From October 1 this year, businesses will be banned from adding a surcharge when customers pay with a debit, credit, EFTPOS or prepaid card.

The Australian Restaurant and Cafe Association has said it “will be one of the largest changes in payments” in Australia’s history – and many small businesses “are unprepared for its arrival”.

The change follows a lengthy Reserve Bank of Australia review and decision to remove surcharging from all designated card networks (EFTPOS, Mastercard and Visa). American Express is voluntarily joining the change.

When the Reserve Bank first effectively allowed card surcharges in 2003, Australians mostly paid in cash. Cash still accounted for 69% of payments in 2007, when the central bank first began tracking payment methods usage. Back then, debit and credit cards were used for only one in four payments.

Now, cards make up almost three out of four payments. Debit cards are Australians’ favourite way to pay, making up 49% of all payments in 2025, while credit cards came second, used for 23% of payments.

Here’s what will change for shoppers, and what businesses will and won’t be allowed to charge at the checkout.

What paying by card costs now

Every time you pay with your card, it costs the business money to accept it. The current cost varies: 0.43% for an EFTPOS debit card, to about 1% for Visa or Mastercard credit cards, up to 1.36% for an American Express credit cards.

Without the ability to add on a card surcharge, a business owner will have two choices: absorb the remaining cost themselves, or build those costs into slightly higher prices – passing the costs on to all customers, regardless of how they pay.

Where customers will see changes

Assuming some businesses do pass costs on to customers, shoppers regularly using cash can expect to see the biggest difference, given they can currently avoid card surcharges.

Cash made up around 15% of consumer payments in 2025, but it’s used for almost one in four purchases under $10.

If you’re shopping at most large retailers – such as Woolworths, Coles or JB Hi-Fi – there shouldn’t be any difference from October 1. Most large businesses don’t currently apply card surcharges at the checkout.

The change is more likely to be noticeable when buying from the 16% of businesses that have had card surcharges, including Aldi supermarkets, local grocers, cafes, restaurants, some tradespeople and some online stores.

What does it mean for prices and inflation?

The Reserve Bank has acknowledged businesses will still incur costs when accepting cards after October 1 – and that “those costs can be reflected in a business’s overall pricing”.

If all card surcharge costs were instead built into prices, the Reserve Bank has estimated it could add about 0.1% as a small, one-off impact on measured inflation. While consumers have already been paying these costs via payment surcharges, those weren’t included in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) used to track inflation.

The central bank argues this will reflect what most customers say they want: no surprises at the checkout.

Consumers who shop at businesses that currently surcharge will pay similar amounts as they are paying now (just in a different form, via the sticker price rather than the surcharge).

Some price changes are already on the way.

This week, Flexischools – used by more than 2,100 schools across Australia for canteen orders – notified parents that from October 1, it will increase its existing order fee by 6 cents per student, per order, plus introduce a $10 minimum at checkout “to help manage the cost of processing small payments now that surcharging has been removed”.

What’s changing for businesses?

Behind every card payment are several costs, including “interchange fees”: a fee paid by a payment service provider (such as Paypal, Stripe or Square) to the cardholder’s bank.

The Reserve Bank aims to lower wholesale card payment costs for businesses by about $910 million a year by cutting those interchange fees.

The cap on consumer credit card interchange fees is falling from 0.80% to 0.30%, a reduction of 50 basis points. Debit and prepaid card caps are falling from 0.20% to 0.16%, while commercial credit cards remain unchanged at 0.80%.

Business savings will vary

Large businesses generally have the scale and bargaining power to negotiate lower payment costs. Reserve Bank data show large merchants typically pay around 0.6% in payment costs.

In contrast, Reserve Bank data shows the vast majority of small businesses (81%) are on a different type of pricing plan. This means they typically pay around 1.4% of the transaction value now to accept cards.

Before these October 1 changes, that’s why many small businesses often charged a card surcharge fee of about 1.4% at the end of a transaction.

After October 1, businesses should see some reduction in what they’re charged to use cards, because the consumer credit card interchange cap is coming down by 50 basis points.

However, Australia’s biggest bank, the Commonwealth Bank, has announced that from October 1, it will reduce its flat merchant rate from 1.10% to 0.99% per transaction.

