Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

While Australians are closely watching the Reserve Bank's movements on interest rates each and every month, there is another activity of the Reserve Bank that demands our close inspection. In August of 2022, the RBA quietly announced a year-long study of central bank digital currency. This should concern every single Australian who values freedom. Under the guise of improving efficiency, the RBA study of a centralised digital currency is in fact a study on how to better regulate and control the lives of ordinary Australians. It is a study of how the state can replace cash in free citizens' pockets with a digital currency that is completely controlled by the state.

Although similar to the money that you have in your net bank right now, one of the key differences is that this currency is based on blockchain technology and, as such, is programmable. A more accurate way to think about this currency is a digital voucher or a coupon. The state can decide where you can spend your money and what you can spend it on. It can set an expiry date on your money and do a whole lot more. The fact that the CCP is excited by the potential for a central bank digital currency is a huge hint that this is not something that Australia should be pursuing. So why are we contemplating this?

The World Economic Forum, under the leadership of the unelected, Bond villainesque Klaus Schwab, have already declared their intention to provide citizens with a carbon allowance. We need to be given a carbon allowance, you see, in order to save the planet—how convenient! A central bank digital currency is the way in which such an allowance could be enforced upon every person on the planet. We are rapidly coming to a time where the state will replace people's cash—money citizens can spend as they wish, when they wish, on whatever they wish—with a digital currency that can be spent only as a state controlled central bank will allow. Why would we contemplate a world in which governments could freeze your spending on certain items because you have potentially reached what they deem is a safe carbon allowance for the planet? Why would we contemplate a world in which the state can determine how you may spend and what you may spend it on at all?

If you don't have the freedom to buy and sell as you wish, then you don't have any freedom at all. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that governments, declaring that they must tackle some sort of financial crisis, demand that you spend your money in your account within a certain period of time before it expires. Remember Klaus Schwab promising that in the not-too-distant future we will own nothing and be happy he wasn't joking. Anyone who doubts the World Economic Forum's intentions or the reach of their tentacles into governments around the world has not been paying attention. Klaus Schwab, after all, did say he has penetrated the cabinets—those are his words.

A central bank digital currency would allow increasing levels of control over our nation by globalist organisations to program our money to literally disappear if it is not used within a certain time frame, thus ensuring we are unable to save and therefore unable to build generational wealth. A central bank digital currency, as is right now being considered by our very own RBA, is a high-tech way of turning citizens into slaves of the system. Eventually cash may be banned, and there will be no buying or selling without the express permission of the government—no true freedom at all. It was a dark day in 1932 when our nation's currency departed the gold standard. This began a process of reducing our trust in our own currency. CBDCs will make it easier for reserve banks to create and to control money, and it will undermine our trust even further.

If my parliamentary colleagues here in this place are serious about representing their electorates, then, rather than merely waving through a very clear globalist agenda that robs people of their freedoms, they should and must oppose the idea of a central bank digital currency with every fibre of their being. Some will say that this a conspiracy theory, but it is not a conspiracy theory. The RBA is very closely examining this right now.