00:00What we're hearing from people who work for the National Debt Helpline is that
00:06one in four calls to that helpline so far this year have been about people
00:11facing mortgage hardship. Now not all of them are defaulting on their loans yet
00:16because what they typically do is they sacrifice other living expenses, so
00:21they'll go about missing meals or they'll not pay other bills, electricity
00:25bills, stuff like that in order to just keep paying the mortgage, but some of
00:29them are getting to the breaking point and some have been forced to sell their
00:33homes. What the big bank bosses are saying is that they're mainly taught,
00:38they're not being very specific, but they're alluding to two main regulations.
00:42One is the regulations that were introduced post the Banking Royal
00:46Commission, so that's when we saw all these horror stories emerging of people
00:50being lent to that shouldn't have got loans and ended up in financial strife.
00:54So those laws are part of the laws they're talking about that should be
00:57changed or they haven't been specific about how those laws could be
01:01eased. The other regulations that apply here are buffers that are placed when
01:07you try and get a loan. So when a bank assesses you on your ability to get a
01:12loan, they look at whether you can pay an interest rate that's 3% above the
01:17current interest rate. So what they're talking about here is potentially
01:21loosening or removing those buffers for people who are refinancing and possibly
01:25also for people who want to get a new home loan. Consumer groups are very
01:29worried. They don't want to see a repeat of what we saw during the Royal
01:32Commission times. They say the rules that we've got in place came because of
01:37all those problems. We don't want to revisit those problems. We have already
01:43a high number of cases coming to us about people in stress, and that's based
01:47on pretty stringent rules in place currently. So don't basically change the
01:51rules.
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