Dr Paul Smith: Right to Repair Aotearoa Coalition spokesperson on the Right to Repair Amendment Bill reading

Getting faulty or broken goods fixed could be made significantly easier if a new bill giving Kiwis the right to repair becomes law.

The Consumer Guarantees Act (Right to Repair) Amendment Bill is set to have its first reading in Parliament tonight - and if passed, Kiwis could be able to get items repaired instead of tossing them out and purchasing replacements.

Right to Repair Aotearoa Coalition spokesperson Dr Paul Smith says many people want to get things repaired - but the process is difficult and expensive under current laws.

"It's gotten to the point where buying something new, in a lot of cases, is cheaper than getting somebody to look at the product to assess whether it's repairable. And that's partly because products aren't repairable at the moment."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ryan Bridge nine after fought here on News Talk semb
it could soon be in cheery news. It could soon
be cheaper and easier to repair your faulty or broken goods.
That's if an amendment to the Consumer Guarantees and Act
becomes law. The Right to Repair Amendment Bill has its
first reading in Parliament today and would require manufacturers to
make repair parts and information more available to consumers. Dr

(00:23):
Paul Smith is from the Right to Repair alto a
coalition and he's with me this afternoon. Paul good A.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Good good day, Ryan. How are you doing? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Good, thank you. What's the current loophole that means manufacturers
don't have to repair their products here?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Oh yeah, Now that's a great one. If I paraphrase it,
it is you have to provide repair facilities and repair
tools and parts unless you say you don't. And basically
that means you should tell consumers up to runt that
repair for a particular product is not available. But in
practice that means it can be buried away on a

(01:01):
website somewhere in some terms and conditions, or as we
find in practice, actually it's never really policed, so a
lot of them just don't bother.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Aren't things so cheap in techy these days anyway that
you I mean, you wouldn't want to repair them. It's
so much cheaper to just buy a new thing.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, and that's one of the problems that we're trying
to fix with this. Partly what we've found is a
lot of people want to repair, but they struggle because
repair is just so difficult and so expensive. And it's
got to the point where, yeah, buying something new in
a lot of cases is cheaper than even getting somebody
to look at the product to assess whether it's repaarable.

(01:42):
And that's partly because products aren't repaarable at the moment,
a lot of them, and they've been designed to make
it quite difficult to repair, to force everybody into buy
a new stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, but that's because they're cheaply made. Because what you're
proposing would make stuff more expensive, wouldn't that, Because if
it was able to be repaired, it would be more
costly to make. Plus you have to factor in the
cost of repairs. Don't we just want cheaper stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Well, one of the problems we've got is one of
the things that won't make it more expensive is we've
had this Great Consumer Guarantees Act since nineteen ninety three,
and as part of that, manufacturers have to support their
products beyond their nominal short usually one year warranty.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
No no, I get that, but the fact that they
have to factor in the cost of repairing stuff would
make the initial upfront cost more expensive.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
A lot of the things that we're talking about that
being repairable are not changes to the product themselves, and
that's sort of like a real long term game is
to try and make things more repearable in the first place.
But it's things like what happens when you break the
jug of your blender and you can't get that jug
and that's not something that you need to change the

(02:55):
product for. That's just making that part available for you,
or seals on a coffee mash, something like that.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Okay, interesting, I would love to know what people think
about this one. Dr Paul Smith, thank you very much
for your time. Great to have you on the show.
The Doctor Paul Smith is from the Right to Repair
out Here Coalition. For more from Hither Duplessy Allen Drive,
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