Thanks, Nicholas Gruen.

Your suggestion is brilliant!

If we combine the Internet with the economy of scale that a single Government sponsored saving system (a People's bank? A Commonwealth Bank?) which should have been maintained all along, the efficiencies and savings would be truly spectacular. The costs of saving would become negligible once again and the costs of obtaining loans would plummet.

However, I would differ from you in your estimate of how much of a threat such a policy would pose to the financial sector. Banks would lose a high proportion of their customers almost overnight and the whole rationale for so many 'services' offered by the financial sector would vanish.

The number of people deriving their bloated incomes from the provision of financial services would, before long, only constitute a small fraction of what they do now, as they should.

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I have e-mailed a copy of this article to Bob Brown and every other Greens politician, whose e-mail address I had. If they have the nous to adopt your suggestion as policy, their popularity would be guaranteed to double overnight.

Yes, this is a very good suggestion and would also be open to those receiving government payments etc.

As the previous commentee has noted, the banks would all smash in a screaming heap as the billion dollar profits proping up their corporate HQ's saw these buildings decompressed faster than a QANTAS plane to Manilla!

So, with the righ PR campaign, perhaps the public could convince the banks that a fee free account without penalties and three day delays for the transfer of funds would, perhaps, just be in their (and shareholders) interest (no pun intended!)