The Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin of May 2006 reports that banks collected $3.66 billion in fees from households, up seven per cent from the year before. A report for the ABA, also in May 2006, by Dr Kim Hawtrey from Macquarie University found that customers continue to gain more from reduced loan interest margins than they are paying in account fees while the proportion of the weekly household budget paid in bank fees has more than halved since 1998/99.Hawtrey concludes that sixty per cent of the population have access to fee-free basic banking services and that the "user-pays approach to fees that we have today is a fairer and more transparent system of charging customers for banking services compared with the past when services like cheques were paid for implicitly through higher interest charges."