Adam Steer:
The next federal election is due by May. You can expect a lot of pitches, promises over the next 18 weeks. And the battle ground, one of them at least, looks to be drawn around the cost of living. As we were chatting today, the Labor government is vowing to crack down on unfair card surcharges following the RBA’s review of the merchant card payment cost. Stephen Jones is the federal Assistant Treasurer and Financial Services Minister. Minister, happy new year. Welcome back to the program.
Stephen Jones:
Good to be back with you, and happy new year to you and your listeners.
Steer:
Let’s start with the credit card surcharges. They exist, but they’re quite minimal. Why is this a government priority above everything else?
Jones:
We’re doing a range of things to stop the rip‑offs that are putting billions of dollars worth of costs on consumers. Surcharges are costing consumers around about a billion dollars a year. The things that the – the other areas we’re focused on, in the unfair trading areas, subscription traps where it’s easy to sign up to a service and impossible to get out of. You know, online dynamic pricing where the price of a product increases over the course of the – while you’re online transacting and making a purchase. And drip pricing, which is when you go online to buy a hotel or a booking or an airline ticket and you get all these add‑on charges, junk charges that are added to the price of the transaction. There’s a range of things that we are looking at and as well, you know, pricing practices in supermarkets to stop the rip‑offs to ensure that Australians are getting a better deal.
We’ve been working on it for about a year. Some of these things are more advanced than others. In the area of surcharging, between 0.5 and 1.5 per cent on average people are being charged regularly to use their own money, which is access to their debit cards. It’s in our focus. We’ve got the Reserve Bank doing a deep dive at it at the moment. We want to find out what the actual cost of providing these services are. And we want to ensure that when we do ban it doesn’t just pass the cost on to small businesses.
Steer:
It seems – I remember the royal commission into banking was very critical of the fees that the banks were charging, and the government moved to stop them doing it. How have they managed to creep back in, those charges? How has that happened?
Jones:
No, these are – the royal commission was looking at charges and commissions that were being paid for fees for no service in a range of different services, whether it was banking or whether it was superannuation or insurance. And this is different. These are transaction fees which the cards and the service providers say are the cost of providing the service. We know that it’s much more than that. We know that there are additional charges that are being put in place there and we want to drill down, ensure that Australians aren’t being whacked with these unfair prices and unfair charges. We’ll do it properly, because we’re adamant we’re not going to do it in – when we’ve raised this in the past small business have quite rightly raised concerns saying, ‘Well, if you ban this surcharge, us charging a surcharge, we’ll just have to absorb that cost.’ So we want to do it in a way that doesn’t whack small businesses but protects the interests of consumers as well.
Steer:
So just to clarify there are you suggesting scrapping the surcharge from banks to business or businesses to the consumer? Because if it’s business to consumer and you do nothing about the banks charging the business, then, you know, that’s going to create a lot of issues?
Jones:
Great point. There’s a complex web of services that are being provided. I don’t want to dive too deeply into the weeds, but there’s the people who provide the little terminal. There’s the people who provide the connection between the terminal and the banking services. There’s the people who provide the service between the banking services and the credit card providers. There’s a whole range of businesses and services that are invisible to the consumer but take a little bit along the way.
Steer:
But you can understand that small businesses today might hear, Assistant Treasurer, that they fear they’ll be slugged with the fee they can’t pass on to the consumers. Can you say with confidence they won’t be punished and it will be the banks who are faced with dealing with those fees?
Jones:
And that’s why we’re taking the time to get to the bottom of where all the costs and charges are so that we will be able to say with hand on heart, yes, the consumers will be protected, but so will small businesses. And here’s why we know there’s sharp business going on – if you go to a big supermarket like a Coles or a Woolworths, they are paying a small fraction of what the coffee shop or your small corner store is paying for their transaction fees. So we know – we know – that they’re having a lend here, and that’s what we’re getting to the bottom of.
Steer:
You’re on ABC Radio Darwin, Adam Steer with you. Stephen Jones is the federal Assistant Treasurer and Financial Services Minister. It is 22 to 9. On some other issues, the Australian Venue Co has been in the news for not advertising Australia as Australia Day but, rather, the January long weekend. Is there an expectation for our venues to celebrate calendar‑gazetted public holidays?
Jones:
Look, this is not a totalitarian regime and country. We don’t tell, you know, private companies what they do or don’t celebrate. I’ll be out there on Australia Day down in my electorate having breakfast by the beach and I’ll be doing about 3 or 4 Australia Day events there. And I think there’ll be hundreds of thousands of Australians that do it. It’s up to private businesses about what they do or don’t do. And I think their customers will make their own mind up about whether they support or don’t support that.
Steer:
The Prime Minister at the National Press Club today is expected to announce a new scheme offering payments to apprentices who work in residential construction in a bid to help address the nation’s housing shortage. Ten thousand dollars will be offered to electrical, plumbing and carpentry apprentices. The Master Builders Australia says improving apprenticeship completion rates is vital if Australia is to meet its housing targets. What can you tell me about this announcement today?
