The demise of daily letters, 3G and cash – are governments leaving us old (and young) fogeys behind?
For many years I enjoyed free-to-air television perfectly well in standard definition, with no fear of missing out on shiny high definition.
Then one day they turned the SD off.
AFL football, down the dial on 7Mate, was no longer available to me unless I went to the pub or paid for an expensive subscription or streaming service.
So I reluctantly bought a new digital TV, thinking: “Wouldn’t it be better if they’d just kept things the same?”
I had become a young(ish) fogey. Lately I’ve been thinking about the fogeys, young and old, and how public policy balances the interests of those who have moved with the times and those who would be quite happy standing still.
Today marks the end of daily letter deliveries.
In response to the long-term decline of letters and Australia Post’s first loss in eight years, the postal service has shifted to delivering ordinary letters and unaddressed mail every other business day. Urgent mail, including Express Post, will still come daily.
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Paul Graham, the chief executive of Australia Post, is putting a positive spin on it.
“The new regulations will enable Australia Post to focus on what Australians want most: flexible and more reliable parcel deliveries with enhanced tracking technology and more delivery options,” he says.
“Households now receive about two letters per week, and we expect this to halve in the next five years.”
When you put it that way, the shift makes sense. While we can all wait
another business day for that bill, traffic fine or charity letter, there are some changes that are not quite so consequence-free.
Last week the ABC reported on concerns that more than a million mobile phones could be cut off from calling triple zero within months due to the planned shutdown of the 3G network.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, told parliament in March she is “not satisfied that adequate efforts have been made by industry to identify and inform their impacted customers” of the impending shutdown.
Telstra, Optus and TPG were ordered to develop action plans, with fortnightly updates.
Rowland said the government “takes this issue extremely seriously” and noted she had “options … in law”, including to delay the 3G switchover. Fixing the triple zero issue was the “absolute priority”.
But what about small businesses in the regions with older Eftpos machines that use 3G? Or the elderly relative of a colleague of mine who needs an olderstyle 3G phone due to vision loss?
Presumably they’ll just have to get with the times, even if the available range of dumbphones is extremely limited.
We see the same kinds of balances between the old and new ways over the decline in use of cash and the related issue of the viability of Armaguard, which has a near-monopoly on cash delivery in Australia.
The Morrison government tried to ban cash payments of more than $10,000 as a measure to tackle the hidden economy and crime. It faced a revolt from minor parties and within its own ranks, and overturned the policy.
But that doesn’t change the fact Australians are using less and less cash.
Over Easter there was a minor scare over whether supermarkets would limit cash withdrawals. It’s something we should expect to see more of in future: cash droughts or cash deserts.
That will affect people who want privacy in their transactions, people who use physical cash as a budgeting measure, those of us who don’t want to pay sneaky little fees every time they tap and go – which is particularly galling in businesses that won’t accept cash at all.
The big four banks stood ready to bail out Armaguard, in line with the Reserve Bank’s desire for banks to pay for more of the cost of moving money and maintain their ATM networks.
Another flashpoint is the closure of regional banks, which has been the subject of a long-running Senate inquiry. It’s had 12 public hearings so far with another coming on Tuesday in the retiree-heavy Bribie Island, Queensland.
I’ve not been covering the hearings but a neutral observer noted to me that it’s been quite a sight watching the outrage of communities over closures contrasted with the cool logic of the banks that the statistics don’t lie: clearly most people don’t want or need to walk in to a branch.
Their sense was the bank leaving town had become a totem for everything they didn’t like about change, and had very little to do with their frequency of using in-person banking services.
The demise of daily letters, 3G and cash are thorny issues because for the few for who they matter, they matter a lot.
Time passes, technology and consumer preferences change. It’s easy for the minority to be pulled along by the views of an indifferent majority like a receding tide.
There are worse things that could happen than having to buy a new TV to watch the footy or only getting letters every other day. But governments and industry have to plan for the big shifts.
For those who have no difficulty adjusting, a little bit of empathy for the fogeys who feel left behind never goes astray either.