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Is Australia Becoming A Cashless Society? (abc.net.au)
Australia's Reserve Bank will roll out an instantaneous money-transferring technology later this year, "which will push Australia even further towards being a cashless society," according to ABC. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
In 2014, 12 financial institutions signed up to build the "New Payment Platform," partly as a way of bringing Australia up to speed with other countries that are ahead in the race to becoming completely cashless. Sweden is on track to become the world's first completely cashless economy, and just last November India got rid of its highest denomination bills, effectively eliminating 90 per cent of its paper money... The "New Payment Platform" will mean money can be transferred almost instantaneously, even when the payer and payee are members of different banks.
"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is lost in tax revenue due to the sort of cash economy," says an economics professor at the University of New South Wales, who predicts Australia could be cash-free by 2020. The Australian Payments Association reports that over 75% of the country's face-to-face payments are already tap-and-go, and ATM withdrawals have sunk to a 15-year low.
"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is lost in tax revenue due to the sort of cash economy," says an economics professor at the University of New South Wales, who predicts Australia could be cash-free by 2020. The Australian Payments Association reports that over 75% of the country's face-to-face payments are already tap-and-go, and ATM withdrawals have sunk to a 15-year low.
The better to track you with, my dear!
The breakdowns that I've encountered, while rare, are generally moderately severe, i.e. not just out for a few minutes, but hours, or overnight. Fortunately the local IGA supermarket will allow known customers to run a tab for as long as it takes to recover the EFTPOS systems.
I don't do EFTPOS or credit card, it's cash, cheque, or direct deposit. The banks charge too much on EFTPOS and credit card transactions. Some of the merchants around here are already adding 30 or 50 cents to EFTPOS/CC purchases.
If you try to take cash away, people will find something to replace it - there's already a LET system here, but most of it is for the hippies - trading a patchouli-scented massage for some free-range eggs, but I can see it picking up if cash is withdrawn. The government didn't invent cash, they just stepped in when they saw a need to regulate it.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
What this kind of paranoid person doesn't understand is that they can already track you to an incredible degree, and there's fuck all you can do about it, so ultimately all you're doing is arguing against having the convenience. Black markets exist anyway, so that's not really an argument either.
It's always interesting how the Media guys consider themselves as part of the government. "It's our money! How dare the people keep it!"
>"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is lost in tax revenue due to the sort of cash economy,"
"Lost in tax revenue". That is, it's the government's money, and the citizens are just thieves who are stealing it.
Let's correct that, shall we?
"It's estimated that somewhere between about $3.5 and $5 billion in Australia every year is saved by the people..."
The only EFTPOS failures I've experienced in the last ten years have been caused by damaged magstripes or removing the card too quickly when I was first using contactless. Both were very easy to solve.
As for the privacy concerns, for small purchases it hardly matters. Medium purchases could already be visible to some extent by irregular withdrawals, and large purchases already require traceable payment forms anyway. A concerned and determined person could conceivably hide most (but not all) transactions from the banks; bit is probably painting a target on their backs for law enforcement similar to the way encrypting your hard drive does. Unencrypted they read your crappy poetry and send you on your way; encrypted they lock you in a room until they have forced you to reveal your password.
I'm not saying we should accept this; I'm saying fighting this particular tech is just a waste of time. We need to pick a better battle.
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
Cashless means everything costs more, including paying your child an allowance for mowing the lawn because it's taxed.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
This is 99% about TAXES. No more cash between friends. Tax everything 3, 4 and 5 times.
All this cashless society has the main problem that during any serious cataclysm that kills the communication infrastructure the trade just stops. Not only the global nuclear cataclysm and EMP but any kind of local cataclysm like Katrina or war in Syria. And if the trade stops the hungry people could rob since they could not buy.
Moreover, I feel that the more Western is the society the higher the unrest. Some Somalians could organize a government-less society based on traditional law, in the First World it's just impossible. We Russians survived the wild capitalism of 1990-s because in any crisis there was impossible to foreclose or cut off the electricity and heat. Next such crisis could produce hordes of homeless.
The supermarket duopoly offer POS cash withdrawals with no fee.
Contrast that with an ATM where you have to hunt for your bank's machine or face an extortionate $2 charge to withdraw from a rival bank's machine. Hence an increasing number of people just get $100 or so out in cash when they buy their groceries.
There are all sorts who want information on your shopping history. The NSA is passe. We know the government has access to most digital shopping data. If you are an undocumented immigrant or buying anything tangentially illegal or without paying the appropriate tax they can look it up. Today's argument is generally more marketing or blackmail oriented.
