Make a submission to the consultation by 15 August
Make a submission to the consultation by 15 August, with the message that the solution to the cash distribution crisis is an Australia Post bank which takes over cash distribution for all of Australia—see details below.
The fight to save cash in Australia is coming to a head, with the government forced to address the crisis created by the banks aggressively dismantling cash infrastructure in their mad drive to force Australians to go cashless.
The management of the major banks, and their corrupt lobby the Australian Banking Association, sit around in their pin-striped suits in opulent boardrooms in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide and literally plot how to make it harder and harder to get cash, so that all transactions are forced online where their parasitical snouts can siphon off a cut of all transactions and gather our data to be monetised.
Because although these parasites are already the most profitable banks in the world, it is not enough for them—they demand more and more and more.
Bendigo Bank has decided the way to join their fat-cat big bank club is to show it is just as callous and greedy as the Big Four, by closing ten branches and 28 agencies in one fell swoop.
Five of the branches and all 28 agencies are the last full banking services in their towns, which will plunge those towns into devastating financial chaos, including in terms of how to access and bank cash.
The people of Queenstown in Tasmania now face this chaos, thanks to Bendigo Bank CEO Richard Fennell closing the last bank on the entire west coast of Tasmania just so he can get a bigger bonus.
Citizens Party Research Director Robert Barwick flew to Hobart and drove to Queenstown on Sunday to attend the public protest meeting against the bank closure, and saw for himself the intimidating, tightly winding mountain roads that locals will have to traverse to visit the next closest bank two and a half hours away in Burnie.
The locals told him that getting cash, and businesses getting change, will now be a massive challenge.
Solution: Australia Post bank and cash distribution
There are 20 towns on Tasmania’s west coast that depend on Queenstown’s Bendigo Bank branch for full banking services, and will face severe disruption.
However, Queenstown and the rest of those towns all have post offices, which already provide banking services through Bank@Post.
Bank@Post is an agency service for most of the banks in Australia, but the banks impose impractical restrictions on Bank@Post that mean it is not a substitute for a full-service bank.
The biggest restriction is cash: the banks limit cash withdrawals from Bank@Post to $2,000 a day, and deposits to $7,000—some impose even lower limits—which are seriously problematic when towns have peak tourism season or event days that draw in large numbers of visitors.
(Stupid bank executives say towns should move away from cash and use electronic transactions on those days instead; they seem to have no idea that the more people gather in one place, the slower and less reliable the internet—the Mayor of Queenstown revealed that his town’s maximum 4G coverage slows to a crawl every day at 3:30 PM when schoolkids get out of school and get on their devices!)
The win-win solution for all communities is for the government to re-establish a public bank like the original Commonwealth Bank, as an Australia Post bank, providing full banking services through Australia’s 4,000-plus post offices—which is more than all bank branches combined.
A full-service Australia Post bank would force real competition upon the profit-gouging Big Four, Macquarie and Bendigo banks; but regardless of what those banks do, it would guarantee that every community in Australia always has access to full, face-to-face banking services—and cash!
And an Australia Post bank would be able to use Australia Post’s extensive transportation logistics infrastructure to distribute cash all over Australia, more efficiently than Armaguard or any other company, which would solve the cash distribution crisis once and for all.
(An example of Australia Post’s cash distribution efficiency is recorded in the 1999 “Regional banking services: Money too far away” Senate report, which noted that when Australia Post distributed cash to banks in regional Western Australia in the 1990s, it cost each branch $20 per week, but when it was privatised to armoured cash-in-transit companies the cost soared to $600 per branch per week.)
What you can do: make a submission today!
The Council of Financial Regulators (CFR) and Australia Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) are holding a public consultation on cash distribution which is taking submissions until 15 August.
You have 10 days to make a submission by emailing the consultation with one clear message:
To save cash, the government should immediately establish an Australia Post bank, which should be responsible for cash distribution all over Australia.
That’s all you need to say; if you want to elaborate and say more, that would be great, but the goal is to get hundreds or thousands of people to hammer the consultation with this clear message, and force them to respond.
Email your submission today to: CashDistributionRegulationConsultation@cfr.gov.au