Community in Credit Unions: Has banking regulation impaired CSR in Australian Customer Owned Banks?

This paper presents a sector scan of a sample of Australian Credit Unions and Mutual Banks to examine the CSR reporting from the perspective of the three pillars model proposed by van Oorschot, de Hoog, van der Steen and van Twist (2013). It is argued that the pillar requiring co-operatives to ensure activities which ‘aim for change’, should promote increasing adoption of CSR. The paper theorises that regulatory requirements imposed in Australia on all banking institutions carry a higher proportional cost to the customer owned banking sector than the shareholder based commercial banks. This consumption of the limited financial resources available in this sector of banking services, are inhibiting regional Customer Owned Banking providers, as co-operative organisations, to fulfil the required co-operative principle to instigate change for the betterment of communities. This failure could signal the demise of some entities in the jurisdiction of Customer Owned Banking.