CHOICE membership

The Cash Transactions Ban Bill



I agree.

It’s one thing to mandate that cash transactions over a certain threshold should be reported. Quite a different matter to treat them as a criminal offence. This restricts our rights as consumers in an unprecedented and worrying way.


The period they allowed for formal discussion/remarks/submissions has closed, so no chance now for further formal “on the record” participation. CHOICE would only now have their informal channels to lobby for any changes if they perceived that any needed to be made.


However if you have $50,000 or more in an offshore bank account then you are supposed to declare that on your tax return - so not exactly avoiding any prying eyes.

If it’s just sitting in an offshore bank account then it isn’t subject to this legislation, as a) it currently is supposed only to apply when you pay it to a business for goods or services and b) it is only applicable to cash anyway.

Is “enough to warrant an offshore bank account” less than $50k?


The cash transaction Bill is another step promoted by the International Monetary Fund. Very left wing, The first major step took place last year when a Bill went through both the house and the senate in a matter of days. That Bill was the bail in legislation which made everyday private depositors and self managed super fund cash deposits the first available source to bail out a bank in trouble. So depositors get hit and not the regulators ,the govt or Bank management The deposit guarantee scheme is not in force and would probably be activated after your money is gone with the bail in law already active.

The cash transaction Bill has little to do with money laundering. It is the start of forcing all transactions to be done through the banks so you as a depositor can be hit with negative interest rates and also wealth tax, plus any fee the bank wants for the transaction. Of course if there is no cash, you cannot avoid the bail in process by having your funds outside the banking system. If the gov. does allow cash to remain in circulation , the IMF has also proposed that cash would have an exchange rate at a lower value than your digital funds in the bank so effectively you would not avoid the impact of negative interest on your bank funds.

I believe this is one of greatest risks to our basic freedoms far surpassing our modified free speech and political correctness. If you feel you are responsible for the financial mess globally and locally, then do nothing because you are going to pay. If you wish to remain free to buy and sell as a consumer or producer, you had better make yourself heard fast.


I don’t know that it is “left wing” as it was done but what some term a “right wing” government. If you go far enough out on any side then each seeks control of it’s populace. What could be termed fascist, communist, plutocracy, dictatorship, corporate capitalism, sovereignty and so on all may have the desire for absolute control and oversight.


I understand. The last vehicle we sold (over the $10K proposed limit) was a strictly cash sale.

We learnt the hard way that a bank cheque isn’t wortht the paper it is written on. When it happened to us, I found out from the bank that it only indicates that the person had the money in their account at the time the cheque was written. The money can be withdrawn as soon as the bank cheque is written, leaving nothing in the account. The cheque is then worthless and the goods are gone with the buyer.

Personal cheques are just as useless, and most buyers would be reluctant to transfer funds without being there at the time to receive title for the goods (eg a private vehicle purchase)


Certainly needs more clarity?

It is not our experience when paying by bank cheque for a vehicle, or with solicitors and property transactions. The funds were debited from our account when the bank cheque was drawn. They were transferred to the bank to the value of the cheque.

Banks do have procedures for putting a halt on a bank cheque. A more complex situation.

Although NAB has this to say which suggests the bank will honour a bank cheque presented if it is rightfully acquired, whether or not NAB has been paid for the bank cheque by the customer.


Whenever we have had CBA bank cheques issued over the decades, the funds have always been immediately withdrawn from our accounts.


If I understand it correctly, the bank did a ‘notional’ debit straight away, but the funds were not actually withdrawn till the batch processing was done overnight. This leaves a window of time for the funds to be withdrawn before the overnight batch processing. The bank’s customer would of course get an ‘insufficient funds’ notice and fee, but that is all.


That is my understanding of how it works. When the cheque is generated the funds are transferred from the purchaser of the cheque into an account of the bank and the cheque is drawn against that account not the purchaser’s. Unless the cheque is cancelled the purchaser cannot access those funds.


The funds were gone from our account before the bank cheque was issued. The same as withdrawing cash over the counter.
The transaction which I have done with several of the big banks, and their lesser cousins commences with a standard over the counter withdrawal. The issue of the bank cheque then proceeded as a separate behind the counter transaction.

