Ben Woods, Assistant Archivist, Australian Mutuals History
Clive Skarott has been a champion of the Queensland credit union movement since the early 1970s. This has principally been through his long association with Electricity Credit Union which merged with Queensland Country Credit Union in 2017 and today trades as Queensland Country Bank. Clive’s involvement in community causes has reached far beyond the credit union movement incorporating junior cricket, health, politics and much more besides. I spoke to him on the phone recently about his life and career in the Queensland customer owned banking sector.
Clive was born in Atherton in Far North Queensland in 1943 in a family with a long connection to the area. He began and ended his schooling in Atherton with a stint in the middle at Tinaroo where his dad Alfred worked during the construction of the Tinaroo Falls Dam.
His career plans as a youth were uncertain, only knowing that he wanted to work in “a big office”. This is what he did, gaining employment in late 1959 as a junior clerk at the Cairns Regional Electricity Board (now Ergon Energy) and staying there for 28 years. Clive told me that credit unions became a part of his life after his position as a Director of the Sick and Medical Fund at the Electricity Board became redundant with the introduction of Medicare in the 1970s.
“We determined that we would have to do something else for our fellow employees so we looked around to see what we could do”, said Clive. “I read a story about a credit union, which I think was the Brisbane City Council Credit Union. I thought that would be great to have. So the outcome of that was that four of us got together and talked about it and then we asked someone from the Queensland Credit Union League to come up to Cairns and tell us all about credit unions and of course they came up and it was a really good story. You could fit it in with what we wanted to do for our fellow workmates so we started what was the CREB Employees Credit Union in 1973”.
Clive took up the role of Company Secretary in April 1973 and remained in that position until 2006. Clive was offered the CEO role in February 1989 where he remained until retiring in December 2008. Of his time as Company Secretary Clive said:
“In no time at all we had every employee as a member and then we looked into the Cairns City Council, we went into Cairns Hospital and we were successful there but we still weren’t getting the increase in numbers that we liked so we thought we’d change our name to the Electricity Credit Union with a plan to move the credit union into all other electricity board areas in Queensland.
So we moved into Townsville and that was successful, we moved into Mackay, that was successful, then there was Capricornia Electricity Board based in Rockhampton. I think we were there by 1979. We moved into the Wide Bay Electricity Board at Maryborough in about 1980-1981. Then we moved into the South West Queensland Electricity Board which was based in Dalby but included Toowoomba. We were there in about 1985-86.
Then we moved into the South East corner with the South East Electricity Board in about 1989. By then we’d achieved what we’d set out to achieve which was to be the credit union for the entire electricity industry in Queensland”.
Clive went back to a role on the board post-retirement leading up to Electricity Credit Union’s merger with Queensland Country Credit Union and its subsequent conversion to a mutual bank. The conversion to Queensland Country Bank was a good thing according to Clive. He told me that, “I always used to get people who didn’t like the word credit union. They thought we might’ve been controlled by workers and all that. So, I was really happy when we became the Queensland Country Bank because people feel more comfortable with that word ‘bank’”.
Clive went on to say that, “I believed in the credit union, I believed in the credit union movement and I worked really hard to get great outcomes for us all”. On the future of the industry he said, “I still believe that there is a future for mutual banks and that there are some really great outcomes going forward. I’ll never leave the mutual banking sector. I think it’s great. The people are genuine. It’s all about delivering great outcomes for people. That’s what our aim was when I first started our credit union and that aim hasn’t changed”.
Clive and his wife Merle have four children and outside them, his credit union career and other community work, Clive has a passion for sport. He has been associated with Cairns Junior Cricket and the Far North Queensland Umpires Association since 1980 and is known as a fanatical supporter of the Collingwood AFL Club. As he is an FNQ boy I had to ask Clive how he came to be a fan of the Pies?
“Yeah, that’s a great story”, said Clive. “In 1954, they started Aussie Rules in FNQ and we lived in Tinaroo as I told you and Tinaroo put in the 4th team so that they could get a competition. The Tinaroo team got people from Victoria who worked on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, so we had people fully aware of Aussie Rules living and working in Tinaroo.
When they started a team we didn’t have a team strip so at the meeting, one guy said “I’m a member of Collingwood, I’ll see if Collingwood would give us a strip.” So the outcome of that was that Tinaroo played in Collingwood colours in the first year of the competition and they won the competition in Collingwood colours. So that’s when I became a Collingwood fan.”
Clive Skarott was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours of 2012.
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