Your bank branch might already be gone as everything has moved online or is planned to be so. Australia lost 155 of them in the 2024-25 financial year, part of a 33% decline over five years, according to APRA data analysed by Canstar. When a branch closes, the queue that used to form at the counter moves online, and it takes the appointment booking and the bill payment and the government form along with it. That’s the real story of the past decade, and nobody sent a letter about it.
If you’ve felt that shift and wondered where to start, start with safety. everything has moved online
Where the offline option used to be
Centrelink, Medicare and the tax office used to mean three queues in three separate buildings, sometimes three different suburbs. Now they sit behind one login. myGov is the front door to all of them, plus the NDIS and a fair few others, according to myGov’s own guide to linking services. Setting it up takes patience the first time. A Medicare number here, a Centrelink reference number there. After that, the whole relationship with those agencies runs through one account.
Claiming a Medicare rebate used to mean a form in the post, or a wait in a chair under fluorescent lights. Now it’s a handful of screens.
The bank branch was the fallback when the internet felt like too much trouble. That fallback is closing fast. There are 3,205 branches left across the country, and ATM numbers have dropped to 5,143, close to half what they were in 2020. Bank@Post counters inside post offices thinned out as well. A third of the branch network disappeared in five years. Online banking stopped being a choice somewhere in there.
For a regional reader, none of this is theoretical. The nearest branch can be an hour away, and a wasted trip costs an afternoon. Going online becomes the only thing that reliably works, whatever the reception is like once you’re past town. You also lose the part nobody counts, which is the chance to ask a real person a quick question while you’re standing there.
Doctors’ appointments. Council rates. Electricity accounts. Job applications. They moved one at a time, until picking up the phone became the exception.
Everything has moved online
The skills stopped being optional everything has moved online
None of this happened because you didn’t keep up. The services moved, fast, and they didn’t ask first. The ground shifted under a system you were already using.
It looks different depending on where you sit. A sole trader chasing invoices through an app that didn’t exist five years ago. Someone back at work after years away, expected to already know software nobody gave them time to learn.
A decade ago, not knowing your way around a computer was an inconvenience you could work around. Ask a neighbour. Wait for the branch to open on Saturday. Those options have narrowed.
It’s also more common than most people assume. About one in five Australians are digitally excluded. Among people aged 75 and over that figure reaches 66.5%, more than three times the national rate, according to the 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index. Almost one in ten Australians get online through a phone and nothing else, which the Index links to fewer options for work and study.
Two thirds of the oldest Australians, locked out of the system that now handles their Medicare. Whatever that is, it isn’t a personal failing.
Confidence builds the way it does with anything else. You do the thing badly, and then you do it again a few days later.
A safety routine you can follow
Start with the safety habits. They matter more than anything else you could learn first, and they take less effort than people expect.
Reported scam losses in Australia fell 25.9% in 2024, down to $2 billion, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre. Scamwatch alone logged 249,448 reports, with losses of $318.8 million, down from $476.8 million the year before. That drop is the most encouraging figure in this article. Fewer people got caught, partly because more of them had learned what the pattern looks like before it cost them anything. The skills work.
The pattern is boringly consistent, which is the good news. Something urgent turns up. A fine, a missed delivery, a suspended account, a refund you’re apparently owed. It hands you the link or the phone number to use. Then it asks for a payment or a security code. Once you’ve seen that shape a few times, it’s hard to unsee.
Australians aged 65 and over still lost the most of any age group, $99.6 million. So here’s the routine, built from the eSafety Commissioner’s guidance on the basics.
- Give every account its own passphrase. The Australian Cyber Security Centre recommends four or more random words, at least 15 characters all up, along the lines of “purple duck potato boat”. Be Connected has a walkthrough on safe passwords if you’d rather follow one. eSafety is firmest on this part. Never reuse a passphrase across accounts, and never share it.
- Turn on two-step verification wherever it’s offered, starting with myGov and your bank. It’s usually one setting inside the account menu, and it takes a few minutes once.
- Fill in only what a form asks for. eSafety’s guidance is to skip the optional fields that want extra personal details, even when a site presents them as normal.
- Open your phone or computer’s privacy settings and check what has access to your camera and microphone. Don’t just accept the defaults.
