We're breaking up with the other banks... to become bigger arseholes.

A friend posted a link to this today. A piece on how one of Australia's 'big four' banks, NAB, is seeking to immediately evict tenants of properties whose owners have defaulted on their mortgage.

It certainly makes for aggravating reading.


Once upon a time, I lived in a surreal land called the Advertising Industry. At the time, a major creative agency turned out the ad campaign used to make NAB seem all sorts of touchy-feely.

We're breaking up with the other major banks, they said. We're siding with the cool peeps, instead of all you stuffed shirt banking fatcats, they said. How, like, totally groovy.

I tend to have a well-honed bullshit meter for advertising. Having been inside the industry, I tend to recognise when a client wants to engage in button-pushing to turn you toward them as a customer, or away from a competitor. I must admit my first reaction to NAB's campaign was 'Is anyone really going to swallow this horseshit?' quickly followed by 'But... you still are one of the big four banks. What's actually changed?'

Well, I guess what's changed is, now that they've put on their smiley face, they feel free to trample roughshod over resident's rights. While the house buyer's market fluctuates to all the get-out, the renter's market seems to just get more and more competitive. A shortage of affordable rental properties, means punters end up engaging in all sorts of shady horse-trading to make themselves more appealing to the agent and landlord. Pitching in more per week, paying x months in advance, and so forth.

If the difficult housing climate didn't make renting hard enough, now NAB wants to make it harder. Don't get me wrong, they're a business, I understand where they're coming from. However, understanding where they're coming from and sympathising with them are two entirely different beasts. Regardless of what they have to deal with as a business, they have to contend - like everyone else - with residential rights. Legally, though perhaps not ethically, if a lease has expired they may be well within their rights to evict. But that's not what they want.

If your landlord defaults, obviously quite without your knowledge, NAB want the right to bust your door in, throw your shit out the door, and leave you homeless and looking for a new residence WITHOUT WARNING AT A MOMENT'S NOTICE.

Which I'm sure, you can all comprehend, is the act of a villainous, dead-dog humping shit-hat.

Are we seeing the early warning signs of the Australian banks starting their own wave of homelessness, similar to that caused by the US banks and their sub-prime collapse? Maybe. Maybe not? What we are definitely looking at, is yet another instance of being lied to by advertising.

If an ad on TV tells you a bank is your friend, start sniffing around for what they want to do to you behind your back. In my experience, someone only tries to make themselves look good through advertising, because they don't have the first clue how to be decent to people in real life.

Sorry NAB, it's not us, it's you. I thought you loved us. Well, get your shit out, you're dumped.