5 cent demise

Today’s The Sheet notes the rumoured demise of the Australian 5 cent piece. This follows the withdrawal of the 1 and 2 cent pieces over a decade ago.

I must say I am ambivalent about this. The cost of handling this sort of trivial small change to any bank is high and very few, if any, vending machines now take it. I cannot use it to pay for parking at any meter either.

That said, I wonder when the point comes when you should start looking at rebasing the currency. Obviously, you should not wait as long as, say, Zimbabwe did, nor should it be something that is done at the drop of a hat. The fact that you can now buy only one tenth of what you could with this coin is not a good thing.

The other option, of course, is to work to maintain the value of the currency – something that governments have historically been very poor at.