This illustrates the point: a 50-basis-point cut in the wholesale interchange cap will not automatically translate into a 50-basis-point reduction in what every business pays.

Other surcharges will survive

The October 1 changes only affect card surcharges.

They do not apply to weekend surcharges, public holiday surcharges, or booking fees or service fees you might see on your bill.

Taxi fare surcharges can also continue, as they are regulated separately by states and territories.

From October 1, Australian customers will no longer be annoyed by a surprise “card surcharge” at the checkout. But businesses will still need to cover some card payment costs.

The only question is how: either taking a financial hit themselves, or by slightly increasing prices.

Vibhu Arya, PhD Researcher, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The latest Apple Watch models have some new features: they can listen to the sounds around you all day, transcribe snippets of conversation on demand, and write up summaries of everything they heard.

This kind of ambient, always-on surveillance raises privacy concerns, which Apple addresses well. The company says audio is never “recorded” or stored, that nothing is attributed to any speaker, and all content is encrypted so even Apple cannot read it.

I have no reason to doubt any of that. But my reaction to these features is still clear: ick.

I’m not the only one who feels that way, and the ick deserves to be taken seriously. Let me explain why.

The conversation belongs to the room

The new features may run into problems with privacy laws, particularly those that require consent from people being recorded, but also with unspoken social conventions about speech.

When we talk with other people, we have some expectations about what happens to our words. Our comfort comes from what information scientist Helen Nissenbaum calls contextual integrity: the expectation that information moves around according to the norms of the setting in which it is shared.

What you say across a café table, in a bathroom, at a dinner party, at a town hall meeting or during a television broadcast is said for the people present and for the purposes apparent in that moment. Until now, our ambient conversations were not said for a auto-magical-summariser to fold into someone else’s searchable life records.

Apple can encrypt, minimise and delete all it likes, but data protection isn’t the problem. The problem is a conversation has been quietly re-routed from the room where it happened into a device and service and product.

‘Opt-in’ doesn’t work for everybody

These features are marketed as “opt-in”. But only the person wearing the Apple Watch gets to opt at all. Nobody else in the room has a choice.

Apple seems to know this is a problem, so Live Rewind – which transcribes the previous 15 seconds of speech on demand – announces itself with a chime, an animation and a microphone indicator.

Siri Recap, the feature that runs all day and makes on-device summaries later, affords no such notice. You can see how a continuous chime and blinking light would make the feature unusable, and any watch unwearable.

In places where confidentiality is expected – whether for personal, commercial, or legal reasons – devices with ambient recording features are likely to be unacceptable.

Right now, the Apple Watch is welcome anywhere, like AirPods. The new features may change that – and the cameras Apple reportedly plans to add to AirPods may do the same for the now-ubiquitous earphones.

Meta’s video-recording smart glasses have already been banned in some workplaces and venues. The media often frame the problem with individual users, as with Meta’s so-called “pervert glasses”, but the tech industry has earned public distrust in its own right.

It’s the trust, stupid

Tech companies have a reputation for misusing user data. One study of 14,000 apps found almost half violated their own privacy policies. Another study of almost 6,000 children’s apps found most may have been in breach of privacy law.

Norms about ambient recording are already being set by other devices.

Meta’s smart glasses are one, and a recent crop of AI pendants and pucks are in similar territory. These devices and services have broken integrity expectations (and privacy laws) again and again and again and again.

Surveys show most people already think their phones are listening to what they say in order to serve them ads. The irony of introducing a similar feature to everyone’s wrist should not be lost on Apple.

Nor are they unfamiliar with the need to get it right. The company paid out US$95 million to settle a court case in 2025 over claims that Siri activated by accident and sent private audio to contractors, but did not acknowledge wrongdoing and maintains their focus is privacy.

A private way to record your day?

Apple is handling privacy in ways that are demonstrably better than others. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, which powers the new features, is built so the company’s own staff cannot read what passes through it. The servers keep no logs and retain nothing after a user’s answer is returned.

Apple has promised to publish the software used in each Private Cloud Compute instance, so independent researchers can check it works as described.

So, Apple’s privacy policy and software experience is backed by hardware open to inspection. It shows a precedent that others can follow. Seen in this way, the Rewind and Recap features demonstrate that always-on listening can be done without giving the data to anyone but the user.

