[Brad Lockyer]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed the gradual decline of cash in our society. From shops not to banks closing ATMs, it can be hard to use cash in today’s economy – if you can even obtain it in the first place.

Figures published by the Australian Banking Association last week showed mobile wallet apps such as Apple Pay now accounted for 35 per cent of all transactions in Australia, while cash accounted for just 7.5 per cent.

But the decline of cash doesn’t make cash any less important to people relying on it, says Professor Steve Worthington from Swinburne University.

Prof. Worthington is urging the federal government to act on recent Senate inquiry recommendations that in-person community banking be considered an essential service in the same way telecommunications and utilities are.

“Cash is an essential service for large groups of people, particularly senior citizens and people who live in regional areas,” he said.

“The paradox here is the banks are celebrating all this, but they’re also closing their branches.”

Using cash is the only option for around 15 per cent of the population who are unable to use digital payments, due to factors such as lack of internet access or payment-capable devices.

Prof. Worthington says the government should step in to protect cash’s role in our society, saying that relying solely on electronic payments is a recipe for disaster were something to happen to the electricity or internet networks.

“There are quite frequent outages – telecoms or IT systems have issues, or the power fails,” he said.

“Cash can’t crash.”

Do you agree we need to safeguard cash in Australia?

[Des]

“From shops not to banks closing ATMs”
I take it there’s something missing there?

The failures of telecommunications are entirely at the feet of the current system design, and need not be the major outage they currently result in. It is entirely possible, where multiple networks coexist, to have phones default to another provider should the designated provider not be available. This is, in fact, how TCP/IP is intended to operate. It is a deliberate design choice to have mobile service users have no service available to them if their particular telco is not available, even if another has a full 5 bar service. With the current reliance on mobile services, and definitely for EFTPOS machine transactions, the inability of the system to automatically switch to any other available provider is no longer acceptable, and regulation should be changed to force providers to ensure usage of each others services is the default when there is an outage.

[allan j goodwin]

yes

[Allen Gilchrist]

Des, you seem to have forgotten about the other things that can knock out the Telecommunications networks like the solar flares that happened a few weeks ago, luckily nothing happened this time, next time we might not be so lucky because if it does happen we will be sent back to the Stoneage in some respects.

[Karl Marx]

It’s an easy addition to current legislation in which notes and coins are legal tender. Add a clause to make it illegal for any business for goods or services not to accept legal tender.
This is easy to do and doesn’t require any new legislation and makes legal tender an option.
But we know this won’t happen as banks make to much money from card transactions and they will lobby governments against any act that may jeopardize the billions they make in transaction fees

[driag]

Yes it is an essential service. Digital finance is a fiasco, every time the internet goes down 100,00s are squealing because their cards don’t wok. Cash never ever fails to be able to be used.

[ronloby]

Yes, until the government declares cash no longer legal tender then it should be available and accepted by all people and companies. The banks NUST provide cash to those who wish to use it and they must not decide whether cash is available or not. It is up to the government, not the banks.

[soarer129]

Cash should always be available if the credit cards don’t work because of the internet goes down and it has in the past how do you buy food, petrol, medicine, no one is going to supply without payment how do we sell our homewares stuff on market place, or gumtree If I go into a place and they don’t accept cash I boycott them and have now started going to bank withdrawing cash and now make all payments in folding money whether it be post office paying bills, car reg, etc down side is I get my receipts put them into a plastic sleeve envelope and keep for month unless it is say a television or a large ticket item I them scan details into computer and the paper info goes into a expanding yearly tax filing box

[Author]

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