Senator Gerard Rennick gives his reasons for not supporting the Digital Currency Regulation Bill
Regulating a digital currency is a fantasy. 15.11.23
28 Nov 2023 YouTube | Rumble-Mirror | Telegram-Mirror | Hansard | Bill | Web
Transcript:
Senator RENNICK (Queensland): I too won’t be supporting this bill, the Digital Assets (Market Regulation) Bill 2023. (01)
I don’t believe in digital currency—I think it’s a stepping stone to the social licence—and I believe the currency should be controlled by the government of the day. I will stand here and tell you that I do not want the government in the family home, the boardroom, the doctor’s waiting room or the classroom, but there is one thing I do think governments should regulate, and that is the currency.
Digital currencies are used to traffic drugs, to traffic children and to traffic weapons. There is no way that ASIC will ever be able to keep up with the tracking of digital currency. ASIC can’t even do its job properly now. The idea that we are going to regulate digital currency is just a fantasy. We may as well have a market for unicorns and fairies if we’re going to try to regulate it, because that’s all a digital currency is—a world of bytes, a world of make-believe.
If we want to get this country back on its feet, we need to start producing real goods and services. We need to build infrastructure. We need fewer white-collar spivs in their ivory palaces in Sydney and Melbourne. We need more people back on the tools, not trading imaginary figures on a computer screen.
It’s very important that we understand how important controlling currency is. It’s actually one of the reasons why—and I’m one of the few people in this chamber who believe this—the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) should come under the control of the Treasurer and should not be independent from government. (02) (03)
I’ll just read out the history of coins in the early colony, because controlling currency is everything. The first colony of modern Australia didn’t really have its own currency for the first 17 years, and, if you want to regulate and control your country, you’ve got to have a currency. This describes currency in the early settlement:
The coins in the pockets of the passengers on the First Fleet were a mixture of currencies from all around the world and included English guineas, shillings and pence, Spanish dollars, Indian rupees and Dutch guilders. It was confusing to try and use these coins to trade because no one knew how much they were worth when compared to each other. This coin confusion meant that other ways of trading were used. People bartered for goods and services with anything they had—food and rum became popular items to trade.
We all know what happened with the Rum Rebellion. It literally went the proverbial up. Luckily enough, we had Lachlan Macquarie, who came along in 1810. He was the first governor to see Australia not as a colony but as a country. He knew that if you wanted to be a good governor for your country you needed a military to defend your borders and provide law and order, you needed a taxation system and you needed a monetary system. (04) (05) (06) (07)
He introduced the Holey dollar, and that holey dollar was used to fund the Sydney Hospital and the Sydney barracks, which still stand in Macquarie Street today. That is what we have to do, as good government involves regulating and controlling your currency. (08) (09)
I want to repeat: when it comes to the government going into your personal lives, I’ll fight that any day. But when it comes to defending the right of the government to control your currency, we have to make sure that that is in the control of the people, because the history of monetary policy is the history of wars.