Apple products have set social precedents in the past, as well. The iPod changed ideas about music piracy, and AirPods made it okay to have weird white sticks hanging out of your ears at all times.

The socialisation of Apple tech is not guaranteed, however. The futuristic Vision Pro goggles launched in 2024, for example, are still not cool.

Nope is still a choice

Despite Apple’s efforts, the basic problem of a device that is always listening in public remains. It still violates our expectations about the integrity of a conversation belonging to the room.

The ick feeling about Recap and Rewind comes from what Apple is actually selling: a new default understanding that a conversation is something that may be casually captured, analysed and used elsewhere by others.

Apple is one of the most credible companies to ask us to accept that new default. Which is why those saying “nope” to breaking the contextual integrity of our conversations should be heard. If we don’t want that kind of tool in our lives – or the lives of others – we need to say it out loud: ick.

Luke Heemsbergen, Senior Lecturer in Communication, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In his lifetime, Les Murray (1938–2019) was often associated with contradiction and tension. He was seen as both Australia’s national poet and a reactionary who was out of step with modern Australian life. He was internationally fêted, often seen as a potential Nobel laureate, but he had a complicated local reputation. He was a university-educated “subhuman redneck”, to evoke the title of his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems.

Unlike some poets, Murray was not celebrated for one or two “big” poems (like Kenneth Slessor and his Five Bells). Murray’s Collected Poems contains dozens of poems that could be discussed here. I have chosen The Broad Bean Sermon, partly because it illustrates his extraordinary skill and ability to produce delight, and partly because it reminds us that, to a large degree, he kept his ideological pugilism outside the pages of his poetry collections.

In other words, whatever cultural anxieties Murray might elicit (or might have elicited), they tend to fall away when you actually read his poems.

The Broad Bean Sermon was published in Murray’s fourth collection, Lunch and Counter Lunch (1974). The joke of the book’s title might be opaque to those who did not grow up in the 1970s and ‘80s, but the mixing of dialectics (the system of arguing that resolves contradictory ideas) with the Australian pub meal known as the counter lunch is classic Murray.

The mix of erudition and vernacular culture illustrates how Murray was not accidentally associated with contradiction. He habitually brought together apparently contradictory things: high and low cultural registers, regionalism and cosmopolitanism, urban sophistication and rural wisdom, capacious broad-mindedness and cramped belligerence.

The Broad Bean Sermon, while not necessarily Murray’s “best” or even best-known poem, shows why for many years Murray was considered, and is still considered by some, to be Australia’s preeminent poet.

Why a 'sermon’?

The title of the poem is ambiguous. Is the poem a sermon about broad beans or by broad beans? Even if the voice is apparently objective (that is, talking about the beans), this doubleness never wholly leaves this sermon.

And why a “sermon”? By the 1970s, sermons were not especially cool, associated as they were with lecturing and moralising. Murray’s use of the word suggests a long tradition of preaching that brought together the written and the spoken word, the prepared and the extemporised text.

Describing the poem as a sermon, of course, adds a religious note at the beginning of a piece ostensibly about a humble legume. This religious note is also present in the poem’s form. Made up of nine tercets (three-line stanzas), the poem is a trinity of trinities.

While the Christian resonance of this structure is not directly commented upon in the poem, it is impossible not to see Christian symbolism in a poem by a poet who routinely dedicated his books “To the Glory of God”. Murray converted to Roman Catholicism in 1962.

The poem’s opening stanza immediately shows that this religiosity is not to be confused with ponderous moralising. The first lines offer a kind of establishing shot of beanstalks, which humorously confuses religious and military language:

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.

The awkward, energetic syntax is typical of Murray, as is the technical detail of the beanstalks being compared to Air Force recruits dressed in green dacron, the brand name of a type of polyester.

That the church parade is “slack” and “without belief”, and the recruits “unbuttoned”, suggests an endearing sense of casualness about the beans, which are calling to be picked via the language of the Lord’s Prayer (“trespass against us”), another religious note.

The poem goes on to describe the beans as both static (“square in stem-section”) and amusingly dynamic:

they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.

The punning here of “grow/go to great lengths” leads the reader to energetic verb and preposition combinations: “keel over”, “kink down”, “grow up”.

