Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026, Cash Distribution Framework (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2026

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (19:43): The fact is cash is king for retailers, sellers and buyers. The Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026 and the Cash Distribution Framework (Consequential Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2026 establish a regulatory framework for Australia's cash distribution system, with a particular focus on the cash-in-transit sector.

The government's claimed intention is to support continued access to cash as cash use supposedly declines and the economics of distribution become more difficult, especially in regional and remote areas. Key measures include allowing the Reserve Bank of Australia to designate systematically important cash distribution entities, giving the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission oversight of standard terms, pricing, service agreements, access arrangements and service level standards and creating good faith negotiation, arbitration and dispute resolution mechanisms.

The bills introduce crisis readiness and resolution powers so that the Reserve Bank of Australia can intervene if a critical provider becomes financially distressed or services are disrupted. In effect, cash handling is moving from a commercial market service with many providers to critical national infrastructure. One Nation supports this bill.

I would add that a main assumption in this bill is false. The use of cash is not declining. In 2016, when I first started campaigning to protect the use of cash, there was $70 billion of cash in the economy.

Today it's $107 billion, a 53 per cent increase in cash. Cash use is now increasing from 13 per cent of transactions in 2022 to 15 per cent today. Around 50 per cent or half of Australians use cash weekly, and seven per cent use cash exclusively.

I'll say that again: seven per cent of Australians use cash exclusively. Liberal-Labor uniparty governments have lost their war against cash because half of Australians disagree with ending the use of cash. Thank you, Australia.

Reasons given for moving back to cash include the cost of electronic banking, which was always the plan—eliminate cash, and then banks can charge whatever they damn well like for electronic transaction fees, and consumers will be a captive market. We must keep cash. Secondly, an age-old budgeting trick is making a comeback.

Withdraw your budget for the week in cash and, when it's gone, stop spending. Swiping a plastic card encourages people to overspend. This is a measure one wouldn't see making a comeback if everyday Australians were doing well.

The truth is that the comeback in cash is directly linked to the cost-of-living crisis and the war on the middle class which the Liberal and Labor uniparty have been perpetrating for a generation. Increasingly, the use of cash is associated with privacy concerns. We know every purchase you make electronically is logged and then sold into the data market, often called big data.

These companies have significant data files on every Australian, so much so that huge data centres are now necessary to keep track of it all and then exploit that data for the benefit of retailers and, of course, for the benefit of the government. The Australian Banking Association points out the rise in the cash economy. This is a valid point.

There is significant use of cash payments in hospitality, among other industries. This is being driven by workers, not employers. I know one employer who advertised for bar staff and had emails from prospective employees asking what the rate per hour was for payment in cash.

Foreign students are working their 20 hours legally and then working another 20 for cash. This is facilitating part of the $39 billion a year visa holders send back overseas. Recently, in Senate estimates hearings, I was given answers on this topic which suggested the amount foreign students earn each year was equal to the amount foreign students send overseas each year.

So what are foreign students living on? Well, it's obvious: their cash work and tax avoidance, adding GST to their subcontractor invoices and then shooting through before the ATO, the Australian Taxation Office, can catch up with them. I acknowledge that cash can facilitate a black economy, yet the answer isn't getting rid of cash; it's getting rid of the black economy.

All of these things could be policed if the government really wanted to. It's chosen not to. Both this government and the previous Liberal government chose not to get rid of the black economy.

I note the bill does not explicitly mention Australia Post outlets or Bank@Post. It really should have included a statement of support for providing cash handling to post offices. Australia's banking oligopoly, banking cartel, has badly served the bush.

Local post offices are the last source of cash services for retail outlets in many rural and regional areas. The regulatory powers created in this bill must be used to mandate cash handling ATMs in areas that banks or post offices do not properly service so that business can still operate. Banks should earn their social licence to operate.

In many ways direct and indirect, taxpayers protect the banks, and government favours increase bank profits and lower the risks banks face. Major banks today socialise losses and privatise profits. When things are going well, they're private.

When things are going badly, they want help from the government. In return, banks should fulfil adequate services, including provision of legal tender, cash. This Labor government continues the uniparty policy of hollowing out the bush, replacing farmland with industrial solar and wind installations and transmission lines to feed power to their city voter base.

Part of that is the policy of turning agricultural land into a wasteland in the name of carbon dioxide credits, wind turbines and solar panels. As one of many examples for proof, look up Rushy Lagoon, Tasmania, which the Senate is debating. It's 11,000 hectares of prime farmland turned into a pine plantation for carbon dioxide credits—for rubbish.

