Crikey is not the only person outraged by the exploitation and
ruthlessness of the obscenely lucrative Australian banking cartel. The
Latham Diaries quote Paul Keating as follows in a private meeting with
Iron Mark on 15 July 2003: “One of the few things that would tempt me
back into Parliament is to f*ck the banks.”

This tip from someone inside the Commonwealth Bank is an interesting insight into the continuing ruthless cost cutting:

The Commonwealth Bank recently informed 127 staff in Sydney that they would
be made redundant on 21 September. The people affected are the entire Sydney home
loan phone sales/service and operations department. Each job is specifically
related to home loan lending and everyone has been made or redundant or
redeployed (10%) from the sales manager down. Today (19 Sep) they informed
approx 10 people that they are no longer being made redundant but have been
redeployed to a personal lending section (after these people have already been
applying for jobs and gotten used to the job loss and payout).

There has
been no media reports on this since it affects home lending and is a pretty
significant amount of staff. I think the bank has chosen to keep quiet as they do
not want the market to think they are going soft on the home lending
market.

The remaining staff are in Brisbane and Melbourne and total about 200 – this
is the 132224 home loan hotline department. As you can see, this is over a third
of home loan staff being cut.