Dave Sharma (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

The idea of paying a fee in order to spend your own money sounds like a bizarre one. The notion that someone who's taking a payment from you will also then be able to charge you for taking that payment sounds like something that should belong in a Kafka novel, not in real life, but that is what's happening in Australia with card surcharges on transactions. What started off as a small number of transactions that were performed electronically each year has grown to large volumes, and these days about three-quarters of all transactions, online and in real life, are paid for with a card. Increasingly, we see the practice of merchants or businesses charging you a fee for using your card—that is, charging you a fee for accepting your own payment.

We would never accept this with cash—the idea that you would go into a business and offer to pay them cash and they would charge you a cash management fee or a cash-processing fee. Most of us would walk out and say, 'That's ridiculous.' But, increasingly, it has become normalised in the card sector, and we see more and more merchants adding surcharges in a way that's often not transparent and often not visible. I point out here that the cost of managing cash in an economy is at least double that of managing electronic transactions, because you need to physically move the cash from the place of sale to the banking venue and whatnot.

That's why I want to commend the work that the Reserve Bank of Australia has done in looking at this issue through, now, two discussion papers and commend their outlined proposals to address it to help lower wholesale fees in the system so merchants are not forced to recoup them from consumers, to increase transparency around the fees that are paid and to give merchants and consumers better choice. The idea that you should be paying for the privilege of spending your own money is preposterous, and I'm glad the Reserve Bank is looking into this.