With just about all signs pointing toward Australia becoming a “cashless society” in the future, Sunrise Nat Barr has pointed to a major problem with phasing out physical cash that most of us have probably missed.
Her comments come after Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock Bullock revealed that paying in cash in declining in popularity and the share of consumer cash payments has declined to just 13 per cent.
During a discussion with Government Services minister Bill Shorten and Opposition Finance spokeswoman Jane Hume on Sunrise, Ms Barr pointed out a major flaw with a cashless society.
“The problem is, do we need cash for those ‘just in case’ moments?” she said.
“Like the Optus outage when people couldn’t pay for anything and cafes and small businesses had to shutdown for the day because they couldn’t do anything else.”
Widespread chaos ensued amid a major national outage of Optus services recently, which left around 10.2 million customers across Australia without internet and phone services for over 12 hours, sending multiple hospitals, businesses and transport networks into disarray.
The outage meant businesses that use the telco were without EFTPOS, meaning customers needed cash to pay for goods and services.
Many had to shut their doors for the day before lunchtime, because they effectively could not operate.
It was later revealed that the outage was caused by changes to “routing information” made during a software upgrade at the telco, but it is not the only company to suffer tech problems that caused widespread chaos.
Telstra has had its own outage earlier this year. In October, a major outage of Osko, an online bank transfer system, left millions of Australian banking customers without money.
And most recently, Westpac customers were left outraged when mobile and online banking services went down overnight – some saying their accounts “suddenly disappeared” when they logged onto internet banking.
Ms Barr asked the MPs if they could “see a world where we have to pay to use our cash”; which Bill Shorten said he hoped it would not.
He also said the governor’s speech at the payment summit on Tuesday morning pointed to broader social trends in cash use.
“As I understand it, [Ms Bullock] was giving a speech where she highlighted how society is changing. Back in 2007, 70 per cent of transactions were done by cash. Now it’s down to 13 per cent,” Mr Shorten added.
Senator Hume said she also hoped Aussies would not be charged for using “legal tender” in the future.
“Cash is still legal tender and Australians shouldn’t be charged for using legal tender,” Ms Hume said on Sunrise.
“I would hope the institutions involved take responsibility for this and make sure Australians aren’t being charged more.”
She said it is important Australians “can use their own money without being charged extra”.
Barr agreed, saying the notion of having to pay to pay for things with cash would not sit well with Aussies.
“I don’t think this will go down well, with Aussies, if we have to pay to use our own cash,” she said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that.”
