Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026, Cash Distribution Framework (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2026
Senator DOWLING (Tasmania) (19:28): It's great to be back and talking about cash. It used to be how we paid for pretty much everything. Cash was king, as they say.
In 2007, about seven in every 10 payments were cash—pretty significant. Most payments were cash based. Most people in this chamber would remember the cash world.
Some of our newer, younger members are probably unfamiliar with it at all, and some of our more experienced members probably grew up in a cash economy entirely. There's been a rapid evolution of how our payment system works in Australia, and by and large it's worked pretty well. If we compare our system of cash and digital to other economies, we have a stable currency and we also have a digital framework that allows and facilitates the rapid transfer of cash digitally when times require that.
We saw it in no better case than when Australia needed to respond through the COVID period and provide people with rapid access to cash; we had that digital infrastructure to support it. The ecosystem we have works very well in Australia, but, today, cash is used for fewer than two in 10 payments. It was seven in 10 in 2007, but it's fewer than two in 10 today.
They're not particularly averaged out; that doesn't really tell the story. The two in 10 are very overrepresented in certain parts of the country. It's a significant shift, and it does present us with a problem, because moving cash costs about the same whether the trucks—the Armaguard vehicles—are full of cash or nearly empty.
The cost of moving that cash is the same. As cash use has fallen, the business of moving it has stopped adding up until the whole job came down to a single national carrier—one carrier moving all of Australia's cash. We know that when a market comes to a single provider it loses the ordinary discipline of competition—competition being the pressure that keeps prices fair and keeps service reliable.
With several carriers, the loss of one is a setback that could be absorbed by the others, but, when you only have one, the loss puts the nation's cash at risk. It puts the entire economy at risk. It can put people's lives at risk.
This bill treats cash as what it has quietly become: essential infrastructure. It doesn't just treat it as economic infrastructure but societal infrastructure. That infrastructure has to work for everyone, especially when other things fail.
I'm a huge supporter of the digital economy and the future that that digital economy is building, the opportunity it provides and the platform it provides for people to participate and capture new economic opportunities. But I also know what that future does not yet reach. It does not reach the town where the phone signal drops out.
It does not reach the checkout when the power goes down in a storm. It does not reach the person the app was never built for. When the digital system fails—and it does fail—cash is the backup that keeps the community going.
We saw it in the last big network outage. The card machines went dark right across the country, and cash was the only thing that still worked. I referred to cash before as 'essential infrastructure'.
It's essential emergency infrastructure. While payments in cash today might only be two in 10 payments, when the network was down, cash was 100 per cent of payments. It was cash or nothing.
Making sure the systems people depend on and the backups behind them hold up wherever they live is what the Albanese government is all about. That's true in the cities, but it's just as true, if not more so, in the regions and remote communities. In my home state of Tasmania, that's not just a theory.
In less than a decade, Tasmania has gone from 135 bank branches to just 84 bank branches, and the trajectory is clear. No-one is opening new branches. In town after town, the nearest one has become no longer within walking distance.
The drive to get to the nearest bank has become further and further. It's not necessarily connected to a public transport route. Access to banking services has become challenging.
You see it right across the state. A stark example is on the remote West Coast of Tasmania, in Queenstown. The last bank on the West Coast, the Bendigo Bank, shut its doors.
It was the last one—and it was relied upon. Local businesses did their banking there. Local residents did their banking there.
It wasn't just a place where you did transactions; it really became an important touchpoint for the community. It's hard to think that you might talk about a bank in romantic or nostalgic terms, but that's really what it was like for the people on the West Coast in confronting how they would operate in a town with no bank. I commend the local town's resilience in how they've gone about this challenge and, particularly, the University of Tasmania, which has gone in with a fantastic program around financial literacy, giving residents the confidence and capability to adapt from what they'd taken for granted and what their whole life was—that physical bank infrastructure—to having to move their business or their household finances to a hybrid or an entirely digital experience.
That has been a real challenge. Queenstown's experience is shared by hundreds of communities across Australia that have had to move from a system of entirely face-to-face, largely cash transactions to that hybrid or fully digital experience. It's a similar experience on the east coast of Tasmania at St Helens, where the last branch closed.
