Heather du Plessis-Allan: Banks aren't the moral police

Yesterday a long running court case came to an end – at least for now.

BNZ has won permission to shut down Gloriavale’s bank accounts.

Now I actually feel quite uncomfortable about this. I’m no fan of Gloriavale – I’d like to see the place close and the people there realise how weird their situation is.

So I should, on the face of it, like what BNZ is doing because it will effectively, probably, shut down Gloriavale.

Because without a bank, how can Gloriavale continue?

No one else will bank them – they’ve tried, no other bank will take them.

This is why they took the court case, to try to force BNZ to keep their bank accounts open, because without it, they basically can’t do business anymore.

They can’t do anything really, because in a modern world you can’t survive without a bank account.

It’s how you get paid, how you pay your power bills, how you get a mortgage to buy a house, how you order things from overseas.

But I still don’t think this is the right thing, because of the precedent this sets.

Banks can shut your account if they don’t like what you’re doing —doesn’t have to be criminal— and there’s too much of this moral policing already.

Australian banks here are imposing penalties on our dairy farmers who they don’t think are cutting emissions by enough. Kiwibank’s pledged to stop banking coal mining businesses.

BNZ won’t let a couple of women running a sex toy shop open bank accounts because they sell sex toys.

There is a massive debunking scandal playing out in the US where even Melania Trump reckons her account was shut down after the Jan 6th riots.

And to be fair to banks, it’s not as if this is new. 

Remember they wouldn’t let women take out mortgages unless a male relative said it was okay as recently as the 1980s.

I get that it’s a bank’s right to stop doing business with whoever it wants to, I just don’t like the bank’s reason.  

Because if it’s Gloriavale today, a couple of girls selling sex toys tomorrow, who comes next? 

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