Friday, February 7, 2025

Cash must be ‘King’ this year

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Towards the end of this 2025 year, all Australians have been guaranteed continued access to using cash by special mandated legislation. This development at Federal level will be one of the most important advances facing each of us personally in the near future as it will hopefully deter those who set out to steal our hard-earned money.

As we all know only too well, our national banking and financial sectors have been attempting to force all Australian consumers into a cashless society as they have closed down umpteen bank and business branches and ATMs throughout the country.

This attempt by our high-earning bankers and financiers to cut their operating costs and enhance their swollen profits at our inconvenience and loss has been a big worry for a few years now, particularly for the elderly and small marketeers.

The banking sector’s actions over the exclusive use of digital bank cards have also largely been responsible for Australians having well over $3 billion a year stolen from their bank accounts by a growing number of IT criminals in our midst and in spurious overseas countries.

I have personally often wondered why those essential businesses which are meant to protect our valuable dollars and cents have, in fact, been over-eager to indirectly assist mainly international gangsters to continue to hack our bank card numbers ad lib and to thieve our incomes and savings.

With this sad state of affairs in mind, surely the time has arrived for we taxpayers to back the Federal Government’s latest move to keep cash flowing in the future. As an old and well-proven saying goes, cash must be allowed to be ‘king’ for all time instead of facing threats of being done away with to the satisfaction of greasy handed digital and mobile phone hacking criminals.

Our current Government should be wholesalely supported on this one issue of great national importance. When mandated later this year, the “continuation of cash” mandate will provide certain essential categories of shops and businesses with legal warnings that they cannot be forced to demand bank card transactions only.

In my particular domain here in the Clarence Valley, I know that an increasing number of people are now becoming aware of the high chance that their usage of their bank card in many circumstances can lead to a loss of their earnings and savings.

As a result, these people are now refusing to use their bank cards for anything other than obtaining cash directly out of their personal bank accounts on regular visits to their bank’s local branches and ATMs.

By keeping their bank card digital numbers exclusive to their particular bank, they now enjoy the virtual guarantee that any loss of account monies is the total responsibility of their bank and is no longer their liability problem.

Although this entails these clever bank customers having to personally draw cash on a weekly basis, they now realise that having cash in hand helps them with keeping more strictly to their family budgets in these times of financial uncertainties.

In many cases, they have also reverted to paying their essential home bills by depositing cash through their local post offices without incurring any additional bank charges.

If more people adopt this modus operandi, surely, we will soon halt a good deal of the nefarious activities of our bank card identity thieves?

In regional Australia, the banking sector is hellbent on closing down more local branches without any consideration for individual customers who wish to protect their monies from possibly going into local and foreign criminals’ pockets.

The Government mandate due to come into force by September of this year will force certain businesses to accept cash when selling essential items, with appropriate exemptions for small businesses. By mandating cash for essential purchases, such as groceries and fuel, the Government is throwing a future lifeline to those of us who are not digitalised and to those who wish to keep track of unnecessary over-spending, now made all too easy by the mere waving of their bank card over shop accounting registers.

Official statistics show that about 1.5 million Australians use cash for more than 80 per cent of their in-person payments. The free use of cash, of course, also provides an easily accessible back-up for digital payments in times of national or regional disaster, digital outages (which are frequent in some areas) or future power failures which are likely to increase in the future.

According to Canberra sources, a long and growing list of foreign economies around the globe have — or are about to — mandate the use of cash in the event of a truly international war breaking out.

Clarence Valley Independent 22 January 2025

This article appeared in the  Clarence Valley Independent, 22 January 2025.

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