Episode 39: Indigenous Outreach trip to the APY Lands

ASIC's Indigenous Outreach Officer Nathan Boyle talks with Susan Tilley from Anangu Lands Paper Tracker Radio Program about ASIC's work with indigenous consumers and the recent outreach trip to the APY Lands with super funds. Visit the Paper Tracker website to listen to the full interview. Transcript below: *Opening music* Susan Tilley: Nathan, welcome to the Anangu Lands Paper Tracker radio show. Thank you for joining us today. Nathan Boyle: No worries. Thanks very much for inviting us on. Susan Tilley: Nathan, could you give us an overview of the role and the work of the Indigenous Outreach Program of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission? Nathan Boyle: Yeah sure. The Indigenous Outreach Program, or IOP for short, is a national team of lawyers and analysts who specialise in working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, in communities right across the country to really help them to resolve financial services issues that might impact on them. The IOP focuses on three main types of work. The first is on helping Indigenous people to get a better understanding of financial products on the market, by producing information that is designed specifically for Indigenous people to really help them get a proper understanding. The second main type of work that we do is working with stakeholders. So, people that are in the organisations that Indigenous consumers need to interact with, like superannuation companies or banks, and helping them to understand how they change the way that they provide services to Indigenous consumers to make sure that they have the same ability to access financial services as all other Australians. And, the third thing that our team does is where Indigenous people let us know about a problem that they’re having with a financial services provider, like a bank, or credit provider, and we can work with that community to take those issues to court and to ask a judge to decide whether or not the type of behaviour that is being experienced by the Indigenous consumers is fair. And that way we’re able to help Indigenous consumers to solve big problems that they might be having in the way that they’re treated by certain companies. Susan Tilley: Now, ASIC and your team have just been to the APY Lands to talk with Anangu about their superannuation and their entitlements. But before we chat about your visit, which we’re really keen to hear about, it would be useful if you could explain what superannuation is and who’s eligible to pay and to receive superannuation. Nathan Boyle: So, there are a lot of quite difficult rules around exactly how superannuation works. Sometimes it can seem really hard for people to understand exactly what superannuation is, but the easiest way to think about super is that super is like a special bank account that a person’s boss has to set up and put extra money in, on top of the wage that they earn each week. That money can only be accessed by the person usually once they’re too old to work, and they retire. Susan Tilley: So Nathan we’re really keen to hear about your recent visit to the APY Lands. Would you like to tell us which communities you went to and what was the reason behind your visit? Nathan Boyle: I’m really excited to be able to talk about last week’s trip actually because it was a really fantastic trip and we got to meet with a whole lot of Anangu. So, last week we took a group of executives from superannuation funds that had customers in the APY Lands, as well as Government departments and senior people from the Government departments that are involved in superannuation, out to the APY Lands. We visited 5 APY Lands communities last week. We started in Indulkana, moved to Mimilli, Fregon and Pukatja, then finished the week on Friday in Amata. We really looked to a large part of the APY Lands with this outreach. There were a few main aims of the trip. The first and definitely most important aim was that Anangu had told us that while they had