I always carry a bit of cash; probably not as much as I did in the past. I’m not ‘doing a Rowan’ at this stage (our garrulous editor has been pushing the use of cash), but I do pay cash for things while others seem to wave their phones. Think here coffee/snacks and nails, in particular. Sometimes I get a discount even.

But unless you have been living under a rock – yes, I accept it’s a tempting option – you will be aware of the challenges facing the distribution of cash in Australia. Cash, or legal tender, is being challenged as a means of transaction as more and more people go digital.

It’s worth looking at the figures here. In 2003, when the Linfox Group bought Armaguard, cash was used for around three-quarters of transactions in the economy. It no doubt seemed like a good buy, although cash distribution has tended to be a highly competitive industry in Australia. It also has high fixed costs and significant risks attached to it. (Who can forget the days when the weekly or fortnightly payroll was paid in cash? I can even remember lining up to be paid cash for a travel allowance attached to some pointless meeting of a pointless government committee of which I was a member.)

Even when Prosegur entered the market in 2013 by buying the Chubb Group, around half of purchases were still being conducted in cash. Prosegur’s Spanish parent ended up being very disappointed by its purchase, although it did engage in a fierce price-based competition with Armaguard while that company remained in business.

The outbreak of Covid changed the use of cash dramatically. By 2021, the use of cash for transactions had fallen to around 13 per cent as tap-and-go and the use of credit/debit cards became close to ubiquitous. As a proportion of the value of transactions, the figure is closer to 10 per cent as there are many low-value cash transactions.

It is expected that the proportion of transactions using cash will fall even further, which is in contrast with some other countries where the use of cash bounced back after their pandemic restrictions were lifted.

One estimate puts the use of cash at a mere 4 per cent of transactions in Australia by the end of the decade.

Of course, there are areas where cash is still king: for home-based services such as cleaning and gardening, in casinos, among older folk, particularly those living in regional and rural communities. It’s still the legal tender and must be accepted as payment.  But there is no doubt that cash is under pressure and with it, the efficient means of moving it around.

In 2023, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission – beware the activists there, by the way – waved through the merger of Armaguard and Prosegur as both companies were losing money. Various undertakings were agreed to at the time which lasted around a nanosecond in commercial terms. By the beginning of this year, Armaguard was crying poor and calling for a bailout – just don’t call it a bailout – because the Fox family never need to be bailed out.

The Australian Banking Association led the negotiations, an organisation headed by former Queensland premier, Anna Bligh. What she knows about banking is anyone’s guess. The main protagonists are the four big banks, Coles, Woolworths and Australia Post, the last rather reluctantly.

A package was put together to maintain the services of Armaguard – yep, I can avoid the bailout term – but the Fox family with their close mate, ACTU ex-secretary, Bill Kelty, don’t do packages. They won’t be handing over confidential details to these behemoths that they don’t trust.

They would rather negotiate head-to-head with each of the main players in the cash game. As they say in business parlance, they won’t be opening up their kimono to anyone, let alone a bunch of them acting together.

The broader question is what is the future of cash in society and why there is a rump of people who continue to want to use it. Of course, pretty everyone has a bank account – it’s close to impossible to live without one – so it goes beyond that. Will cash simply disappear when the current heavy users among older folk shuffle off this mortal coil?

One of the legitimate reasons driving the ongoing use of cash is the fear that going digital releases all sorts of personal information that most (sensible) people would want to keep confidential. But there is a high degree of naivety among digital users, including all those taking up loyalty cards and their variants. As those in the know in this industry say, if you are going digital and something looks free, then you are the product.

People are unwittingly giving away masses of information about their spending patterns, their incomes, their movements. Mind you, if I am asked for my postcode at the checkout of some store, I either bluntly refuse, or I give them the postcode of Alice Springs (0870). Who said I didn’t have a sense of humour?

And who doesn’t believe that there are some beady-eyed senior bureaucrats who would love to see cash eliminated to ensure even more tax revenue is Hoovered up? Gosh, just think of the possibilities. It wouldn’t be hard to convince the Treasurer of the day to go along with this, irrespective of the political hue of that person at the time.

Of course, let’s be realistic: cash is used by some pretty nefarious types. It’s passing strange that over one-fifth of the cash in circulation is $100 bills (or ‘hundos’ as they are often called). But let’s also face it, there will always be pretty nefarious types. Eliminate cash and they will find other ways of transacting their illicit or close-to-illicit dealings.

There really is no reason to believe any government assurances that the elimination of cash will be accompanied by safeguards – unbreakable safeguards – to protect people’s privacy and confidential details. We have seen these assurances in other areas and they are basically a joke. It’s one reason why the e-Health initiative went nowhere – thanks, Greg Hunt – because most people simply didn’t trust the government or the bureaucracy.

But the loss of cash would really be a big part of the journey to a more illiberal society where individual human rights are regularly trashed. Perhaps we should all be ‘doing a Rowan’ and turning back to cash. That might just stop it in its tracks.