BHP Strike Month Two: What Happens If You Fall Behind on Your Car Repayments

Two months into industrial action and the group chat has gone from "solidarity forever" to "anyone know what happens if I miss a car payment." Fair question. Strike pay from the union, if you're getting any, doesn't touch what you were pulling on a roster with overtime and allowances. Something has to give, and for a lot of blokes and women on site, the car repayment is the first thing that starts looking negotiable. It isn't. Here's the actual timeline, week by week, of what your finance company can and can't do, and when.

The Numbers Behind the Panic

Most FIFO workers aren't driving a $12,000 hatchback. You've got a Ranger, a HiLux, a D-Max, something in the $55,000 to $75,000 bracket, financed over five to seven years. Repayments on a $65,000 novated or standard car loan at current rates (call it 9 to 11 per cent depending on your lender and credit file) land somewhere between $550 and $780 a fortnight. That's before insurance, which for a work ute with a bullbar and tray often runs another $60 to $100 a fortnight on top.

Strike pay, where it exists, is nowhere near that. Union hardship funds might get you $300 to $500 a week if you're lucky and the fund hasn't already been drained by two months of members drawing on it. The gap between what's coming in and what the finance company wants is real, and it's the gap that gets people into trouble, not because they're bad with money, but because nobody explains the actual mechanics of default until the letters start arriving.

Week 1 to 2: A Missed Payment Isn't a Default

First thing to understand: missing one payment does not put you in default under Australian consumer credit law. The National Credit Code (Schedule 1 to the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009) governs every car loan, personal loan and most novated leases in this country, and it sets out exactly what a lender has to do before they can take your vehicle.

In week one or two of missed payments, expect a text, an app notification, maybe an automated call from the lender's collections system. This is a courtesy chase, not a legal action. No default notice has been issued yet. Nothing on your credit file has changed. If you ring the lender at this point and explain the strike situation, most of the big financiers (Toyota Finance, Macquarie, Angle Finance, the big four banks' asset finance arms) will note the account and sometimes offer a short repayment pause of two to four weeks. This is the cheapest, easiest point to fix things. Ring them. Don't wait for them to ring you.

Week 3 to 4: The Default Notice Lands

Under section 88 of the National Credit Code, once you're genuinely behind (usually after 30 to 60 days of non-payment, though lenders vary), the lender must issue a formal default notice before they can accelerate the debt or repossess. That notice has to give you a minimum of 30 days to fix the default, meaning pay the overdue amount, not the whole loan.

This is the letter that scares people because it uses words like "repossession" and "legal proceedings," but read it carefully. It will state the exact arrears figure (say $1,560 for three missed fortnightly payments of $520) and a date, no earlier than 30 days out, by which you need to pay that arrears amount or make an arrangement. Pay the arrears within that window and the default notice is satisfied. The loan continues as normal. This is also your legal trigger point to lodge a hardship variation request, which we'll get to.

Week 5 to 6: Hardship Notices, Your Actual Legal Right

This is the bit almost nobody on site knows exists, and it's the single most useful tool you have. Section 72 of the National Credit Code gives every consumer credit borrower the right to apply for a hardship variation. You can do this any time you're struggling, even before a default notice arrives, but it's especially powerful once one has.

A hardship notice is a request to change your loan terms temporarily, extend the loan term, reduce payments for a set period, or pause payments altogether, because of a change in circumstances. Industrial action causing a drop in income absolutely qualifies. The lender must respond within 21 days of receiving your request. If they refuse, they have to tell you why in writing, and you can escalate to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) for free if you think the refusal is unreasonable.

Put the hardship request in writing, by email, not just a phone call. Keep a copy. If you ring AFCA later, the first thing they'll ask is whether you formally applied for hardship, and a phone call with no paper trail is much harder to prove.

Realistic outcomes from a hardship application during a strike: a payment pause of four to eight weeks with interest still accruing, a reduced payment arrangement (say dropping from $650 to $350 a fortnight for two months), or a loan term extension that spreads the missed amount over the remaining life of the loan. None of these make the debt disappear. All of them stop the default clock and protect your vehicle and your credit file while the strike plays out.

Week 7 to 8: Repossession Becomes a Real Possibility

If the default notice period expires (that 30-plus days from week three or four) and you haven't paid the arrears, haven't lodged a hardship request, and haven't made any arrangement, the lender is now legally entitled to repossess the vehicle. In practice, most lenders don't send a tow truck the day after the notice period ends. There's usually a further attempt at contact, and repossession agents typically move in the window of 60 to 90 days total from the first missed payment, not from the default notice alone.

Repossession of a car under finance in Australia doesn't require a court order if the vehicle can be recovered without a breach of the peace, meaning it's not locked in a garage or behind a gate they'd need to force. If your ute is sitting in the driveway or the camp car park, it can legally be taken. If it's inside a locked shed or secured yard, the lender generally needs a court order (a warrant of possession) to enter and recover it, which adds weeks to their timeline and gives you more room to sort things out.

Once repossessed, the lender will sell the vehicle, usually at auction, and you remain liable for the shortfall between the sale price and what you owed, plus repossession and selling costs. This is the ugly bit nobody mentions: a $58,000 loan balance against a ute that sells for $41,000 at a repo auction leaves you owing $17,000 plus fees, with no vehicle to show for it. That debt doesn't go away and it will absolutely follow you once you're back on the roster.

What If You Need the Ute for Work Once the Strike Ends

This is the part that should actually change your decision-making now, not just your panic later. A lot of FIFO workers use their own vehicle to get from home to the airport, to a bus pickup point, or to a regional site. If your ute gets repossessed in week eight of the strike and the strike resolves in week nine, you're going back to work with no vehicle, no way to get to the muster point, and a shortfall debt on top of it.

Lenders don't care about your roster. They don't pause repossession because you're due back on shift. The only thing that stops the clock is contact: a hardship application, a payment arrangement, or clearing the arrears. If you know the strike has an end date, or even a likely one, that's your strongest argument in a hardship request, because you can show the lender a genuine, time-limited cash flow problem with income resuming on a specific date. Lenders are far more willing to grant a two-month pause when they can see light at the end of it than when the request is open-ended.

What Actually Works

Cutting through the legal detail, here's the practical order of operations if you're two months into a strike and the car payment is the problem:

• Call your lender before you miss a payment, not after. Ask specifically for a hardship variation, use those words.
• Get everything in writing. Email, don't just rely on a phone call you can't prove happened.
• Work out your actual arrears figure and don't guess. Ask the lender to state it in writing so you know exactly what "fixing the default" costs.
• If you're refused hardship or the lender is dragging its feet, lodge a complaint with AFCA. It's free, it's fast by comparison, and lenders take it seriously because ignoring AFCA complaints affects their credit licence.
• Don't let the vehicle sit unregistered or uninsured while you're sorting this out. A lapsed comprehensive policy on a financed vehicle can itself be a breach of your loan contract, separate from the missed payments.
• If repossession looks unavoidable, talk to a free financial counsellor through the National Debt Helpline before it happens, not after. They can sometimes negotiate directly with the lender and know which of the finance companies in the mining and resources space are more flexible than others.

A strike is temporary. A repossession and a five-figure shortfall debt on your credit file isn't. The legal timeline gives you more room to move than the scary letters suggest, but only if you use it before the 30-day windows close, not after.