Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a)

notes that:

(i)

in 2000, the Payments System Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) conducted a study into one aspect of the Australian payments system, the networks for automated teller machines (ATMs), credit cards and debit cards to determine the economic efficiency of these networks and whether they were delivering the best possible service at the lowest cost to end-users,

(ii)

the study found that the actual cost of ATM transactions was around 50 cents, and

(iii)

the current average cost of an ATM transaction from a ‘foreign’ ATM directly charged to consumers is up to $2;

(b)

recommends that, given that the actual operation costs of processing ATM transactions is likely to have decreased in the past decade, the RBA and the ACCC undertake another review of the cost of ATM transactions to update the information of transaction costs to customers; and

(c)

calls on the government to ban the $2 bank ATM fee and instead cap ATM fees at a level that reflects the actual cost of processing the ATM transactions.