Financially ruined Carl and Audrey Connell typify the mums and dads who are the flotsam and jetsam left in the wake of the Storm Financial debacle and they 'star' - for want of a better word - in a documentary, Piggy Banks, that all financial advisers and bankers must see.
Soon to be aired on national television, Piggy Banks - a 50-minute documentary funded by the Storm victims themselves - explores the continuing pain and fallout from the collapse of Emmanuel and Julie Cassimatis's Storm Financial, and the sense of utter betrayal people such as the Connells feel about Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Bank of Queensland and Macquarie Bank.
Financial advisers need to watch this documentary because it's what the latest crop of mums and dads will see as the public face of the industry, and planners need to have solid and honest answers to the inevitable questions from potential clients as to whether the advice is leading to another Storm.
Audrey Connell's black humour in referring to herself and her husband as garden gnomes is her way of coping with the financial devastation that followed the Connells' decision to take out a mortgage on their home to obtain a margin loan to invest in indexed share funds. But, the 2008 failure of the stock market saw the Connells' portfolio sold at negative equity - leaving them with unmeetable debts and, eventually, just a caravan over their heads.
The idea for Piggy Banks came from the Storm victims who were left voiceless in hearings, and who felt powerless in the onslaught of the banks' media juggernauts. Enter documentary director Andrew Lawrence, who initially assumed Storm's former clients were reckless gamblers.
"I was probably the best person for the job because I originally thought 'who the hell would mortgage their house for a risky loan?' But as I filmed, I saw these people had been sold a dream and they believed the Cassimatises," Lawrence says.
All the Storm investors had their particular reasons for investing, but a common theme was fear of very little or no aged pension being available, and second, there was a lifetime of trust in the banks.
Rhonda Thomson recalled how she'd banked with the Commonwealth since she was in primary school and trusted Storm because of that bank's presence in the arrangements. She spoke for many when she said Storm victims had not spoken out "because of sheer embarrassment".
"We're educated people. We've been conservative. We've gone to banks we've been dealing with for 40 years and [to] financial advisers with an excellent name for 20 years, and it's just embarrassing," she says.
The garden gnomes to which Audrey Connell compared herself have been Disneyfied into harmless ornaments, but the original creatures were imagined to be quite nasty spirits that lived underground, counting money - theirs and others. The Gnomes of Townsville may yet have their revenge on the advisers and bankers who engaged in practices which, while being legal, were a fundamental betrayal of trust.
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