They claim that card fraud has jumped up with the advent of NFC, because it doesn't need any verification for less than AU$100.00. Of course, this only applies to stolen cards for the short time the original owner doesn't realise it's gone. Thieves can still squeeze a fair amount of stuff in that time though.
It takes the better part of a second for a stolen RFID ident to travel to places where the limit is higher. As a matter of fact, AUD 100 is roughly £45, which makes it 50% higher than the UK limit so expect lots of people travelling to Oz who will never actually get there.
The massive problem with NFC is that you can pay without knowing it. I am sure this is intentional by shops (makes impulse buy that much more likely), but as I have said (many times) before, if a credit card company voluntarily limits its own ability to get you into debt (which is where they make your money) you ought to start wondering why - here is that "why".
Even with a mag swipe you have some idea where you had the card in your hands to pay, ditto with a PIN, with RFID you do not and payments can be kept low enough not to show up on your bill, so you better get a wallet with shielding.
And, of course, RFID and CHIP do bugger all against Internet theft which must have taken over physical cloning years ago as it's so much less risk for the crims. I haven't checked, but given that databases are stolen with embarrassing frequency I reckon it must have happened years ago.
It doesn't help that the scaremongers talk of pocket swiping with NFC. But that only applies to close proximity of the cards, meaning the wallet has to be thin, and the pants have to be tight
In lab conditions you get to about 2 meters, in real life it's about 1 meter if you want a reliable one-shot read. You seem to confuse the deliberately bad receivers in the card terminals with actual limits of the radio technology in question. Indeed, in the early days of RFID it did happen often that people were paying who were still queueing and thus paid for someone else's goods (pretty much how thieves would like it).
By the way, leather or fabric does nothing to shield RFID, so good luck trusting your leather wallet and trousers. As far as RFID is concerned, you're naked...