Cash is the Safety Net of a Resilient Society: Malcolm Roberts By Brian Simpson
Another excellent piece by One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts reflecting on the safety net that cash provides, in the light of the Great Optus meltdown last week, that led millions back to the Dark Ages as such. It was only businesses using cash, and people who had it, that were able to still function in the 21st century.
Thus, the events of the Optus blackout show the vulnerabilities of moving to Central Bank Digital Currencies. While this is a vast temptation for power-crazed governments like the socialist Albo Labor government, to be able to exert enormous social control by debanking, as was seen with the cancelation of the Canadian truckers’ protests, the real danger that such centralisation of power will produce is that cyber-attacks will become irresistible. And reports have indicated that cyber-attacks, mainly led by communist China as part of its undeclared war on the West, will continue to rise. Central Bank Digital Currencies would become such a target, and as was seen with just one network going down chaos would be considerable.
Society must move to increasing resilience and resistance to deforming impacts, not become more vulnerable, and retaining cash is but one means of achieving this.
“Last week, Australia was given a reminder about the importance of cash. Waking up to the Dark Ages, around 10 million Optus customers found themselves cut off from civilisation. Among these were emergency workers, hospitals, and those desperately trying to open their shops.
For them, the lesson is redundancy.
In the hurry to centralise Australia’s communication systems by placing the government at the centre of everything, too many people – including those drafting public policy and running telecommunications empires – have forgotten the importance of having a backup.
It’s a strange revelation for a nation obsessed with safetyism.
Remember the days when a summer storm would roll through and take out the power? We’d plug in the landline and ring up energy providers via the trusty old copper network to complain. Was it pretty? No. Was it ‘modern’? Not in the slightest. But as with most archaic technology, it’s bloody tough to kill.
Gas is another example of a backup system in decline. Most of us can strike a match and boil a kettle or cook a meal when the lights go out. Not for much longer. Labor, the Greens, and the Teals are keen to kill gas forever in the name of Net Zero. The free market prefers gas, yet they won’t be allowed to install it. This transition is being done with an iron-fist mandate ‘for the Greater Good™’.
The prize for reaching our 2030 Net Zero targets will be Australia’s most precarious civilisation operating on the whim of the weather, complete with an ‘off’ switch that foreign nations own.
This brings us to cash. Since the invention of money – those with the treasure make the rules. Governments have always feared citizens amassing wealth to rival the State. The old families of Rome held sway over the Senate because their money could buy armies and allies – until Caesar killed most of them and migrated their gold to the treasury.
The role of dangerous monetary influence used to belong to Australia’s Big Four banks, but now the Union Super Funds have become a lumbering giant, pushing policy around with its engorged stomach of roughly $3.5 trillion. What the Super Barons want, the government delivers.
There is $101.3 billion in cash in circulation at last count. That’s money citizens are free to spend and gift as they wish. The government cannot stop these transactions. It cannot exclude disobedient social groups from buying a beer after making a mean social media post against Net Zero. They cannot limit how many steaks you purchase in a week after exceeding your carbon credit allowance.
All businesses must report their sales, so the government ultimately knows what is purchased with this hard money – what they don’t know – what they want to know – is who is doing the buying. Citizen privacy is important. It’s none of the government’s business what you buy. Once they know, they’ll find a way to exploit it. That’s just what bureaucracies do. The predatory billionaires, who ultimately drive this agenda, are particularly keen to do-away with notion of privacy.
Another consideration is the need for a robust civilisation. The further we travel down the path of modernity, the more precarious our position as a civilisation becomes.
Our nation survived two world wars because our fundamental systems were tricky to destroy without getting on the ground and digging up the infrastructure. Today, our entire world could be erased with the destruction of a data centre, the cutting of undersea cables, or a simple update error.
Last week made it clear that we are at the mercy of a ‘whoops!’ from hundreds of tech departments – any number of which could be damaging.
Yes, there are valid fears that cyber warfare from North Korea, China, or other interested parties could cause chaos, but such a dramatic measure is not necessary to cripple us.
Australia’s communication systems are reliant on a handful of providers sharing networks. Economic and social damage can ravage society with even the smallest of failures.
Digital darkness is the nightmare of technical experts around the world, and yet few political interests take their concerns seriously. They are the astronomers pointing at a patch of light in the night sky shouting, ‘Look out!!!’
It has been easier to convince corporate Australia to spend hundreds of billions on the promised ‘global boiling’ promoted by UN Secretary-General António Guterres than the very real and present danger of communication fragility.
Existential threats have deep coffers, yet it is much harder to find money for a real threat. Securing the nation against genuine problems costs money and rarely impresses the electorate. The polar bears are easier to sell on a campaign banner than a photograph of a sad-looking silicon chip.
Part of any serious backup plan must be the preservation of cash.
Keeping cash in circulation is a pain for companies that can’t ‘be bothered’ handling cash.
Keeping cash annoys the Big Banks who are eyeing off the possibility of immense power when it comes to programmable currency, negative interest rates, and the ability to manipulate spending to suit their favourite social projects and largest corporate depositors.
The political class, having learned the wrong lessons from Covid tyranny, quite like the idea of shutting down a person’s ability to participate in the economy. Debanking scandals, such as those we saw with NatWest and Nigel Farage, are only the beginning. Without cash, and in conjunction with a pervasive Digital ID system, citizens could lose their ability to participate in a functioning democracy.
How easy will it be to punish sections of the community – identity groups – for ‘voting the wrong way’?
Without cash, politics becomes ransomware.
Cash is the safety net.
Businesses stayed open during the Optus outage because of cash. People were able to pay their rent and power bills because of cash. Families bought food yesterday because of cash.
Cash is king. Does everyone love this king? No. But every single Australian needs this paper monarch to survive.”
Comments