You know, those little yellow deposit books you took into school to become indoctrinated into the Commonwealth Bank. I mean, to learn about saving money.
You might look back with nostalgia at those wacky little aliens, or the cartoon characters like ‘cred’ or ‘spen’ that acted as cute little mascots for the program.
You might have even learned about owning a credit card or been pre-approved for one.
This allowed the Commonwealth Bank to start locking children into their most lucrative system, making you over-spend on credit cards then charging mountains of interest if you fail to pay it back.
Many of us would remember our primary schools running ‘school banking’ programs and encouraging us to save money with the Commonwealth Bank.
And this was fine back in the 1930s, when the program first started up and the bank was still owned by the government. Once this program became privately owned, it became a bit more insidious.
What you probably didn’t know when you opened up your first Dollarmites account, was that your schools were profiting off indoctrinating you into Commonwealth Bank.
Schools were paid $200 when their first student signed up to the Dollarmites. Then $100 for every further 100 students and $5 for every 10 student deposits.
Effectively, because of the lack of adequate funding for public schools in our state, the Commonwealth Bank was able to buy its way into the educational system.
The only reason Commonwealth Bank stopped exploiting children in this way is because the government banned the program in 2022.
If the government hadn’t taken action, banks would still be indoctrinating children and taking their money.
They can’t be trusted to set their own limits or self-regulate; they just want more profit at any cost.
We need more regulations and taxes on Australia’s big banks to ensure they can’t exploit any more of their customers and are actually serving the community.
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