I pay cash for just about everything. I often get discounts so the merchant doesn't have to pay the 3% charge. Win win.
What this kind of paranoid person doesn't understand is that they can already track you to an incredible degree
Who is "they"? The NSA probably has access to my credit card transactions. But my neighbor doesn't, nor does my mother-in-law, nor do the local police.
Bring India in as an example. They royally screwed over their poorer citizens when they 'retired' their old cash and didn't have enough new bank notes ready to replace it.
It would be interesting to see a graph of household debt vs adoption of cashless payment methods. An anecdotal point: Germany has pretty low household debt and relies primarily on cash for personal transactions. The idea being; if you don't have the money in your pocket, you don't buy it. Cashless transactions are a good way to either get people to run up debt in the form of a line of credit or overdraft fees. I smell more income for banks here.
Have gnu, will travel.
Real time tracking of every financial transaction of your life. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
Reading the article I see the push for this cashless system is to assure that the government gets their cut of the deal. I have an idea, do away with sales taxes and get your revenue by means less likely to get subverted. How many ways do people need to be taxed? Should not one form of taxes be enough? I assume Australia is much like any other Anglosphere nation where there is a sales tax, income tax, property tax, "sin" tax (on alcohol, tobacco, and such), homeowner tax, Homer tax, bear tax, poll tax, pole tax, polecat tax, poll cat tax, cat on a pole tax, and a tax tax.
Where is it written that a government *MUST* tax sales? I'm not saying governments do not or should not have the ability to impose any taxes, only that the number of taxes imposed by most governments is excessive. I know why governments impose taxes like this, it hides just how much money they are collecting by spreading it around so that it is difficult to see just how much the government is taking. I believe that a government that is honest with its citizens would make the taxes simple.
They are fighting a battle they cannot win. If they impose restrictions on the movement of cash then people will revert to barter.
This also gets into the "mark of the beast" territory from Christian tradition. You can call it just a superstition if you like but psychologists, sociologists, and economists have made connections between Christian tradition and a healthy society. I'm not saying following every Christian belief will bring an ideal society, only that we've seen Christian societies excel where others did not. I say it may be helpful to see the Bible as a historical document, full of parables, advice, and warnings for building a healthy society.
I know people will feel the urge to mod me down for getting all religious. This is not about religion though, but religion does play a part in this. There will be people that oppose this on religious grounds. There will be people that oppose this because they see the hazards this has on society. These are not mutually exclusive groups. Removing the ability for people to conduct business with cash is dangerous, and some people roughly 2000 years ago warned us of this. I believe that we should think real hard about what a cashless society means. It won't take divine intervention to destroy society, we'll do that on our own.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
... so ultimately all you're doing is arguing against having the convenience.
Isn't that enough to oppose this? How many reasons do I need to tell the government to get out of my personal business? Assuming the government can already track all my monetary transactions that does not mean I am somehow obligated to make it easier for them.
The reasons black markets exist is because the government has imposed some restrictions on trade. By shifting what would have been legal before into the black market now the government has the ability to fine, imprison, or otherwise make life more miserable for something we used to be able to do freely.
We should not have to turn to the black market to get what we want and need. Places where black markets thrive tend to be tyrannical hellholes where mothers have to sell their hair to wig makers to get enough cash to buy milk for their children.
Free markets are where bread sits in lines waiting for me. The alternative is me waiting in lines for bread.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Asutralia's rural internet is still pathetic, with some areas either unconnected or sporadically connected by pre-dialup speed satellite connections. There is literally no way Australia has any potential to go cashless in 3 years time.
Moving towards a classless society? I'm afraid not. Australia is moving towards a classic feudal society, with an enormous divide between land-owners & tenants.
As prices for a nondescript family home within cooee of anywhere with a job that pays more than 80k/year approach $1 million, the divide between those who already have property & those who don't is becoming impassable.
My pics.
This is 99% about TAXES.
You're probably right - I was about to say it was about trying to shut down black markets (particularly chop-chop), but in the end, shutting down those markets is ultimately about taxation too.
My pics.
On what planet do you live? How is going inside, waiting in line, paying for gas, pumping it, and going back inside and waiting again for your change faster than just swiping your card at the pump (or holding your phone up to the NFC reader), pumping your gas, and hanging the nozzle back up when you're done? For the others, you're trusting that the people involved can do basic arithmetic quickly enough and accurately enough to get your change right in a timely manner. On the occasions that I do pay cash, if I hand over $4.10 instead of $4.00 for a $3.85 purchase, maybe half the time I get a blank stare in return. Hand them plastic and you don't burden their feeble minds with having to make sense of that.
