Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Cameron Brewer have introduced the Fair Trading Amendment Bill, lifting the maximum penalty for misleading pricing and other Fair Trading Act breaches from 600,000 dollars to 5 million dollars, three times the commercial gain, or the value of the transactions involved, whichever is greater. The bill, tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, also introduces a safe harbour defence for online platforms that move quickly to remove suspected scam content, and updates the way New Zealand product safety standards align with international rules.
Willis said the changes are about ensuring shoppers can trust the prices they see on the shelf. “It’s very simple, the price that Kiwis see on the shelf or in the supermarket aisle should be the price they pay at the checkout,” she said in the joint announcement on Wednesday. Brewer said the safe harbour clause had been developed with the digital industry and would give online providers “the confidence to act quickly to protect New Zealanders” from scams that have grown more sophisticated and more frequent.
Most Fair Trading Act breaches will shift from criminal to civil liability under the bill, 1News reported. Serious misconduct, including payment fraud and safety violations that put people at risk, will remain criminal offences. The Government argues that broadening civil liability allows the Commerce Commission to pursue more cases at lower cost and recover penalties that genuinely sting larger retailers. The current 600,000 dollar cap has been criticised for years as too low to deter household-name supermarkets and electronics chains, where a fine of that size can simply be absorbed as the cost of doing business.
The change has not arrived in a vacuum. Consumer NZ has been campaigning for tougher pricing rules since launching its Price it Right effort in 2025. The petition, which gathered 25,000 signatures, was presented to Willis on the steps of Parliament in August last year. Consumer NZ asked for a mandatory pricing accuracy code, automatic compensation when shoppers are overcharged at the till, clearer in-store disclosure of consumer rights, and infringement-notice powers similar to those used in Australia. Wednesday’s bill does not deliver every item on that list, but it lifts the maximum financial penalty well beyond what Australia’s headline figure achieves and signals that ministers intend to make the cost of misleading pricing match the size of the businesses doing the misleading.
The Commerce Commission has estimated that pricing errors at the checkout cost New Zealanders tens of millions of dollars a year. Grocery Commissioner Pierre van Heerden has flagged repeated discrepancies between shelf prices and till prices at the two main supermarket chains, and Consumer NZ’s own mystery shopping has turned up errors on a steady fraction of baskets across stores in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The pattern matters because the most reliable way for households to manage the weekly grocery bill is to compare unit prices at the shelf, and that comparison falls apart the moment the till charges a different number.
The safe harbour clause for online providers covers a separate but related problem. Banks and digital platforms have warned for years that the volume of scam advertising on social media and search has overwhelmed their ability to take down individual ads under existing legal advice, because moving too quickly without watertight evidence can itself expose them to claims from advertisers. The bill provides legal cover for platforms that act on reasonable suspicion, alongside ongoing work by the Financial Markets Authority and the major banks on a shared scam database. Brewer indicated the wording was negotiated with industry to ensure it would actually be used rather than ignored.
Retail New Zealand and the Grocery Action Group have both backed tougher pricing rules in principle, with the latter calling on the Government to go further on automatic compensation and on requiring supermarkets to publish pricing-error rates. The two large supermarket operators have argued in past consultation rounds that the underlying causes of pricing errors are operational, not deliberate, and that any new regime should account for the sheer number of price changes processed each week. Whether that argument lands with select committee members will depend on what the data from in-store audits looks like by the time submissions close.
The bill now heads to select committee for a six-month consultation period, which means a final form is unlikely before the second half of 2026. Public submissions will be open during that window. If the legislation passes broadly as introduced, the new penalty regime would come into force shortly after Royal Assent, with the safe harbour provisions and the product safety changes likely tracking the same timeline.
With a general election due later this year, the politics of grocery prices and online scams are unlikely to leave the front pages. You can compare where each party stands on consumer protection, the supermarket duopoly and digital regulation in our voting tool.
What do you make of the new penalties? Will a 5 million dollar maximum actually change behaviour at the till, or are the bigger reforms still to come? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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