Corporate bullying or a case of mistaken identity?
The Commonwealth Bank – owner of Aussie Home Loans – has gone full Disney on the Affordable Housing Party, threatening legal action against the fledgling political entity over its logo and branding.
Nice one Aussie!
No affordable housing for you!
Here’s the email circulated to members of the now denuded party:
Dear members of the Affordable Housing Party,
While we do not yet know the full results of the New England or Bennelong byelections, our candidates performed well, outpolling six other candidates in New England and four other candidates in Bennelong.
The real impact that we had in these electoral contests will not be revealed until we see how many second preference votes we received, and the AEC is still yet to complete the full distribution of preferences for both byelections.
Unfortunately the rise in the party’s profile as a result of the byelections has lead to a legal challenge to our party’s logo and branding by Aussie Home Loans (which since 2017 has been fully owned by the Commonwealth Bank.)
We were served with a cease and desist letter on December 21 by a lawyer from Sparke Helmore Lawyers, who promptly went on leave the very next day, leaving us in a position where we had no one to negotiate with in terms of what would be acceptable alternative branding for their client.
The cease and desist letter contains a large number of false statements and assumptions about the motives and creative process that went into creating our party’s logo and branding, and makes the bizarre claim that we are an organisation that provides services relating to housing (and so in some way a competitor of Aussie Home Loans) and that a reasonable person could mistake a political party for a financial service provider or vice versa.
We are able to point-by-point refute those claims, backed up with evidence. However we must also accept that Aussie and the Commonwealth Bank have much deeper pockets than we do when it comes to making use of the courts.
Aussie Home Loans have asked us to sign a number of undertakings by a deadline of December 10, which is five days before their lawyer even returns to work from leave.
We believe the timing of this action was designed to prevent us from seeking adequate legal advice and to try to frighten us into signing a legal document that we did not fully understand with the intention of giving the impression that we agreed with its contents.
We also believe this action is designed to crush our movement and damage the party before it can gain real traction as our policies would make housing more affordable while reducing demand for investor home loans which would affect Aussie Home Loans’ (and the Commonwealth Bank’s) bottom line.
We have removed our original logo and branding for the time being to ensure that Aussie Home Loans have no reason to proceed against us in the short term but we will not be signing the undertakings as they have been put to us unless they are presented to us in a far more neutrally worded document that does not make false claims and assumptions about our party or its office holders.
In the meantime, Aussie Home Loans reserve their right to take legal action against us.
For that reason we are asking our members and supporters to think about donating to the party at this time if they are in a position to do so, so that we will have funds to defend against a legal challenge to the Affordable Housing Party if one arises.
You can donate to the party via PayPal through the fundraising portal of our website here.
If it’s easier for you to donate to the party using a standard bank transfer, the party’s bank details are BSB 062105, Account number 10873683 and we can email you a receipt for your records so that you can claim the deduction at the end of the financial year.
We are also asking if any of our members are lawyers who would be willing to provide us with pro bono legal advice as to how we should respond to Aussie Home Loans’ lawyers when their deadline comes up.
If you are a lawyer who would be willing to assist the party please contact me at Contact@affordable-housing-party.org Thank you to all of our members for your support to date and ongoing support,
-Andrew Potts, national convenor, The Affordable Housing Party