The Telstra Wake-Up Call on Cash

Australia got a small taste yesterday of the cashless paradise we keep being promised.

Telstra services went down and, almost instantly, ordinary life became harder than it needed to be. Phones failed. Data failed. EFTPOS terminals failed. Some people couldn’t bank, pay bills, buy lunch, transfer money, or even get basic transactions through.

I was one of them. Standing there, trying to do the sort of everyday thing we’re told is now effortless, only to be reminded that “tap and go” is wonderful right up until it doesn’t tap and there’s nowhere to go.

The outage affected phone services, wireless payments, and train operations. So this wasn’t some tiny technical hiccup in a back office somewhere. It was another reminder that a modern country has quietly made itself dependent on signals in the air, servers in the background, apps on phones, batteries, passwords, and corporate assurances.

All very efficient. Unless it stops working. And when it did stop working, the old-fashioned stuff suddenly looked rather sensible. Cash didn’t need Telstra. It didn’t need a password, a verification code, a working app, a charged phone, or a bank server playing nicely in the background. It just needed to be in your hand.

Funny how quickly the “outdated” option becomes the reliable one.

This is the bit the cashless evangelists never want to talk about. They love telling us cash is dirty, inconvenient, unsafe, costly, and mostly used by criminals, dodgy tradies, and old people who apparently haven’t caught up with the future. Yet when the network goes down, cash is the only part of the system that still behaves like money.

You hand it over. The other person takes it. Done. No spinning wheel. No “transaction declined”. No “please try again later”. No standing around like a goose while the poor teenager behind the counter apologises for something that is clearly not their fault.

Still, the push continues. We are being nudged, prodded, and trained into a digital-only payment system, one little inconvenience at a time. Cheques are being shown the door. The federal government has said the cheque system is to be wound down by no later than 2030, with government cheque use ending earlier. Some banks are already making cheque books hard to get, if not impossible. ANZ stopped issuing cheque books to many customers from June 2024. That matters because each old method that disappears leaves us with fewer ways out.

At the same time, the Reserve Bank of Australia is still researching central bank digital currency. The RBA has already done work on an eAUD with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, and in May 2026 it announced that Project Acacia had issued pilot wholesale CBDC on public and private distributed ledger infrastructure for research purposes.

The language is dull enough to put a horse to sleep, which is often how these things are smuggled past the public. “Wholesale CBDC.” “Pilot.” “Research.” “Distributed ledger infrastructure.” Most normal people hear that and turn the page. They shouldn’t.

A CBDC is central bank digital currency. In plain English, it is digital money issued by the central bank. Not just the money you see in your banking app now, but a new form of official digital cash substitute. We are told it will be safer, faster, more efficient, and more modern. There is always a list like that when the clever people want to take something simple and put it under a committee.

Australia is not alone. Europe is pushing ahead with the digital euro. The European Central Bank says it wants to be ready for a possible first issuance in 2029, assuming the necessary EU laws are adopted in 2026. So the same continent already drowning in unelected regulators, climate rules, and speech-policing enthusiasm now wants centrally issued digital money. What could possibly go wrong?

The United States Federal Reserve says it has made no decision to issue a CBDC, but it continues to study the benefits and risks through technological research and experimentation. That is usually how these things begin. Nobody is doing anything serious, of course. They are only exploring. Then piloting. Then consulting. Then implementing. Then wondering why anyone would object.

It is not just the West either. BRICS, originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has expanded into a broader bloc of major emerging economies and most are actively purusing CBDCs. China is already well down the road with its digital yuan, the e-CNY. In June this year, China signed up 26 financial institutions to cross-border e-CNY transfer services. Project mBridge, involving jurisdictions including China and Hong Kong, has also been developed as a multi-central-bank digital currency platform for cross-border settlement. Russia is rolling out the digital ruble, with the Bank of Russia saying large-scale introduction is to begin on 1 September 2026. India has been expanding digital rupee pilots, including welfare schemes and cross-border payment work. Brazil has been working on Drex, although that project has reportedly run into technical and privacy problems along the way.

So, yes, it is coming.

Australia will be told it is inevitable. We’ll be told it is modern. We’ll be told it is about efficiency, innovation, and keeping up with the world. The same sort of people who could not keep payments working during a telco outage will insist that, this time, they can be trusted with programmable national money. That is the real issue.

The danger is not only that digital systems fail. Yesterday showed they do. The deeper problem is that digital money can be shaped, tracked, limited, and controlled in ways cash cannot.

Programmable money is not a conspiracy theory. The European Data Protection Supervisor has discussed the difference between programmable payments and programmable money, warning that programmable money can contain built-in rules restricting how it is used, including limits on certain categories of services or even expiry dates.

Money with conditions, in other words. Money with settings. Money with a leash. Once that exists, the argument changes. It will no longer be about whether digital money can be used to control behaviour. It will be about which respectable cause justifies doing it first.

Climate change is the obvious candidate. We are already being softened up. Commonwealth Bank partnered with Cogo to let customers view their personalised carbon footprint based on spending data in the CommBank app. Mastercard has a Carbon Calculator that allows banks to show cardholders an estimated carbon footprint based on purchases, track behaviour over time, and compare emissions with targets or averages.

Today it is awareness. Tomorrow it is nudging. Then, one day, it becomes a rule.

That is how this stuff tends to work. It rarely begins with a boot on the throat. It starts with convenience. Then it becomes best practice. Then expectation. Then regulation. Then the people who refused to go along are treated as difficult, suspicious, or selfish.

First, they show you the carbon footprint of your groceries. Then they suggest you offset it. Then they rank you. Then someone decides your spending does not fit the latest climate target.

Sound extreme? Maybe. But Australians have lived through enough government overreach in recent years to know that powers created for one purpose rarely stay politely in their box. During COVID, governments discovered how much of public life could be switched off by decree. Travel, work, school, worship, borders, family gatherings, and medical choice. All of it became negotiable.

Now imagine that same mentality with programmable money. You have exceeded your monthly carbon allowance. Your travel spending is temporarily restricted. This merchant category is unavailable. Your digital wallet requires further verification. Please contact the relevant authority. Or there you are, staring at your phone, hoping the network comes back.

Cash is more than a payment method. It is a backup plan. It is privacy in your pocket. It is a small but important protection against banks, telcos, governments and clever schemes designed by people who never seem to suffer the consequences of their own brilliance.

A sensible country has digital payments. Of course it does. They are useful. Most of us use them every day and will keep using them. But only a foolish country makes them the only option.

Yesterday’s Telstra outage was annoying. For some people, it was more than annoying. It disrupted work, travel, payments and basic errands. But it also gave us a useful warning, and we should take it seriously before the lesson is forgotten.

Keep some notes in the drawer. Pay with cash now and then. Support businesses that accept it. Push back when some bright spark tells you physical money is obsolete and only the backward or suspicious still care about it.

Because when the app freezes, the terminal dies, the bank says try again later, and the telco goes missing, cash still does the one thing money is meant to do: It works.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.”
– William Pitt the Younger