Conspiracy theorist ‘Guru’ cashless society lie debunked with simple check

A failed NSW election candidate’s claim that Australian banknotes are being phased out to create a cashless society has been debunked.

A failed NSW election candidate’s ridiculous claim that Australia hasn’t printed any new bank notes since 2018 and is heading towards a cashless society has been debunked.

The claims were made by David Graham, a well-known misinformation spreader from Wollongong, in a video posted to Facebook on March 31.

Mr Graham, who also goes by the name ‘Guru’, claimed the last time a federal banknote was printed in the US was in 2018 and Australian printing stopped “somewhere around that time”, too.

“So the only currency that is out there is what’s out there. There is none (sic) getting printed,” he said in the rambling rant to his 1,284 followers.

David Graham (pictured) is a well-known conspiracy theorist. Picture: TikTok

Mr Grahams’ claims tap into a baseless conspiracy that a cashless society is imminent which would allow the government to control people’s spending or track their movements.

But AAP FactCheck has sine debunked Mr Graham’s claims, finding more than one billion new banknotes have been printed in Australia since 2018, according to Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) data.

The factchecker also reports US data also confirms billions of new banknotes have been printed in the same period.

A simple look at the notes in your wallet can debunk the lie, too. If you have any new versions of the $20, $50, or $100 notes, you have a note that was produced since 2018.

The new $50 Australian banknotes came into circulation in 2018 with improved security and identification features.

The RBA introduced a new version of the $50 note in October 2018 which included upgraded security measures and a tactile raised dot to help vision-impaired people distinguish it from other notes.

A new version of the $20 note was released in 2019, and the new $100 note entered circulation in October 2020, also as part of the RBA’s decade-long Next Generation Banknote program.

The RBA’s 2022 annual report shows Note Printing Australia (NPA), the bank’s printing subsidiary which manufactures our polymer banknotes, delivered 431m Australian banknotes in the 2021/2022 financial year.

Of those, 40 million were $5 notes, 14 million were $20 notes, 221 million $50 notes, and 156 million $100 notes.

Those numbers are almost double what were manufactured in the 2020/2021 financial year, when NPA manufactured 234 million Australian banknotes. This is more new banknotes than were printed in any other year this century, AAP reports.

RBA data reports one billion new Australian banknotes have been printed since 2018.

Meanwhile, in the US, the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) manufactures billions of new banknotes every year on behalf of the Federal Reserve central bank.

The Federal Reserve expects to print a minimum of 4.5 billion banknotes in 2023, alone – with a face value of at least $US166.5 billion. The actual volume and value of the order will be adjusted throughout the year “to best match available production with demand”.

According to historical US currency print orders, the Federal Reserve has ordered more than 26 billion banknotes since the beginning of the 2018/2019 financial year.

Mr Graham, who stood as an independent candidate for the NSW upper house in the 2023 state election, did not respond to a request for comment from AAP FactCheck to verify the basis of his claims.

There was a sharp rise in use of cashless payment systems during the pandemic. Picture: Supplied

The record-high production of cash seemingly contradicts a report from March 2021 that predicted Australia would be a mostly cashless society by 2024.

The Global Payments Report by fintech company FIS projected only around 2 per cent of transactions in Australia will be cash by 2024, a large drop from 8.3 per cent in 2020.

But the report was written in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, when fears about transmission contributed to a sharp rise in the uptake of cashless payment systems.