RBA wants to curb surcharges, but isn’t the real surcharge our debt-based system?

Saw the RBA’s recent talk about cracking down on excessive card surcharges. Fair enough, nobody likes paying 1–2 % just to spend their own money. But it got me thinking: isn’t that small surcharge just a symptom of the bigger one baked into the entire system?

In 2024-25, Australians will pay over $100 billion in interest alone on mortgages, loans, and credit. The government owes around $1 trillion, households about $2.66 trillion(as of 2022), while GDP is roughly $2.5 trillion. Between public and private debt, we owe far more than we produce and every dollar of it is someone else’s interest income.

So while it’s good to rein in minor fees, isn’t the real problem a financial system that keeps creating money as debt and charging us endlessly for it? At what point do we stop normalising perpetual debt as “modern”?

Curious how others here see it? Could a non-debt-based model (or even partial reform) actually work in Australia’s current setup?