Australia tolerates currency forging

Amazing headline ?  Well, it’s true.  Companies … well known companies … are manufacturing bogus Aussie dollars, and Canberra isn’t stopping it. 

How is it so ?  Simple.  Within Australia, the exchange rate is fixed.  A dollar in Perth is a dollar in Sydney. 

Only the dubious end of the telco sector gets away with saying ‘A dollar is worth whatever we say it is, for the purposes of any given plan.’

Two phone companies say ‘$200 included value !!!’  But one of them might charge calls at 50 cents a minute, the other at $1.  So the reality is that the ‘included value’ is 400 minutes of talk in one case, but only 200 minutes in the other.

Why do they headline ‘$200′ ?  Because they know that the public justifiably assumes that $200 means $200 … that there’s something absolute about a reference to the national currency.  Imagine we advertised ‘legal advice @ $300 an hour’ but it turned out that the ‘dollars’ were ‘CSP Central bucks’ that equate to $400 Aussie in the small print.

Theft ?  It’s no worse than a telco that shouts out ‘$300 included value’ when the only reason the ‘value’ is so high is the company’s self-appointed high rates pull the real deal back to the market.  If they offered the same rates as the telco next door, the ‘included value’ might be quite a bit less.

It’s misleading and deceptive to advertise ‘value’ in terms of a fixed standard – the country’s currency – and use the fact that charge rates are at your discretion to claw back some of the apparent ‘value’.