Oscar Tamsen, Clarence Valley Independent

Australians are losing more than $1 billion a year to debit and credit card scammers and electronic thieves, causing more and more Clarence Valley ratepayers and others to ask why the Federal Government is urging the country towards a cashless society.

Research undertaken by the CV Independent has revealed that many Clarence Valley bank card holders cannot understand why this “convenient banking” is being favoured while it continues to be open slather to criminals’ intent on stealing their hard-earned monetary assets.

Official State law enforcement records also show that only about one per cent of the vast number of bank card incidents reported throughout Australia each year result in a prosecution.

Medical records also indicate that 77.3 per cent of identity theft victims are experiencing serious emotional distress.

Two Queensland local councils have already felt the brunt of public opposition to their efforts to adopt cashless society policies in their areas.

The first one to fall foul of the idea was the Innisfail-centred Cassowary Coast Regional Council which decided last year that bank cards should only be used for transactions.

This move against the use of cash caused a major protest more recently by over 3,000 angry ratepayers and over 1,000 tourists and travellers.

Cairns Regional Council was also forced to urgently overturn a decision to go cashless after suffering a series of rallies by the district’s residents.

In addition, Twitter on the Internet also carried calls endorsed by 62,000 viewers for shoppers throughout Australia to stop using their bank cards for one week from the third to the tenth day of last month and to deal only in “safer cash.”

The organisers of this move against bank cards, engineered in the interests of greater personal bank account safety, claim that cash must be retained as it is trusted and is the only essentially secure way to spend and budget personal and household monies.

In the words of Dr. Paul Harrison, of Melbourne’s Deakin University, the widespread use of debit and credit cards causes Australian shoppers to spend up to 115 per cent more than they would if they only kept cash in their wallets.

In Sweden – one of the first countries to institute 99 per cent digital banking, the bank card system has already gone off-line on a number of occasions through power losses and machine failures.

Whenever this has occurred, the affected customers have often been left without food and medicines, sometimes for days at a time.

Rural and regional areas, such as our Clarence Valley, have also been left particularly vulnerable because of poor unexpected broadband and mobile phone connections.

Even natural disasters are liable to render normal digital financial systems useless, preventing people from accessing their own money or buying what they need.

Swedish people, angered by such occurrences have pointed out that, if they were ever robbed of cash notes on their person, they would only lose a very limited number of their krona currency but, when their bank cards get scammed, they are liable to lose their life savings.

They also point to various economic studies that the widespread use of cash also aids the prosperity of local businesses in regional areas as it tends to discourage the buying of goods on the Internet from city-based or foreign companies away from their own communities.

Some Swedish shops which went 100 per cent cashless last year, found that they lost over 20 per cent of their trade and were forced to change their card-only decisions.

Although Sweden found that abandoning cash helped to reduce some theft and fraud, data and cybersecurity criminals have reportedly continued to breach most established Swedish bank card security systems.

Studies undertaken in Europe on the effectiveness of a cashless society warn that this system seriously discriminates against 25 per cent of people who are left behind by a transition to digital only transactions.

Most members of this group are retirees who experience difficulty in using bank cards or are without mobile phones or computers. And, as all readers know, retired people are very well represented by number throughout the Clarence Valley Council area. 

This article appeared in the Clarence Valley Independent, 9 August 2023.