Post by Shy Ted
“Become ungovernable” they told us. So I did, as much as I could. We all know the criminals in government and those under their control have been making life very difficult/impossible for us since 2020. Protest? Feel the force of the law you’re paying for. So I’ve moved several times to avoid the lockdowns and such but did happen to be in a major centre for 18 months so I get a bit of what you’ve gone through. Minor challenges with GP appointments (for the pills that have made me fat) as I refused to mask up but I got by.
When I moved the new landlord insisted on using the State Residential Tenancies Authority despite my offer of a better system. When it came to leaving he filled in the appropriate Return of Bond form and sent it off immediately. Several weeks later I noticed the bond refund wasn’t in my bank account. Try to contact the RTA? You get redirected to a YourGov website where you put in your details and question it through there. Except it didn’t work. When I eventually got in to it it didn’t recognise my reference number, the number they gave me. A phone call to the RTA, waiting more than half a hour for a disinterested “read what’s on the screen” public servant who said my details hadn’t been updated. “Your site doesn’t work” was met with “perhaps I can do that for you”. After going through the various details she noticed that the date of birth was mm/dd/yyyy, not dd/mm/yyyy and someone, not me, had entered the wrong DOB. Some days later I got a refund and a “are you satisfied with our service?” email. Five weeks it took.
In the last week I’ve received two emails –
State transport had sent me one some weeks before – “due to a computer glitch we have sent your vehicle registration renewal papers by mail to your address” (the one I had left). Completely beyond them to disregard that and send the reminder by email, of course. So I paid it on the day of renewal, got a receipt by email and confirmed my card had been charged, it had. No registration papers. Another reminder to pay from a “no-reply” email.
Having been a nurse in state health I long ago began to suffer RSI from shaking my head in disbelief at the latest edict from those incompetents on high.
Saving the best til last. I’ve had a CBA credit card for decades. Used to put all my monthly expenses on it and pay it off in entirety so other than an annual fee I rarely paid any interest. Good customer? No, bad customer if they don’t make any money off you. For many a month now I’ve been a “cashy” so card purchases are rare. “Update your details” they emailed me. Well, I did update my details and even got –
Hi Shy Ted,
Your personal details were updated.
Then a repeat email – The email says –
Dear Shy Ted,
We’ve reached out to you before about confirming your personal details, and we’ve noticed that we haven’t received confirmation of your details in NetBank or the CommBank app. It’s important you take a moment to confirm your details within the next 30 days.What happens if you don’t confirm your details?
If you don’t confirm your personal details within the next 30 days, we may restrict access to your banking until you do.
Nigel Farage was, of course, debanked, as good Cats know. We live in Orwellian times.
Shy Ted considers himself a bit of (not a lot of) a veteran of rural and remote life, mostly, but not always, nursing. Most of what you might read about in the media, other than the superficial headline such as doctor shortages, is nonsense. It’s interesting, challenging and rewarding and not for the faint-hearted or ideologues. Where necessary, names have been changed to protect identity.
We are ‘cashies’ too, Shy Ted. At least for now …
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Governments are wetting themselves hoping to stamp out cash. I have upped the proportion of purchases made in cash and encourage others to do likewise. Went to my bank last week and got a whack of 100’s. Its not that hard.
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This week’ emails from CBA-
Thank you for contacting CommBank Awards Team.
Unfortunately, we are unable to assist you with your enquiry as this is out of our scope.
Hi Shy Ted,
Your personal details were updated.
We’ve reached out to you before about confirming your personal details, and we’ve noticed that we haven’t received confirmation of your details in NetBank or the CommBank app. It’s important you take a moment to confirm your details within the next 20 days.
What happens if you don’t confirm your details?
If you don’t confirm your personal details within the next 20 days, we may restrict access to your banking until you do.
Bog standard email responses rather than actual customer service. Debanked in about 18 days now.
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And in vehicle rego news –
Attention Shy Ted
Please see the below payment summary for registration ******.
More detailed information about the registration is available in the attached document (PDF).
I did email them to say I’d sold it several months ago. They acknowledged it.
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Ted, you can’t blame CBA.
Maybe they can’t afford to hire staff* due to their poor end-of-year financial status?
CBA Balance Sheet end June 2023
….
*Can you send an email direct to Comyn? His contact details must be available somewhere?
Are you able to go to a CBA branch to get this sorted?
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SO I did ring the CBA number and of course got the “choose a number” menu. So I did. Didn’t recognise the tone. Funny, every other helpline does. Hard not to get paranoid. Visit a branch next week but not hopeful as making a deposit there is almost too difficult for them – they have to count notes!
