How many of us use our cards routinely to buy just about everything, while barely giving it a thought? Once we were seduced by being offered frequent flyer points and receiving rewards for our customer loyalty.
Many of us were shocked to see what happens when a major outage occurs, when people in distress couldn’t even dial 000 let alone use their cards.
The Optus outage affected ten million customers for over twelve hours. Many businesses couldn’t operate.
We’d had a prior taste of that during our local flood crisis, and the vandalism of the Mullumbimby Telstra tower.
People are now talking about how much money is whittled away with each card transaction. Average credit card processing fees are 1.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent. The cost of a coffee using a card is not the advertised $5, but at least $5.15 and sometimes more.
A $50 note, on the other hand, stays at $50 every time it changes hands.
A local supplier of pottery materials estimated she was losing $150 a week simply by customers using cards.
She held up a $50 note and declared: ‘If you were to pass this through 17 transactions on a card, it would be reduced to nothing.’
Another supplier told us it would cost $48 extra to pay by card over the telephone. We paid cash and saved the charge.
The Covid pandemic accelerated the use of cards, as people were wary of cash carrying the virus. Market stallholders suddenly all had card facilities.
A stallholder at the Mullumbimby Farmers Market said people using cards spend more. She’s happy enough for her customers to use cards. Several shopkeepers said more people are using cash again. One said cash use had doubled recently.
Apart from the real risk of systems going down, from sudden wild weather, and not being able to buy essentials, there is also reason for concern that every purchase is being monitored and recorded.
That surveillance will no doubt accelerate with the use of AI.
We are losing privacy.
Who knows how all this data will be used/abused in future?
If we switch to cash we will save businesses hard-earned dollars, and we too will be saving money.
It all adds up.
We used to have purses with loose change and they’ll likely see a comeback. How many of us have jars with coins ranging from five cents to two dollars sitting in them?
Those coins can now go back into circulation.
Not everyone is happy about this return to cash, especially credit providers. All those tiny charges add up to billions of profit.
Before Christmas, the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Michelle Bullock, mused on the idea of people being charged extra when they use cash! How on earth she thinks that could be acceptable and implemented is beyond comprehension.
Could anyone seriously imagine Treasurer Jim Chalmers floating the idea of legislating to charge people who use cash?
The Labor Albanese government won’t even consider making changes to the Stage Three tax cuts, costing Treasury an estimated $20bn. That would have the support of most Australians and enable the government to assist battlers through this cost-of-living crisis.
Mind you, not every Australian is suffering financially.
In the last three years, the combined wealth of the three richest Australians, Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Harry Triguboff, has more than doubled. Gina’s wealth has increased from $23.5bn to $40.6bn, Andrew’s from $12bn to $33.2bn and Harry’s from $11.3bn to $23.3bn. Australia now has 141 billionaires.
According to the 2023 Oxfam Inequality report, the world’s billionaires have increased their wealth from a combined $6tn in 2012 to about $14tn in 2022. Half of the world’s billionaires live in countries where no taxes are paid on inherited wealth. Trillions will be passed on tax free.
Billionaires gathered at the current World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland are asking to have a wealth tax introduced, but not one that will impoverish them, just a modest couple of per cent.
Global wealth tax
They say a tipping point has been reached and there’s an urgent need to address growing inequality.
‘The cost to our economic, societal and ecological stability risk is severe’.
A global wealth tax would liberate hundreds of billions of dollars to feed the starving, house the homeless and help mitigate the disaster of the climate crisis.
While most Australians are counting their pennies and cutting back unnecessary expenditure, the super wealthy are laughing all the way to the bank.
Anthony Albanese is calling MPs back to Canberra two weeks early to discuss the cost-of-living crisis. It’s clearly panic stations. It’s time now for serious tax reform Albo, including a wealth tax.
Time to prove you really do lead an authentic Labor government.
♦ Richard Jones is a former NSW MLC and is now a ceramicist.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
