Australia set to be fully cashless in 30 years as the country is slowly squeezed by fewer ATMs, higher fees and ‘convenient' alternatives

Sky News AU

25-05-2025

If current trends hold, just a few decades from now, Australia is set to become a country where physical money becomes a relic, an object more likely to be found in a museum than your wallet.
And yet, barely anyone is sounding the alarm.
This isn't mindless paranoia.
Across the ditch, New Zealanders are already struggling to withdraw cash.
ATMs are vanishing.
Cash transactions are being phased out quietly, without a boot stamping down — just the slow squeeze of fewer machines, higher fees, and 'convenient' alternatives.
The genius of the strategy is that it doesn't feel like coercion.
It feels like progress.
Progress draped in convenience and contactless transactions.
They don't need to ban cash outright.
They just need to make it a hassle, and they are.
But cash is more than a payment method.
It's freedom.
It's privacy.
It's a last line of defense when systems fail.
It is also—crucially—offline.
And that might be the most important trait of all.
Because systems will fail.
Australia's energy grid is already straining under the weight of contradictory mandates.
On one hand, we're being told to go green.
Switch to EVs.
Electrify everything.
On the other hand, we're told the grid will cope.
Really?
When power prices are skyrocketing, coal plants are being shut down, and summer blackouts are becoming normal in places like Adelaide and Melbourne?
The National Electricity Market (NEM) has had multiple near-collapse incidents in recent years, and yet we're piling on even more demand.
More data centers.
More electric cars.
More 'smart' cities.
And now, more digital payment infrastructure—all of it dependent on a fragile supply of electrons humming through brittle wires.
What happens when the juice runs out?
Remember the 2024 global IT outage?
Banks froze, payment apps glitched, and card readers crashed.
What happened next?
Businesses shut their doors, supermarkets turned customers away, and public transport systems stalled.
Without electricity or the internet, digital money became useless.
That was a warning shot.
And the scariest part?
No one had a backup.
Everyone just stood there, waiting, like children locked out of the house with no key.
Now fast forward.
Picture the same scenario in a world where no one carries cash.
Not one dollar in your pocket.
No change in the glove box.
No envelope under the bed.
Just a dead card and a useless phone.
That's not science fiction.
That's the logical conclusion of our current trajectory.
In a future packed with EVs, smart homes, AI-powered logistics, and real-time analytics for everything from groceries to garbage pickup, outages will be more frequent, not less.
Cyberattacks.
System overload.
Biblical-like floods.
Regulatory mishaps.
Even solar flares.
It won't take much to break the chain.
And when it breaks, it breaks everything.
Still feel safe going cashless?
Now, imagine that future with every transaction tied to a digital ID, every purchase monitored, and every payment decision run through an invisible scoring matrix.
Welcome to the birth of the financial panopticon.
Social credit logic will be baked in, even if no one calls it that.
Deny a mandatory system update?
Lose access to your account.
Say something flagged as 'unhelpful' on social media?
Get throttled.
Accused—not convicted—of some civic violation?
Wallet suspended pending review.
And if you don't think this can happen in a liberal democracy, you haven't been paying attention.
Canada froze the bank accounts of protesting truckers.
The EU has discussed programmable CBDCs.
China's system already exists.
We are being lulled into a digital cage.
Not through force.
Through design.
Because the fewer the ATMs, the easier it is to make cash inconvenient.
And the more inconvenient it becomes, the more we stop using it—until one day, we won't even remember how.
And when the grid goes down or a cyberattack hits—or you simply get flagged as 'problematic'—you'll find yourself standing in line not for bread but for access.
Hoping your biometric scan works.
Hoping you didn't post the wrong thing last week.
Hoping the algorithm hasn't mislabelled you.
Hoping the lights stay on.
Australians, pay attention.
Australia now ranks as the 13th most difficult place in the world to access cash and is set to go cashless in 30 years, according to a new report from UK-based payments analyst Merchant Machine .
Banks are closing physical branches at record speed.
Major events are now cashless by default.
Try paying with paper at a stadium or concert, and you'll be treated like an alien species.
And that's exactly how it's meant to feel.
Foreign.
Suspicious.
Entirely alien.
They want you uncomfortable with cash.
They want your kids to grow up thinking it's dirty, slow, and dangerous.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
That's the actual language being used in boardrooms and central bank papers.
And they're winning.
The erosion isn't dramatic.
It's slow.
Bureaucratic.
Boring, even.
But the endgame is not.
Because this isn't just about money.
It's about dependency.
About obedience.
About making sure that when the system says 'jump', you don't even ask why—you just tap.
Cash is messy.
Cash is anonymous.
Cash is inconvenient.
But that's precisely why we need it.
Keep some.
Use it often.
And tell your kids what it's for.
Because if we let it vanish, we won't be living in a free country anymore.
We'll be living in a monitored one.
And by then, it'll be too late.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.