These are not especially small towns but they are not major cities, and the banks simply cannot find a way to make that stack up. Roughly one in 10 Australians still use cash for most of what they buy. One in 10 might not sound like much as a statistic, but it's millions of people.
Millions of Australians still use cash for most of what they buy. They are more likely to be older, more likely to be on a lower income and more likely to live in the regions. These people deserve absolute consideration, and they must be front and centre when we discuss the payment system and the use of cash in our economy.
We shouldn't be distracted by averages. We shouldn't say, 'It's only one in 10.' One in 10 is millions of people who rely on cash. For them, cash is not simply a preference—it's how they manage.
It's how they get by when the power or the network lets them down, which we've seen firsthand too often. As I indicated in my very first speech in this place, I'm a strong believer in financial literacy and financial capability. I'm a strong believer in giving Australians of every age the skills they need to work and take part in a more digital age—giving people the tools, experience and confidence to navigate a modern economy.
We live in the most complex digitised economy in the history of the world, yet the skills and capabilities we equip people with haven't kept up. That is a challenge that we must continually confront in this space: how we equip our citizens to navigate through that complexity. I also understand that, for some people, becoming financially literate and being able to navigate those challenges will not always be possible.
Where that isn't possible, our economic infrastructure has to be built to include them and not shut them out. This bill keeps the system that delivers cash working. It gives the Reserve Bank oversight of critical providers and the power to step in if the supply of cash is ever put at risk, and that is absolutely fundamental.
It puts the competition regulator in charge of fair, clear pricing and decent service. As I outlined at the start of this speech, market forces do a very good job where you have a lot of players, a lot of buyers and a lot of suppliers, but we used to have multiple providers in the cash transport business and now we only have one. So it's really critical now that the role the market used to play is now taken on by the competition regulator, to ensure that charge of fair, clear pricing and decent service, and that it does all of this in an orderly way before a collapse, not after one.
The amendments before us make another important point clear: keeping cash moving should not cut across the protections of the people who move it. Road transport contractual chain orders exist to ensure that standards across transport supply chains are safe, sustainable and viable. Again, as we said, when we're in a market that doesn't have strong competition and dominance by certain players in the supply chain, safety, sustainability and viability are not necessarily things we should take for granted, so it's important that those standards are protected with these changes.
Most of the time, these two systems will operate alongside each other without any problem. But, where an obligation under the cash distribution framework would conflict with one of those orders, these amendments provide a clear pathway to resolve it, and that gives certainty to the system about how it will work in times of stress. They make sure that worker protections are preserved.
I commend the union movement, particularly the Transport Workers' Union, for making sure that those worker protections are recognised and strongly protected. They give businesses and regulators greater certainty about what their obligations are as well. This is not some adversarial approach.
It actually ingrains a lot more certainty and predictability into the system about how things work, particularly under stress, under pressure, at times of crisis. Importantly, they do this without compromising the Reserve Bank's crisis powers. If the cash distribution system is at risk, the Reserve Bank must still be able to act quickly to keep critical services operating.
That is a sensible balance, protecting the workers who keep the cash moving while protecting the system that keeps cash available. When we think about the payment system and how it operates, you can't look at it through the lens of a single stakeholder. You need to understand that the workers who work in that cash transport and distribution framework need to have their worker protections preserved, but we also need to have an efficient, sustainable business environment for those cash distributors to be able to operate their businesses.
Similarly, we need wider economic confidence that, in times of crisis, cash will be available and in times when your telephone doesn't work, when your online banking system isn't working and when your credit card payment networks aren't working, there is still that last resort—cash is king—and we can make sure that the cash is transported to all parts of Australia, particularly those remote, regional places where particularly lower income households and older households have come to rely on cash for their everyday life.
Millions of Australians still do the majority of their transactions using cash. This is a measured answer to a real problem. It's not a step back from the digital future.
It is a way of making sure that the future leaves no-one stranded at the check-out. It sits alongside the cash our shops must now accept, and it backs the supply of cash that Tasmanians and Australians rely on every day. Therefore, I support this bill and the amendments.