Cheques are the safest and cheapest way to make large or remote payments. If the planned abolition of cheques goes ahead, a lot of people will be inconvenienced – and worse. 28- million-plus cheques a year, which I understand is the current national usage, reflects that a lot of people still use them. And a lot more people probably use bank cheques occasionally, for major payments such as to buy a car, for home deposits, to pay taxes owing, and other major payments.
According to the information I have, cheque usage hasn’t declined at all since 2006, and the supposed “decline” in cheque usage - as a percentage of total recorded transactions - is not caused by a reduction in the number of cheque transactions.
It is said that cheque transactions have gone down to 0.2% of transactions, from a historic figure of 1%, and that this justifies their elimination. But there are five times as many recorded transactions per year in Australia now than there was in 2007, most of the increase being due to minor electronic transactions that have replaced previously individually unrecorded minor cash transactions. So of course cheque transactions have dropped from 1% to 0.2% of total recorded transactions! The financial institutions have been deliberately misrepresenting statistics.
Furthermore, as a matter of principle, people should not be forced to use electronic banking against their will. Electronic banking is less safe and less reliable than conventional banking, and is something that many people simply don’t need. Electronic transactions are not necessarily even faster than cheques, with some electronic transactions having a delay of 24 hours, 48 hours, or even more, before completing.
The banks’ drive to eliminate cheques is motivated by a desire to surcharge the larger transactions, drive processing costs to an absolute minimum, and harvest individual’s complete transaction data.
Cheques are beneficial to society, and if they are eliminated, we will see a lot more people lose large sums of money to fraud, as scammers target people’s larger transactions.
Here is an example of what we can expect a lot more of if using cheques is no longer an option, and it shows the hypocrisy of the banks, in claiming to be doing all they can to keep people’s money safe from scamming, while at the same time working to eliminate the very thing that is the most effective in doing so – cheques! :
The above unfortunate situation described in this article could have been avoided if the victims, instead of relying on electronic banking, had given or mailed cheques to the recipient, and allowed the recipient to deposit them into the correct account. The victims themselves acknowledge that they wish they had used paper methods, saying “electronic banking is scary now, and we have no control over it”. Meanwhile, the banks’ underlying attitude seems to be “Well, if you transfer funds into a scammer’s account, then that’s your doing and your problem.”.
According to the article, scammers are shifting to targeting high value individual transactions like the one featured in the article above, and are now using Artificial Intelligence to make scams more specific, more realistic, more sophisticated, and on a larger scale.
But there may be a surge in demand for cheques, as the insecurity of electronic banking sinks into public consciousness.
Please continue to share the petition, and don’t forget to consider contacting your federal politicians giving them your opinion on this issue.
https://www.change.org/save-cheques
Thankyou.
David Miller.