The best ways to use your 5c coins

THE five cent coin is the black jelly bean of Australian currency. Nobody wants anything to do with it, but it has plenty of uses besides being spent.

Still hanging around, you tiny little pain. Picture: Sarah Marshall

PARKING meters want nothing to do with them. Vending machines will spit them back at you with an air of disdain. Traffic light charity collectors and windscreen washers will shoot you a pained look if you even consider throwing them in their direction.

Even small children won’t bend down to pick them up if they see them on the ground.

Yep, the five cent coin is the black jelly bean of Australian currency. It’s been there for as long as we all can remember, but nobody wants anything to do with it.

Treasurer Scott Morrison this morning got us all excited by stating, quite adamantly, that Australia does not make the annoying coin anymore.

“They’re still in circulation, but we don’t make them anymore,” he told the Tax Institute breakfast in Sydney this morning.

However, after further investigation, news.com.au can reveal that production of the coin is yet to cease, and The Mint produced about 20 million of them in the past 12 months.

It kind of looks like the echidna is preparing to fight you.

The itty bitty coin is kind of adorable (it looks like the echidna has been squashed, or has rolled over onto his back and can’t get up) but for most people — especially those who have embraced cashless transactions — it’s been regarded as ‘useless money’ for a while.

It spends the vast majority of its life loitering in ashtrays and down the back of couches.

And let’s face it — it’s been a long time since you could actually buy something for five cents.

Some of us can remember a time when you could get a red frog or a musk stick for that price. But, at an absolute best, these days you might be able to get a freckle or a jelly bean from a corner store in a country town that still thinks it’s 2002. But you’d be lucky.

One of the better uses for a five cent coin.

At a supermarket the only thing that you can get for five cents is an individual produce item. As someone on a Reddit helpfully pointed out:

“You could try buying a mushroom. A little one. Maybe a clove of garlic. When the one and two cent coins were phased out, some guy in my town figured he’d buy mushrooms at the local Woolies, put them through one by one as individual purchases to round them all down and ... well, lot of work for cheapish mushrooms.”

Damn right it is.

Nobody has ever been this excited about a five cent coin. Picture: Nathan Dyer

Other people on the Reddit thread pointed out that five cent coins were handy for using on Scratchies, and someone else said the only way he could tighten the screw on the camera tripod he used when travelling was with this particular sized coin (no one was thinking of him when they were discussing whether to phase out the five cent piece, were they?)

Reddit user LairySpider helpfully suggested that you could use spare five cent coins “in your cannon” while another fellow told this charming anecdote:

“The other day I was out of cash and there are no ATMs near my house, so I had to get on the bus with a handful of 5c coins. The bus driver called me a ****, but he let me on. When I got off I didn't say thank you.”

A couple of years back there was an urban legend that did the rounds that you could glue two five cent coins together, spray it gold, then pass it off as a $2 coin in vending machines. (Please note that this is super naughty and we don’t condone it.)

Another sound use for leftover coins.

But probably our favourite (yet still completely illegal, don’t try this at home kids) use for the humble five cent coin came from the bloke who wrote that “if you drill a hole in one, you can use it as a washer. And a washer will usually set you back 10 cents, so that’s a saving of five whole cents”.

That is some sound economics right there. I vote we put this guy in charge of the next Federal Budget.