- Pause before you act on anything urgent. A message demanding immediate payment deserves a second look. If you want to check, ring the organisation back on a number you found yourself, from its website or the back of your card. Never the one it just gave you.
- Report anything that looks like a scam to Scamwatch. The takedown service it feeds removed 92% of the malicious URLs referred to it last year and stopped an estimated $36 million in further losses.
Number five is the one that saves people. Urgency is the tell.
If curiosity turns into something more
Managing your own life online, safely, is the whole goal. For most readers that’s where it ends, and that’s fine.
Some people find the safety routine turns into curiosity about how any of it works underneath. If that’s you, start where it’s free. Be Connected, run by the eSafety Commissioner, has self-paced online courses covering phones, tablets and online government services, and it costs nothing. Its partner organisations run free face-to-face classes around the country. There’s a Young Mentors stream that pairs younger volunteers with learners, and a Grandparents Guide if that’s the particular gap you’re trying to close.
For people who’d rather have a person to ask than a course to work through alone, one-to-one Computer Coach Australia is usually the fastest and most cost-effective way to actually close the gap. It starts from what isn’t working for you specifically, rather than a general curriculum, and a good coach adjusts their teaching style to how you actually learn, some people need to see it done twice, others need to do it themselves with someone watching. It also suits small business owners who need practical, immediate answers rather than a self-paced course, and anyone who simply wants a human at the end of the line while they figure out the machine age. You can contact us by emailing computercoachaustralia@gmail.com or calling Zoe on 0407 956 071
Libraries and community centres often run their own free sessions, worth asking about next time you’re in. TAFE has low-cost short courses pitched at exactly this stage, comfortable with the basics and curious about more. One free course over a weekend is enough to find out whether you want another.
For a few people it goes further than that. You become the one everyone at work asks when the printer dies. Then you start wondering whether that could be the job rather than the favour. If you get that far, earning an IT degree online is the kind of study that fits around a job you can’t afford to drop. You keep the income while you study, and that’s usually what decides whether someone starts at all.
Either way, the first move is the same. Pick one account tonight, and give it a passphrase you’ve never used anywhere else.
Your bank branch might already be gone. Australia lost 155 of them in the 2024-25 financial year, part of a 33% decline over five years, according to APRA data analysed by Canstar. When a branch closes, the queue that used to form at the counter moves online, and it takes the appointment booking and the bill payment and the government form along with it. That’s the real story of the past decade, and nobody sent a letter about it.
If you’ve felt that shift and wondered where to start, start with safety.
Where the offline option used to be
Centrelink, Medicare and the tax office used to mean three queues in three separate buildings, sometimes three different suburbs. Now they sit behind one login. myGov is the front door to all of them, plus the NDIS and a fair few others, according to myGov’s own guide to linking services. Setting it up takes patience the first time. A Medicare number here, a Centrelink reference number there. After that, the whole relationship with those agencies runs through one account.
Claiming a Medicare rebate used to mean a form in the post, or a wait in a chair under fluorescent lights. Now it’s a handful of screens as everything has moved online.
The bank branch was the fallback when the internet felt like too much trouble. That fallback is closing fast. There are 3,205 branches left across the country, and ATM numbers have dropped to 5,143, close to half what they were in 2020. Bank@Post counters inside post offices thinned out as well. A third of the branch network disappeared in five years. Online banking stopped being a choice somewhere in there as everything has moved online
For a regional reader, none of this is theoretical. The nearest branch can be an hour away, and a wasted trip costs an afternoon. Going online becomes the only thing that reliably works, whatever the reception is like once you’re past town. You also lose the part nobody counts, which is the chance to ask a real person a quick question while you’re standing there.
Doctors’ appointments. Council rates. Electricity accounts. Job applications. They moved one at a time, until picking up the phone became the exception.
The skills stopped being optional as everything has moved online
None of this happened because you didn’t keep up. The services moved, fast, and they didn’t ask first. The ground shifted under a system you were already using.
It looks different depending on where you sit. A sole trader chasing invoices through an app that didn’t exist five years ago. Someone back at work after years away, expected to already know software nobody gave them time to learn. As everything has moved online we need to bring everyone up to speed.
