Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Whish-Wilson, I think you either misunderstand or seek to misconstrue the core nature of this bill. You said it is dealing with excessive fees. What I would draw your attention to is that it deals with misleading fees, and there is a clear distinction between the two. In relation to the merchant surcharge, what the legislation we are dealing with here seeks to address is where merchants present a fee that is related to the use of a credit card in the purchase of a good or service and the merchant presents that fee as a pass-through of costs incurred from the financial institution that provides the facility for them to take the credit card payment. Here we are seeking to deal with instances where that pass-through is grossly inflated and the consumer is being misled into thinking that it is a pass-through of that cost, whereas in fact the merchant is trying to make an additional profit on the manner in which the individual pays for the good or service.

That is quite different from the ATM context where, of course, the ATM is usually owned by the institution that puts the ATM in place and the fee charged to the consumer for accessing funds from that ATM is directly applied for the service of using the ATM. It is a different matter in that regard. We could come into this chamber every day and you could seek to ask me hypothetical questions about what an appropriate profit margin is for a different private business selling a different good. I do not think it is the role of government to be defining what appropriate profit margins are and what is excessive or otherwise. We have consumer law that seeks to account for misleading practices, abuse of market power and a range of other things, and to protect consumers in that regard, but in this case we should not think it is a straightforward and analogous comparison to look at merchant fees and ATM fees and say they are one and the same problem. They are quite different matters, and it would be wrong of the Senate today, without having undertaken consultation or the proper processes that led to this legislation, to get ahead of the game and do something else in relation to ATM fees.