Perhaps there is something more to how in your example the system failed?
Do all banks service bank cheques the same way, with some leaving a backdoor open?

Personal cheques are very different, and easy to scam, which is why they are now a rare item.


I too don’t understand how this could happen.

Did you make any sort of formal complaint?

Maybe Choice would like to know the details.


Make that three.

A bank cheque is a check drawn by the bank and not against an individuals account. At the time the bank cheque is drafted, the funds from an individuals account is immediately transferred to the bank to cover the bank cheque. The bank would earn interest on the amount of the bank cheque until the cheque is cashed/honoured and the banks funds are transferred to the cheque’s payee.

There are gounds that a bank cheque will not be honoured (or cashed), these are explained in the post from @mark_m above.


It may be the start of that - I don’t know - but this only forces the transaction to go through the bank. This does not force you to hold any other cash in the bank and hence you could largely or wholly avoid the negative interest rates.

So let’s say that you have $5,000 in total cash assets, and that is under the mattress at home and you want to buy a TV for $1,000. You take $1,000 cash to the bank, you deposit it, you then immediately go to the TV store, and buy the TV using EFTPOS. Your end-of-day balance should be $0, so you accrue negative interest on $0 i.e. $0 penalty. [Figures assumed to apply to the future when inflation has eroded the $10,000 cash limit back to $1,000 in today’s dollars, there being no indexation of the $10,000 cash limit.]


@person & @phb … It happened some years ago. We didn’t know this could happen until it was done to us.

We went to the bank when we got a dishonour fee in our account to ask what that was about. That is when we found out the bank cheque bounced, and had been charged for that fact. It was then a bank staff member gave the explanation I have iterated earlier. We were told that the bank accepted no responsibility for the customer withdrawing their funds and the only thing we could do was take the person who passed the bum cheque to court. We figured that if they were already such a shonk, then even if we won we wouldn’t be getting any money. So reluctantly we wrote it off as a salutary lesson not to trust bank cheques again.


You are probably right about that. With the cost of lawyers, it would be good money after bad.


It sounds to me like the bank procedures messed up and they cancelled the cheque, and refunded to their account, at the request of the person who drew it contrary to their own stated policy and then gave you a weak excuse for their failure. I agree that pursuing the drawer in a civil action would have been a waste of money but you may well have got some action from the bank outside of going to court if you had pursued them.

The times that I have bought a bank cheque my account balance was debited immediately. As mentioned above, banks give an explanation the limited circumstances under which they will not honour a bank cheque and insufficient funds is not one of them.


The NAB link above suggests that in limited circumstances it could be.

In the specific case here, possibly asking the state government to intervene would have been an option - since all vehicle transfers have to be registered - and this is effectively a stolen vehicle. (I would guess that the thief on-sold the vehicle ASAP.)

Every day any number of Australians buy and sell real estate using bank cheques. I wonder whether there are any differences between how that is approached, as compared with buying and selling a car. Admittedly, you can’t disappear off to Rio with fraudulently obtained real estate. (However you can borrow against it and disappear off to Rio with the borrowed money.)


This is currently the case in the US. If you are ‘suspected’ of holding cash related to the committing of a crime (an exact instance of that crime is not required) it can be ‘confiscated’.

Surprisingly, the main target appears to be people of colour. /s

Here is a more extensive list of examples of asset forfeiture in the US.

Of course, it is not just a US problem - I think the case of the divorced woman in WA has been mentioned here before, but I cannot find a link either here or through a DDG search. Effectively, her husband was being charged with something long after the divorce, and she was going to lose her home because of it. (And in searching for a link I learned about ‘cuckoo smurfing’.) This paper (PDF) provides some interesting examples of how the law ‘works’ in WA.

One wonders how political parties will cope with this new limit.

Can you say that with a straight face? ‘Economic efficiency’ applies in an infinite market of buyers and sellers in which each has perfect knowledge. That is not Australia’s banking system.

Of course, this whole idea totally ignores grandma who barely speaks English and keeps her life savings under the mattress - along with a lot of migrant communities that are almost entirely outside of the (formal) banking system.


I’d suggest this is not unique to migrants. Any close community has an amount of sharing and good will between trusted members. Genuine mates rates or materials only and a BBQ with beers at the end of the day. Cash only as required?