Jones:
Really important – it builds on our fee‑free TAFE initiative. We want to ensure that all the obstacles to young people getting into one of those traditional trades are removed. We’ve got a shortage of tradies. We need more of them. It’s a great line of work to get into. And we want to attract more people, particularly into the building trades, because lack of tradies means higher costs for building a home and it all adds into the housing shortage that we have at the moment. So we’re attacking this from every angle. We need more workers in the building and construction and in the housing industry, and that’s what this is all about – getting more people into the traditional trades via these apprenticeship bonuses.
Steer:
Well, the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has told Channel Nine the government – you’ve been too late to act on the worker shortages, even though he says –
Jones:
He had 9 years. Nine years. We’ve been in government 2 years. He had 9 years, and they sat on this problem and made it worse. And because we haven’t fixed his 9 years’ worth of mistakes and inaction in 2 years we’re the problem? I think Peter Dutton needs to have a good, hard look at himself because Australians are sick of this sort of negativity. You’ve got the government having a crack at fixing a problem that we inherited and you’ve got the bloke who created the problem running around criticising us for doing it. Australians are rightly jack of that sort of mindless negativity.
Steer:
Well, over 14,000 electrician apprenticeships were commenced in 2023. That’s compared to just 8,000 in 2017. What’s the number you’re aiming for? What would you like to see here?
Jones:
We want to see more young people taking up a trade and more people sticking with that trade.
Steer:
Okay.
Jones:
I think that the Housing Industry Association are right – it’s not just the number of people who are starting; it’s the number of people who complete the trade, and these bonuses are around – are about ensuring people hit those completion rates.
Steer:
Okay. But doesn’t the Opposition have a point here? The Master Builders Association forecasts a shortage of 130,000 workers across the building and construction industry alone this year. Why didn’t you act sooner on the shortages? Is this not because it’s an election year you’re announcing this?
Jones:
We did. We did. Within the first 3 months we held a skills summit. We got all of the major players around the table in Canberra and we said we have got a crisis here, we need everyone playing a Team Australia moment on here. We need to get states and territories governments playing a part in this, because they run the TAFE system. We injected more money into the TAFE system to ensure that that was well supported. We instituted fee‑free TAFE. This is the third part of it, which is about ensuring that we make it more affordable for tradies to – for young apprentices to not only take up trade but to stick at the trade. So far from us doing it in the last few months; it was something we started in the first 3 months of being in government. It takes more than 2 years to turn around 10 years’ worth of inaction. So this is what I get a bit frustrated about. This other mob created the problem; we’re fixing it and they’re saying we’re not going fast enough when they did nothing for 9 years.
Steer:
New figures from ABS show Australia is 15,000 homes behind your national housing accord target. The territory is right at the back of the pack – 78.6 per cent fewer homes than we should have built last quarter. How does the $10,000 for apprenticeships turn that around?
Jones:
We’ve got to be doing everything in this. We’ve got to get more land released and we’ve got to speed up the development applications so that whole planning process has got to be accelerated. We’ve got to have more skilled workers in this. So that’s what the apprenticeship system is about – ensuring that over the long term we’ve got more people entering the industry, so more skilled tradies working in the industry in those traditional trades. So it’s not a – there’s no one silver bullet. We need workforce, we need land supply, we need planning, we need investment, we need the lot of it, and we need it all working together and every tier of government working in on this together with the private sector. No one silver bullet; we need all of it working together.
Steer:
Australia Day this weekend, it is a long weekend. There’ll be a few people, particularly in the Top End, I imagine, having some cold lemonades. The federal government’s biannual increase in alcohol excise on February 3 will see the price of a schooner rise as much by $1. Isn’t this going to hurt publicans and licensed venues by forcing people to stay in to entertain rather than spending money over the counter and at restaurants?
Jones:
Look, the excise, this has been a feature of the taxation system for several decades now. It’s been designed – it wasn’t designed by our government; it was designed by a previous Coalition government, if my memory serves me correctly. And it’s designed to ensure that the real value of that excise is maintained as prices increase over time –
Steer:
It is designed so that it is increased over time because of the perceived health risks of both alcohol and tobacco. When is enough enough on those alcohol excises? Because it’s a growing tax – 2 per cent on 2 per cent on 2 per cent.
Jones:
No plans to make any changes in this area at the moment.
Steer:
Stephen Jones, federal Assistant Treasurer, Financial Services Minister, one more question I reckon we’ve got time for. Let’s touch on the supermarkets. Long experience for Top Enders is the high cost we have for our supermarkets here. That seems to have spread now right across the country. What is your government’s plan to try and rein in what could appear from some sections as price gouging by the major supermarkets?
Jones:
Yes, so we’ve funded the ACCC to have an ongoing price monitoring and beefing up their legal enforcement of the supermarkets, which is why we’ve got them in court at the moment over deceptive pricing practices. It’s where they jack the prices up, say, 20 per cent and then drop them by 10 per cent and pretend that they’ve got a special going on. So there’s deliberate action going on, we’ve got going on, by the ACCC, the competition regulator at the moment. We’re also legislating a new code of practice around supermarkets to ensure that not only are they treating their consumers fairly, their customers fairly, but also their suppliers, because we want to crack down on both of those areas, so there will be a new mandatory code legally enforceable with millions of dollars worth of fines against these companies for doing the wrong thing.
Steer:
Minister, appreciate your time. Come into the studio next time you’re up here, please.
Jones:
Looking forward to it.
Steer:
Thank you, Stephen Jones, federal Assistant Treasurer and Financial Services Minister.