There were very interesting developments in Australia yesterday with the RBA continuing on it's path to deliver further regulation in the market.

Along with further downward pressure on interchange rates the RBA are proposing a ban of card surcharges from July next year at a retail level - meaning that retailers will not be able to add a card surcharge for debit or credit cards. This follows on from their initial proposal to ban surcharges for debit cards.

It's going to be very interesting to see the response to this by the Commerce Commission here. In many countries around the world card surcharges are illegal, however in 2009 the Commerce Commission took legal action against both Mastercard and Visa and required them to make surcharges legal, on the basis that banning credit card surcharges was anti competitive.

In recent months here Dr Small and the Commerce Commission have doubled down on this with Dr Small even claiming in a radio interview that even banning debit card surcharges was pointless and they had no plans to consider this.

It's pretty clear that we have a bunch of incompetent numpties running the Commerce Commission.