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Your experience is but one of many such out there.
Are you familiar, by any chance, with the ‘MyGovID’ fiasco?
This is a relatively new imposition on anyone who is a director of a proprietary limited company.
This covers not just business owners, where the company is involved in a business activity, but also directors of corporate trustees of self-managed superannuation funds. Never mind that most such company trustees of SMSFs are ‘sole purpose’, which means they don’t run a business, own no direct assets and are limited to – you guessed it – the sole purpose of being a SMSF trustee. As such, they are even entitled to a discount on the annual registration fee from ASIC.
This means, LOTS of people, many of them old and not very computer-confident or even literate, must have this new ID, otherwise they may be up for up to $13,000 in fines.
This is apparently needed to ‘combat money laundering, reduce red tape [LOL], etc, etc…’please do invent your own excuse here.
So, a new bureaucracy, the Australian Business Registry Services has been set up to administer this. By the ‘centre-right’ Liberal government, no less.
The application process is more or less solely available via a phone app. They do not, unlike MyGov (another sh*tshow, but that’s for another day), have a web site apart from one for general information. They also very much do NOT like offering paper form.
Hence, get your phone out, and good luck, because at least the Android version does not really work. If you want to see your tax dollars at work, search for ‘MyGovID’ on Google Play and read some of the comments. It is absolutely appalling just how bad this app is – and you are required to upload several of your ‘primary ID documents’ to ‘verify’ who you are, and trust the government IT geniuses, who coded this abomination, to not lose it all to hackers.
Such examples, unfortunately, are many. The major corporates are increasingly almost as bad.
One more comment I’ll add here:
Cash will be gone soon; like it or not. The fact is, the vast majority of people do not care. A card, or even more so, phone payments are so much more convenient, mate, eh?
And even more of them have no idea of the difference between the current ‘digital’ dollars and the coming Central Bank Digital Currencies, which will be programmable and will mean total surveillance and control over what you can and can’t buy, everywhere and at anytime.
A few holdouts, trying to pay with cash, will not stop the tide. The only possible solution is to switch to anonymous, fully decentralised crypto currencies, like Monero for example.
But that may prove way too hard for most. So it is likely that we will get to experience Orwells’ boot stomping on our faces, forever.
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Yes John, I was forced into a MyGov account some time ago. Terrible, just didn’t work or timed out.
Went into the CBA branch and may have had some success. My date of birth was wrong which is pretty odd as I’ve had their credit card for 30 years without a problem. We shall see. Battle with Dept of Transport next.
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John Bayley
+100
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I only use my credit card for purchases over the internet or the phone. When I go out shopping, I withdraw cash and use that.
Sadly, most people prefer the convenience of the card and don’t realise how they are helping cash to be phased out.
We need to have a similar petition here in Australia.
Don’t Kill Cash
GB News Presenters Nigel Farage, Patrick Christys, Bev Turner, Michelle Dewberry and Liam Halligan hand in the GB News Don’t Kill Cash petition to Downing Street, as the campaign fast approaches 300,000 signatures.
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It’s good news that you are not going to be debanked, Ted.
…
The real scandal of central bank digital currency
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This is actually incorrect.
The cash we use is subject to a government monopoly. It is accepted as payment because of legal tender laws, not because of any particular preference we, the general public, may have.
The Australian dollar, a “fiat” currency with no backing apart from the government force, is also the only form of payment that can be used to pay our taxes.
While nominally the central bank, in our case the RBA, has “independence” and the power to regulate the amount of currency on issue, it is the government that can change or revoke this as it sees fit.
“We” the public currently have no say over what currency we can use in everyday transactions, nor can we control the amount of currency units at issue, so when the RBA “prints” an additional 70% of dollars on top of the existing monetary base, all within less than 18 months, at is has done during the “Covid pandemic”, “we” get to wear the resulting price inflation.
This is no “freedom”; we are in fact all serfs of the state already.
Cash does allow for more privacy than even today’s electronic form of the dollar, let alone the coming CBDCs, but even there, there have been ideas how to “fix” that, too, by using various forms of tracking features on the actual bank notes.
And cash does have some significant disadvantages, like how does one safely store large amounts of it outside of a bank.
As the saying goes: “Bitcoin fixes all that.”
Alas, I doubt we are ready for this. Perhaps we need a visionary like the President of El Salvador, where BTC is legal tender already.
In today’s Australia? Fat chance of that.
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