Our 5c coin is definitely on death row, it's just up to the pollies to decide when to throw the switch. Could take a few more years at the rate things usually happen.
Perhaps they will take the opportunity to overhaul the Australian Cent coins like New Zealand did a couple of years ago. No offense intended, but Australian coins are currently too large and heavy for their face value, the materials used are too valuable for the face value...Wasn't there talk about a re-design of the 50c coin recently?
I don't know how things work in Australia (=how long such things take), but Canada got rid of the 1c coin a few years ago pretty quickly. And they changed the materials of the Loonies and Toonies also pretty quickly a few years ago.
As coin collector and strong proponent of cash I was glad to read in the linked article that 50% of payments in Australia are still being made in cash. We here in Germany have pretty much the same percentage rate.
A collector friend in Sweden is rather sad that they are down to approx. 20% there.