There are plenty of good reasons to hang onto cash, but transaction speed isn't one of them.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Obviously you aren't Australian then. In Australia paywave/paypass are many times faster than cash. I still use cash for a lot of things but when speed is needed you can't beat the speed of contactless payments.
Even the fastest most efficient cashier is going to be many times slower than a contactless swipe of a card. Especially as the reader for the card can actually be at places like the gas pump.
I don't fucking know.
In Australia not so much. People disappear all the time just because they don't want to be found. Sometimes (eg. battered wives with a homicidal spouse looking for them for extreme examples (which do happen)) it's not a bad thing.
I think you'll find it's not unheard of in the USA either despite efforts to track people getting onto busses etc.
There are still a lot of cash in hand jobs so it's possible to get by with no identification in a lot of places apparently.
This is 99% about control. There are multiple players here. Local governments, the US major political players, credit card companies, banks, they all get to win. Control means you know much more about transactions, you get more say about what transactions you favor or not, you get a larger percentage on transactions, you get to use negative interests in the bank because people can no longer extract their money from the bank. There's a lot. It's about power and the threat of power. For one thing it means the US can threaten to stop all financial traffic for any target they pick, on the spot. There is a big difference between using little cash and taking away the possibility to use cash.
This article http://norberthaering.de/en/ho... describes what happened in India. India is mostly cash based, or was until some people decided that was no longer the case. The result was a caricature of unchecked power.
For those Americans confused by the above "chop-chop" is tobacco sold outside the mainstream so not subject to very high rates of tax on over the counter tobacco products. While there is likely to be a massive black market it's probably less than the tax even just Apple avoids in Australia.
In a capitalist system, no cash means being a slave to those who give you permission to access anything. So what exactly do you do moron, when the bank says no, where the fuck do you go, no lawyers, no transfers from anyone else, phone account shut, you can walk to nowhere. Either capitalism has to go or cash has to fucking stay and that is an or fucking else, I am no ones fucking slave, I will not ask for permission to fucking live.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So how fast will economic collapse be when the electronic funds transfer system is purposefully shut down by a hostile force. What exactly would happen after the first day, the second day the third day and how long would recover take. Power goes down the entire economy shuts down. Two weeks and people would be starving to death, hospital would should down, patients would start dying, and it would take years to recover. Why cashless because finnacial corporations would have total economic power over the populace and the government. So what exactly would the government say when the banks so no, you can not have any money, we don't have to by law.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You are sort-of right, but you are looking at the wrong 'tax'. The real benefit of cashless, is that central banks can drive interest rates negative in a deflationary environment.
Since around the 1990s, automation and competition from low labour centers basically destroyed the utility value of the working class. We still give them jobs (which are basically funded by welfare), but most of these are just a sop to our consciences so that we can enjoy our lattes and craft beer without having to stare at slum dwelling children.
The real horror for us, however, is that through the 2000s this same effect has extended well into the middle class. Some of us have quite obviously been directly affected, but these are not a majority yet so nobody cares about them. So why has the middle class not collapsed? The reason is because of the banking sector. What the banking sector has been doing since 2000s is engaging in a giant UBI process for anyone in the middle class who owned a house. Central banks have maintained broadly negative real interest rates (when you've adjusted for inflation) since then, which has ensure that anyone with access to credit (ie middle class home owners) can get connected to a perpetual money spiggot that supplements their falling income from their increasingly unnecessary jobs. This has sustained the middle class in most western countries.
Essentially the problem that occurred is that central banks let a fast bubble develop which blew open the nature of the ponzi scheme and those middle class homeowners freaked out. They then hit the zero lower bound on interest rates, and could not keep the bubble inflated. This is why they are desperate for inflation (just watch Mark Carney do nothing as UK inflation rockets) as this would force real interest rates negative, but demographics, automation and a continuing lack of confidence means that they cannot get the mild 3-4% inflation that would allow them to keep the debt ponzi scheme going.
Because of this, what they would really like to be able to do is drive nominal interest rates deeply negative. If they could do this they can get the debt bubble going again even under deflationary conditions. Just imagine how many people will rush out to buy a house for even more stupid prices if people started getting paid to have mortgages. The middle class economy would take off again as the homeowner UBI comes back on line (well, for anyone lucky enough to have gotten onto the housing bandwagon).
The biggest impediment to negative rates is cash. This is why the swiss national bank does not allow you to store francs in safety deposit boxes, and why many countries have introduced controls on cash (under the guises of preventing terrorism). Central banks want this as a tool for the next crash, and they are slowing setting things up to ensure this is possible.
