Car deals target cyclone victims

A CAR salesmen charged 48 per cent interest rates for used vehicles as he targeted $3000 welfare payments handed to vulnerable indigenous Australians after Cyclone Yasi, the banking royal commission heard.

But many of the customers would default and the car would be repossessed and then re-sold to other people in the community by that same north Queensland car dealer.

The corporate cop’s indigenous outreach representative Nathan Boyle told the commission the dealer was targeting payouts after Cyclone Yasi.

“The car provider knew there would be some money coming into Aboriginal communities around Cairns at that time and that’s why the behaviour began,” Mr Boyle said.

In another case, the head of under-siege life insurer, the Aboriginal Community Benefit Fund, was forced to deny that his company had a “sales model” of targeting policies at babies due to the high infant mortality in the indigenous community.

“You have sales representatives who sign children up at birth,” counsel assisting the commission Rowena Orr, QC, put to ACBF chief Bryn Jones.

Mr Jones struggled to answer the question, saying “they don’t actively pursue that” but “if a mother wants to cover their children they’re not excluded from doing that”. “We’re not actively going for children and grandchildren.”

Ms Orr revealed about 36 per cent ACBF policy holders were under 18 years of age.

Meanwhile, Tracey Walsh, from Mooroopna in northern Victoria, took the stand and blasted Mr Jones over her experience in taking out ACBF funeral insurance.

Ms Walsh told the commission how she had paid $10,000 into an $8000 funeral insurance scheme run by ACBF, under the presumption that if she died her family would get the excess cash.

It was only after taking her case to the Consumer Action Law Centre that Ms Walsh won the right to the full amount of her cash. She said others were unlikely to ever get their excess.

“I’ve got elders who have been in these funeral funds for years; they plan to give this money to their families so they can survive,” she said.