Major banks CEO’s call on government to ease lending rules

What we’re hearing from people who work for the National Debt Helpline is that one in four calls to that helpline so far this year have been about people facing mortgage hardship. Now, not all of them are defaulting on their loans yet, because what they typically do is they sacrifice other living expenses. So they’ll go about missing meals or they’ll not pay other bills, electricity bills, stuff like that in order to just keep paying the mortgage. But some of them are getting to the breaking point and some have been forced to sell their homes. What the big bank bosses are saying is they’re they’re they’re mainly, they’re not being very specific, but they’re alluding to two main regulations. One is the regulations that were introduced post the banking royal Commission. So that’s when we saw all these horror stories emerging of people being lent to that shouldn’t have got loans and ended up in financial strife. So those laws are part of the laws they’re talking about that should be changed or they they haven’t been specific about how those laws could be eased the other. Regulations that apply here are buffers that are placed when you try and get a loan. So. When a bank assesses you on your ability to get a loan, they look at whether you can pay an interest rate that’s three percent above the current interest rate. So what they’re talking about here is potentially loosening or removing those buffers for people who are refinancing and possibly also for people who want to get a new home loan. Consumer groups are very worried. They don’t want to see a repeat of what we saw during the royal Commission times. You know, they say the rules that we’ve got in place came because of all those problems. We don’t want to. Revisit those problems we have. You know already a high number of cases coming to us about people in stress, and that’s based on pretty stringent rules in place currently. So don’t basically change the rules.