If you have lots of money, then you'll know how to protect it (buy a house, basically). If you have lots of debt then the central banks have your back. If you have a moderate amount of savings, then you will be screwed. Indeed, watch Mark Carney's recent talk on the post crash recovery and he admits that the only people who have suffered since the crash are those who had savings but not assets, but he justifies letting this happen by saying they in the minority.
I exchange cashless between friends all the time. We go and have a dinner and one of us pays by card. The others then transfer the money to that person.
Where I live this is free. They are working on making it faster, but for now I can wait a day. When with the same bank, it is immediately.
No taxes.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is 99% about TAXES. No more cash between friends. Tax everything 3, 4 and 5 times.
Actually this is 0% about taxes.
If the incompetent LNP cared about taxes they'd be looking at the big end of town. A$3-5 billion is a few days worth of tax evasion for the mining and tech giants.
This is about a conservative government trying to keep the populace distracted whilst giving a boost to their mates in banking. Yep, every time you use your card the bank collects from the merchant. The merchants have to pay the banks to get the money you paid them.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
>Free markets are where bread sits in lines waiting for me. The alternative is me waiting in lines for bread.
The real difference between those two scenarios is just that in your 'free market' a helluva lot of people can't get bread at all.
There is then more bread than people who CAN get it, and hence it sits and wait.
This is, obviously, great for you - being one of the few who can get bread - but it sucks for the people who can't.
Of course the OTHER thing it does it so perpetually increase the number of people who can't - so more and more bread goes to fewer and fewer people. We often refer to this effect by the shorthand name "rising inequality' - perhaps you've heard of it ?
But your BIGGEST mistake of all is thinking those are the only options. This is not an either-or question. Nothing that involves human beings is ever THAT simple. It's not a choice between "laizes faire capitalism" and "USSR style communism" -there are literally THOUSANDS of other ways we could organise the distribution of resources (which is all an economy is - a system to distribute resources). So while you feel the advantages of liazes-faire capitalism outweigh the problems (but only because none of the really BIG problems happen to you personally), a great many people do not and the argument that it's better than the downsides of Soviet Style communism is complete bullshit - because we don't need to choose EITHER.
Are you seriously so closed-minded that you are convinced, among the thousands of other possible ways we can organise this activity - not ONE of them may offer better pro/con ratios than the one you love ?
Because I am. None of them can... for every resource, service and product. But for every resource, service or product there is a way to organise it that would be better than EITHER laizes-faire capitalism OR soviet-style communism - in THIS location. In another town - another one will work better for the same product. And somewhere in the world, there is one product which, in one town, will work best with laizes-faire capitalism and somewhere out there is one product which, in one town, will work best with soviet-style communism. But for all the millions of other products in the millions of other towns the best answer will be NEITHER of those.
Indeed it's impossible to predict what the best answer will be. The only way to discover it is to experiment with all of them - in every town and for every product- and record the results. The only way to get an economy with minimum downsides and maximum benefits - is to have an economy that's created by the scientific method, experiment, test, improve - and consider all answers to be local to the specific parameters of the experiment. Just because in bummsville Idaho the best way to distribute apples turned out to be "plant an apple tree on every street corner and let everybody pick when they want" doesn't mean it's true for oranges in bummsville idaho and doesn't mean it's true for apples in New York.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
and lastly, because if everyone pays their rightful share, each individual can pay less. This is not about "extra" taxation, or taxing "3, 4, 5" times, but simply applying the same rules everyone. It is amusing to me that you assume that everyone in the world has the same allergic reaction to paying taxes that you do, because you assume that everyone else in the world shares the same jaundiced view of government and the social contract that many of you do - not just those on the libertarian fringe either, it seems, but reg'lar folks who rather unbelievably to me and many in my country, elected a president that publicly brags about paying little or no taxes. In Australia a political campaign would be dead in the water after such an admission, - the "obligation to shareholders blah blah blah" argument being self-serving bullshit in the case of a privately-held company like Trump Organization anyhow - because although we're not the fair and equitable nation we once were there's a pretty strong feeling that our obligations must balance our privileges. Of which we have many. As it happens I don't think GST or other consumption taxes that this kind of payment system will help with tracking are the best kind of tax, but they're not entirely regressive either. For mine, a single, universal no-exemption financial transaction tax is the way to go.
ATMs, when first introduced, were free. Now they often charge fees. Do you really think once a cashless society is reached that fees will not be applied to everything?