A decade ago, not knowing your way around a computer was an inconvenience you could work around. Ask a neighbour. Wait for the branch to open on Saturday. Those options have narrowed as everything has moved online
It’s also more common than most people assume. About one in five Australians are digitally excluded. Among people aged 75 and over that figure reaches 66.5%, more than three times the national rate, according to the 2025 Australian Digital Inclusion Index. Almost one in ten Australians get online through a phone and nothing else, which the Index links to fewer options for work and study.
Two thirds of the oldest Australians, locked out of the system that now handles their Medicare. Whatever that is, it isn’t a personal failing.
Confidence builds the way it does with anything else. You do the thing badly, and then you do it again a few days later.
A safety routine you can follow
Start with the safety habits. They matter more than anything else you could learn first, and they take less effort than people expect.
Reported scam losses in Australia fell 25.9% in 2024, down to $2 billion, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre. Scamwatch alone logged 249,448 reports, with losses of $318.8 million, down from $476.8 million the year before. That drop is the most encouraging figure in this article. Fewer people got caught, partly because more of them had learned what the pattern looks like before it cost them anything. The skills work.
The pattern is boringly consistent, which is the good news. Something urgent turns up. A fine, a missed delivery, a suspended account, a refund you’re apparently owed. It hands you the link or the phone number to use. Then it asks for a payment or a security code. Once you’ve seen that shape a few times, it’s hard to unsee.
Australians aged 65 and over still lost the most of any age group, $99.6 million. So here’s the routine, built from the eSafety Commissioner’s guidance on the basics.
- Give every account its own passphrase. The Australian Cyber Security Centre recommends four or more random words, at least 15 characters all up, along the lines of “purple duck potato boat”. Be Connected has a walkthrough on safe passwords if you’d rather follow one. eSafety is firmest on this part. Never reuse a passphrase across accounts, and never share it.
- Turn on two-step verification wherever it’s offered, starting with myGov and your bank. It’s usually one setting inside the account menu, and it takes a few minutes once.
- Fill in only what a form asks for. eSafety’s guidance is to skip the optional fields that want extra personal details, even when a site presents them as normal.
- Open your phone or computer’s privacy settings and check what has access to your camera and microphone. Don’t just accept the defaults.
- Pause before you act on anything urgent. A message demanding immediate payment deserves a second look. If you want to check, ring the organisation back on a number you found yourself, from its website or the back of your card. Never the one it just gave you.
- Report anything that looks like a scam to Scamwatch. The takedown service it feeds removed 92% of the malicious URLs referred to it last year and stopped an estimated $36 million in further losses.
Number five is the one that saves people. Urgency is the tell.
If curiosity turns into something more as everything has moved online
Managing your own life online, safely, is the whole goal. For most readers that’s where it ends, and that’s fine. As everything has moved online or is being planned to shift across there has never been a time so important.
Some people find the safety routine turns into curiosity about how any of it works underneath. If that’s you, start where it’s free. Be Connected, run by the eSafety Commissioner, has self-paced online courses covering phones, tablets and online government services, and it costs nothing. Its partner organisations run free face-to-face classes around the country. There’s a Young Mentors stream that pairs younger volunteers with learners, and a Grandparents Guide if that’s the particular gap you’re trying to close.
For people who’d rather have a person to ask than a course to work through alone, one-to-one Computer Coach Australia is usually the fastest and most cost-effective way to actually close the gap. It starts from what isn’t working for you specifically, rather than a general curriculum, and a good coach adjusts their teaching style to how you actually learn, some people need to see it done twice, others need to do it themselves with someone watching. It also suits small business owners who need practical, immediate answers rather than a self-paced course, and anyone who simply wants a human at the end of the line while they figure out the machine age. You can contact us by emailing computercoachaustralia@gmail.com or calling Zoe on 0407 956 071
Libraries and community centres often run their own free sessions, worth asking about next time you’re in. TAFE has low-cost short courses pitched at exactly this stage, comfortable with the basics and curious about more. One free course over a weekend is enough to find out whether you want another as we need to learn a lot everything has moved online
For a few people it goes further than that. You become the one everyone at work asks when the printer dies. Then you start wondering whether that could be the job rather than the favour. If you get that far, earning an IT degree online is the kind of study that fits around a job you can’t afford to drop. You keep the income while you study, and that’s usually what decides whether someone starts at all.
Either way, the first move is the same. Pick one account tonight, and give it a passphrase you’ve never used anywhere else. Be prepared everything has moved online as change is coming along very fast with the building of multiple data centres.
