — in engineer Joseph Bazalgette's sewage network — and crammed in its poor.
It was home to the massive shipping docks that Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed ferociously because they handled one-third of Britain's imports. When Buckingham Palace in the west was bombed in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's mother, the late Queen mother, was famously said to have been almost glad that she could now "look the East End in the eye" and share its suffering.
East London was where stinking industries clustered and where Jack the Ripper slashed and horrified, where Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky visited and where India independence leader Mohandas Gandhi stayed in 1931, preferring to live among the working people and smoke stacks than in a West End hotel.
For those in the west, "the old saying was that you never went east of the Aldgate Pump," a public fountain marking a rough boundary between the city proper and its East End, says Brian Grover, an east Londoner who works at the Museum of London Docklands.
His childhood memories are of swims in the Thames so polluted "we all had boils, ear aches," and of recovering cans of fruit discarded by cargo ships in the flotsam and jetsam of the river.
Italian business confidence falls to three-year low - Daily Telegraph
“Economic gloom continues to envelop Italy,” said Raj Badiani, principal economist at IHS Global Insight. “Given the relentless pounding from the tougher austerity regime, tighter credit conditions and rising unemployment, the downturn is expected to linger through the year.”
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