Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, Wednesday reprimanded Westpac Banking Corp, the third-ranking lender in the country, for sending an email to its customers, in which it justified the rise in mortgage repayments by equating its business to that of selling banana smoothies!

The Westpac move of sending the email to its clients came after its last week announcement of a 45-basis-points rise in its variable mortgage rate, following the 25-basis-points rise in the interest rates by the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA).

The contentious Westpac email included a video wherein the bank compared itself to a business which sold street-side banana smoothies after storms had devastated the banana crop, thereby leading to a rise in retail banana prices.

Chastising Westpac for the emails, Rudd, talking to ABC Radio in Townsville, said: “I think Westpac should have a long hard look at itself. They are talking about peoples' most basic things in life
- a mortgage, an affordable mortgage, to underpin things as basic as a home.”

Meanwhile, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has proposed tighter lending rules for banks. Treasurer Wayne Swan opined that the rate hike move by Westpac, and three other leading banks, was not a justified one; more so as their hikes surpassed the official rate rise. Swan said that such a move reflected that the banks were “letting down their customers.”