Right to Repair

The Green Party has a Member's Bill up arguing for a consumer right of repair; Auckland University's Alex Sims has written a few columns in support of such a thing. 

I'd had an email asking about that legislation; figured I'd share my response here - tidied up a bit.

If it’s more expensive to produce a product that can be easily disassembled for repair, there will be trade-offs. Consumers could choose an offering with lower up-front costs, but hard to repair, or one with higher up-front costs, but easier to repair. There’s no reason for legislation to privilege one choice over another. 

If one car company makes vehicles that can only really be repaired by dealers, and another uses a more open standard, the latter could easily advertise that ease of repairability. I remember back on our farm we had a very strong preference for tractors made by Versatile, because field-repair was dead simple and you didn’t have to wait for a couple days for some tech to come out with a diagnostic kit in the middle of harvest. Folks who could afford fleets of John Deere tractors to cover twenty square miles of fields could have a couple in reserve; we couldn’t on 1000 acres. Trade-offs and consumer choice. The John Deere machines were great for folks in situations different from ours.

But even leaving that aside, New Zealand has to be a regulation-taker in this space. We import all this stuff. A bespoke rule could require separate production lines for products destined for the NZ market. That has to increase costs while sharply limiting the range of products here available. And if Europe or some other crazy kind of place sets rules requiring more repairable versions, nothing stops anyone from bringing the Euro-standard products into New Zealand. 

Also important to remember that avoiding putting things in landfill can itself be wasteful. Landfills charge people for dumping things. Important to make sure that user charges there are set to fully cover the cost of disposing of stuff in landfill. If the landfill charges are set properly, and it's cheaper to buy something new and dispose of the old one than it is to repair the old one, repairing the thing would be wasteful. It would take more real resources to effect the repair. 

And if there are competition issues around vertical integration in repair, that’s for ComCom right?

I hope the legislation does not progress. It could easily see a sharp reduction in the range of products offered onto the NZ market.

The current Consumer Guarantees Act amounts to an information requirement on this stuff. 

If a manufacturer does not undertake to provide parts or repair services, they inform the consumer. That's the exception provided at Section 42 and signaled in Section 12. It arguably increases consumer information and enables better-informed choices. I'd still argue that manufacturers of easily-repaired goods already have plenty of incentive to advertise that fact to customers, but it's harder to see that the Act does harm where that exception is provided.

Deleting that exception while extending the requirements placed on manufacturers willing to sell into the NZ market really wouldn't be good.