The reference to “greenstuff”, meanwhile, might be an allusion to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855), another energetic poem of praise that makes the everyday extraordinary, in which the poet sees grass (another green plant) as “the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven”.

In the third stanza of The Broad Bean Sermon, the poet calls attention to snails that “hang rapt in their food” (another pun), while spiders “tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage”.

The flags there again might echo Whitman (“the flag of my disposition”), while the reference to “cordage” again strikes a technical note. The term refers to ropes and lines, especially with regard to the rigging of a vessel.

The references to the snails and spiders, however lightly rendered, gives the setting a sense of life-and-death reality, rather than an idealised pastoral version of the natural world. This is also seen in the reference to the “cat-and-mouse floor” (presumably a metaphor for the dynamic to-and-fro of light through the plants).

A poem of bounty

In the next stanza, the poet appears to address himself:

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfuls more.

This is a poem now of bounty. The poet is like Adam in the garden of Eden, wanting for nothing and supplied by nature’s boundless largess. Barely working, he takes beans by the shirtful (another moment of casualness, and suggestive of lived experience).

From there, the poem goes on to engage in an audacious display of poetic invention. A single, complicated sentence snakes through twelve and a half lines in a catalogue of bean diversity.

                                                At every hour of daylight

appear more that you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, fleshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,

beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover

till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,

like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, and those lolling in pointed green slippers …

These extraordinary lines demonstrate how even in a poem as apparently light and humble as a broad bean sermon, Murray’s technical prowess can make the quotidian and unremarkable extraordinary and endlessly multifarious.

The cataloguing of the beans’ diversity is made up of a host of compound neologisms: “thin-straight”, “thin-crescent”, and so on. Once again, the poet takes on an Adamic quality, moving through the literal garden, naming things like the first man.

What is most notable about the list is the way it represents plenitude by celebrating difference and imperfection. Consistent with the relaxed opening, this world, while implicitly divine, does not require any religious belief (the beans, after all, are “a slack church parade / without belief”). Rather, it requires attention, engagement and appreciation, things central to any poetic act.

In evoking the natural creativity of beans, Murray matches that creative plenty with an outpouring of newly minted images. What John Kinsella in Beyond Ambiguity calls the poem’s “overwhelming optimism” is not just the beans’ literal fruiting, but also “the bounty available to all people”. The beans, in their generous generation, also require the speaker’s action. As the final stanza puts it,

Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.

The vow here again sounds a religious note: a vow is a solemn promise, often made in religious contexts, such as marriage and taking religious orders. But the moral seriousness of vowing sits easily with the poet’s state of happiness, which is also “your health”.

The poem ends with a look to the future, when the last of the season’s beans will appear, ordinary and semi-comic in appearance: “misshapen as toes”.

A poem of praise

The Broad Bean Sermon fuses the material and spiritual worlds, physical and ethical forms of health, the religious and the secular, the ordinary and the transcendent.

As a poem of praise (another form associated with religious discourse), it traffics in an emotion not often found in contemporary poetry: happiness.

The sense of happiness comes through the metaphorical and syntactical energy of the poem. This energy amounts to a joyful acceptance of natural and human diversity, with the description of the beans (“portly”, “stiff”, and so on) acting as an implicit comparison with human beings. This is a poem that is the opposite of heroic or epic, delighting in the diverse morphology of things.

Ultimately, The Broad Bean Sermon brings together ancient and modern (poetic) traditions, a productive tension that plays out throughout Murray’s long career. For Murray, it was the poetic image itself that could resolve such tensions. In his essay The Trade in Images (1988), he writes of poetic images in a way that is interestingly coincident with the language of The Broad Bean Sermon:

Images are at their least disruptive in art, where they are at their most mysterious and many sided and inexhaustible, food for contemplation rather than precipitate action. In art, imagery and conflict alike are raised beyond embodiment in action to a more perpetual embodiment where their life needs nothing further from the world to feed itself. Art […] has arrived, without having to find its way there through tyrannies, at the true ambiguity of things, and can let all things, even opposites, be true at once.

This is no doubt a utopian view of things, but Murray’s appeal to the benign efficacy of poetic images as a way to resolve conflict and contradiction should not be ignored or forgotten. In poems such as The Broad Bean Sermon, Murray gifts us poetry that is nothing less than a dynamic encounter with being, which is mysterious and inexhaustible.

David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.