Pretty shit article.

The Australian Financial Review goes into a bit more of the 'why', such as Apple charging fees on top of Apple Wallet purchases or these companies not being regulated for transparency/hidden fees/etc the same way other financial institutions are.

A quick look at the draft legislation, has this as a stand-out not mentioned elsewhere

Introducing a new ministerial designation power that will allow particular payment services or platforms that present risks of national significance to be subject to additional oversight by appropriate regulators.

Which makes me think this is also pre-empting more all-encompassing systems employed in other countries, i.e. wechat style shit and protecting against fuckery from a certain large country located in East Asia.

While the ABC just has a slightly better generalised article compared to Reuters.

Australia's government said on Monday it would bring Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital payment services under the same regulatory umbrella as credit cards and other payments as part of legislation set to be introduced to parliament this week.

This is complete nonsense. Does the government even know what it’s saying? Apple Pay just refers to a credit or debit card loaded onto your device. It’s already fully covered by all regulations that apply to the cards themselves.

We want to make sure the increasing use of digital payments occurs in a way that helps promote greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy.

If we are to take this stated goal at face value it would seem to be a good thing. Getting ahead of the curve before the tech giants find a way to turn these products against us.

The problem is a lot of Australian's will not take this at face value especially in the current climate of the movement away from physical cash. It's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are doing this to protect the Australian people with the lack of any sort of harm or complaint. Feel free to point out if there's something I'm not thinking about regarding this point.

Personally, this smells extremely fishy to me and the most likely explanation in my mind is that they want to kneecap the tech giants and allow our financial sector to push in this space. I can't imagine CBA, ANZ, etc particularly enjoying their control over this space being eroded. They have every opportunity to innovate in the space but they're clearly lacking the drive to do so. Instead of improving competition by forcing the big banks to step up, they're knee capping actual innovation.

Yeah, I wonder what they're actually doing. Are they making it safer, or just shitty they aren't taking a cut, and changing it so they can skim off the top.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

SYDNEY, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Australia's government said on Monday it would bring Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital payment services under the same regulatory umbrella as credit cards and other payments as part of legislation set to be introduced to parliament this week.

Digital wallets from the likes of Apple (AAPL.O), Google (GOOGL.O) and WeChat developer Tencent (0700.HK) have exploded in popularity but are not captured by Australian payments law.

"We are modernising Australia's payments system to ensure it meets the needs of our economy now and into the future," Treasurer Jim Chalmers said in a statement.

"We want to make sure the increasing use of digital payments occurs in a way that helps promote greater competition, innovation and productivity across our entire economy."

Legislation is set to be introduced on Wednesday or Thursday, according to Chalmers' office.

The amendments will also give a relevant minister power to subject a system or platform to special oversight in the event it presents a risk of "national significance."

The original article contains 251 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 33%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!