Shame on you. You use taxpayer money to help these foreigners do it. You gave grants to yourself—grants to government entities.

Australia's banks have been actively supporting the uniparty government's agenda to hollow out the regions, removing regional cash and banking services. This bill will provide a mechanism to restore the viability of cash handling in the bush, but I'm not convinced the government means a word of it. One Nation welcomes this new framework that we can use to restore cash handling in regions once we get into government.

Armaguard is concerned about costs imposed in the bill making cash deliveries too expensive. This will result if the cost of regional cash services is charged on a cost-recovery basis. Banks, though, do not use cost recovery.

They average operating costs across all their products. Yes, the city will pay for cash handling in rural regions. The bush though, right now, pays for the heightened cost of security in our crime ridden cities, the multiple armed guards on cash deliveries, the in-branch security and in-branch translation language services not needed in rural regions.

Banks spend way more advertising in the city to get customers, whereas, when a bank has the only branch in town, that bank does not need to spend money advertising. In the growing number of regional towns with no bank, banks have no branch costs and simply give Australia Post licenced post offices a cheap fee to act as agent for the bank. By the way, the large majority of our country's export income and wealth comes from the rural regions, from the bush.

Don't tell them in the bush they're sponging off the cities. It's the city's sponging off the bush. The Cash Distribution Framework Bill 2026 allows the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to require Armaguard-Prosegur to provide access to their depots for smaller operators, while noting these operators already access their depots.

This provision is actually not really new. Nonetheless, protecting access rights in legislation is useful, so thank you. Potential market entrants into the cash-handling market, such as NCR, expressed support for this provision.

The Bills Digest discusses concentration of industry power in the hands of the merged Armaguard-Prosegur entity. This bill may create barriers to entry for new or smaller entities and thereby serve to cement the Armaguard-Prosegur monopoly. It's a fair point, although, once again, it goes to use of the powers in this bill not the creation of those powers.

One power I am worried about, though, is the crisis-funding provision in the bill. Part 6 and 7 allow the Reserve Bank to declare a cash-handling emergency and may authorise up to $400 million in assistance to provide continuity of service while taking action that could include appointing an administrator. My concern is this provision can be triggered on a very low bar.

One trigger provided in clause 90 is simply the entity asking for the money and the Reserve Bank of Australia deciding that, if the payment is not made, their operations may become unviable. From the very start, One Nation and I have been champions of the use of cash and critics of the banking cartel. In 2017, I was successful in creating the Senate Select Committee on Lending to Primary Production Customers, which I chaired, or rather, I should say, Senator Pauline Hanson was successful in creating the Senate select committee and appointed me as chair.

The inquiry investigated unconscionable bank lending practices, default interest rates and predatory foreclosure behaviours that ripped off and traumatised Australian farmers and rural families and fishermen and loggers during periods of drought or financial hardship. Our inquiry found so much banking misconduct that Prime Minister Turnbull, at the time, was forced to call the royal commission into financial services that found widespread systemic corruption.

Then the Morrison government tabled the Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019, which was to introduce a $10,000 limit on cash transactions. When such provisions were introduced overseas, the $10,000 limit was quickly reduced. Greece now has a limit of 500 euros.

France and Germany have a limit of 1,000. One Nation led the campaign against this obvious attempt to get rid of cash and force the public into the electronic banking system for the financial benefit of the banking cartel. They get to charge fees, and there's no alternative.

Despite Liberals and Labor passing the bill through the House of Representatives, we were successful, in December 2020, in removing the bill from the Senate Notice Paper. It didn't go through the Senate. The banking cartel, though, did not give up.

Recently, the Treasurer introduced the Competition and Consumer (Industry Codes—Cash Acceptance) Regulations 2025. This regulation destroyed the legal basis for cash. How?

Very cleverly. It required only petrol stations and supermarkets to accept cash. Everything else did not have to accept cash.

Petrol and supermarkets only had to accept up to $500 in cash and only between 7 am and 9 pm, so it was a furphy. That meant every other business—and every business, from 9 pm to 7 am—was not legally required to accept cash. The government justified this measure as guaranteeing cash, which was fundamentally a lie.

Since Federation, the start of our country, cash has been legal tender. Businesses can only refuse cash in a narrow set of circumstances. The Albanese regulation was deceitfully designed to provide air cover for any business that wanted to move to card-only payment.

That's the real aim—to get rid of cash. This is the reason I'm suspicious of the motives the government has in preparing this bill. The uniparty government has now tried three times to get rid of cash.

In the hands of a One Nation government, this bill, though, will create a fair environment for the free market to thrive and for consumers to win.