Editing Building society (section)

=== Australia ===
In Australia, building societies evolved along British lines. Following the end of [[World War II]], the terminating model was revived to fund returning servicemen's need for new houses. Hundreds were created with government seed capital, whereby the capital was returned to the government and the terminating societies retained the interest accumulated. Once all the seed funds were loaned, each terminating society could reapply for more seed capital to the point where they could re-lend their own funds and thus became a permanent society.

Terminating loans were still available and used inside the permanent businesses by staff up until the 1980s because their existence was not widely known after the early 1960s. Because of strict regulations on banks, building societies flourished until the deregulation of the Australian financial industry in the 1980s. Eventually many of the smaller building societies disappeared, while some of the largest (such as [[Advance Bank|Advance]] and [[St George Bank|St George]]) attained the status of banks.

More recent conversions have included [[Heritage Bank]] which converted from building society to bank in 2011, [[Hume Bank|Hume]] in 2014, while Wide Bay Building Society became [[Auswide Bank]] and [[IMB Bank|IMB]] followed suit in 2015, and Greater Building Society became [[Greater Bank]] in 2016. Building societies converting to banks are no longer required to demutualise.

A particular difference between Australian building societies and those elsewhere, is that Australian building societies are required to incorporate as [[limited companies]].

Current building societies are
*Bass & Equitable Building Society ([[Tasmania]])
*Maitland Mutual Building Society ([[Maitland, New South Wales|Maitland]])