The banks were hoping to go totally cashless within 5 years; now Covid19 in 6 months has progressed this. Just think of all the fee transactions the banks will make! They laugh with glee. 99.9% of those who test positive for this new corona virus will survive. We need to protect the elderly and those with chronic ailments not lockdown the healthy.

Surely there are t main reasons. One to be able to track everything we do,but

the second is to make it much easier to "bail in" all our electronic assets. Just a couple of key strokes & our bank deposits are converted to bank shares, leaving us with nothing.

You can't hide your lap top under your mattress to stop government or the banks, [is there still a difference], grabbing your savings, any time they like.

Recently in Queensland, we saw deeds for real property abolished. The only record of your ownership of your personal bit of dirt, is now just a few key strokes in an electronic memory. The reason, [excuse], for doing this were very flimsy to say the least. So without cash just a couple of key strokes, & it is all gone, as if you never owned a thing.

Burying some physical gold & silver is about the only insurance policy we will have.

Laptops that are routinely turned off, give up nothing while they are down and modems can also be switched off until required, as can phones!

Governments are the servants of the people that pay for their salaries and entitlements, not their masters as hasbeen erroneously concludes?

Some people prefer cash? Don't trust the banks and or government and with good cause sometimes, given the cultures they were once part of?

For mine, people who hide their money in the mattress are setting themselves up as possible targets for violent home invasion by lunatic ice addicts etc!

Banks do charge a small fee (which could be pegged by government legislation) for supplying a card and that card remains with you for your exclusive use and is protected by a PIN.

And some of these cards can be used in any ATM around the world if there is need of some cash for the occasional, rare, cash only transaction! So, cards do not eliminate cash transactions entirely, just ensure that there's an accurate record of them!

Therefore, where is the problem? An accurate and very revealing record of your total (white colour crime/tax avoidance/evasion etc?) drug and alcohol/brothel visitation, official bribery, etc-etc, expenditure perhaps?
Alan B.

Come off the raw prawn Alan.

Ask the Greeks if the government can decide to convert your bank deposits to bank shares. The Greeks who had their cash under their mattresses were the real winners.

No cash & they have ypu completely.

Stop Press.

Suncorp bank are now limiting phone banking transfers between your own accounts to $5,000 a day. I wonder why they would do that?

Is their phone banking system so insecure that it can't be trusted to avoid scammers?

Is it to avoid people changing their deposits around to slow down a "buy in".

I am only allowed by their rules to use phone banking to transfer money from my offset accounts to a trading account. I can transfer money or pay money into them at a branch or agency, but nor out of them. Now they want to limit how much I can transfer daily.

Obviously my offset accounts will be liquidated over the next few days. Only a fool would leave money in them with these rules.

Last time I was buying a car they wanted 8 days notice for me to withdraw more than $10,000 from a branch, or $3000 from their wholly owned agency in a large town. Are any banks better?

A tin full of gold & a few dozen notes buried in the back yard is looking safer every day.

IS IT TO STOP A RUN ON THE BANKS AS THE RECESSION GOES FROM RECESSION TO DEPRESSION?