Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer says it’s a case of timing when it comes to the government's proposed surcharge ban.
“We continue to work with the Commerce Commission [ComCom], with MBIE [Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment], with our friends and foes in Parliament as to where we could take this,” he told reporters on Thursday.
“There’s a lot of work required because we want to see if those interchange fees that ComCom dropped twice … What impact they’ve had on merchants and have merchants passed those on.”
“We continue to do the work,” Brewer said.
This is despite National’s lack of backing from coalition partner ACT, while its other coalition partner NZ First thinks the plan is going nowhere.
The Greens do not support the ban as it currently stands while Labour has not guaranteed its support. Both parties have put forward amendments and different proposals.
Brewer, who is also the Minister for Small Business, said the small business sector were also in his ear.
“The policy and the view of the National Party caucus is to ban merchant surcharges. That policy hasn’t changed, that view hasn’t changed, and it’s a case of timing."
Asked if the Bill had been pushed back until after the election, Brewer said legislatively, things were getting tighter.
“We’ve only got 20 odd days of legislative timetable here in Parliament, and so it gets tighter and tighter.”
Brewer said the small business sector had been telling the Government to reflect on this and consumers had told them to look at this.
In June, Finance Minister Nicola Willis said it still remained the Government’s intention to get rid of PayWave fees. Brewer inherited the Retail Payment System (Ban on Merchant Surcharges) Amendment Bill, after taking over the commerce and consumer affairs portfolio from Scott Simpson.
The Bill was first announced by Simpson in July last year and it was expected to be in place by May this year.
It hit an impasse in February. And in March, ACT leader David Seymour told interest.co.nz his party had pulled its support and put up a counter proposal.
Brewer said: “We continue to do the work because when we act, we want to make sure that it gets the desired outcome … We don’t want it to have an inflationary outcome, for example."
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