I got twisted around when I was writing, and mistook a reference to 20 days, which actually says that manufacturers have 20 working days to provide you these things from when you made the request.
This bill aims to make it easier for consumers to repair things they buy, by creating new requirements for manufacturers.
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson is in charge of the bill. It was originally drafted by Green member of parliament Ricardo Menéndez March. The bill is open for public submissions until Thursday 3 April, 2025.
As usual, I’ll be discussing what the bill is about, who supports it, who’s against it, and what I think about it.
The Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 is the basis of many rights New Zealand consumers enjoy, many of which are not commonly known.
For example, it gives you the right to return any product that develops a fault within a reasonable time frame. The seller is required to repair or replace it, or refund it if those options aren’t reasonable.
Thanks to this Act, you should not need a warranty for any consumer good you buy in New Zealand, including extended warranties. In fact, Consumer NZ advises that if a company offers an extended warranty, the Act probably already covers you for that period, and the extended warranty may even cover you for less time than the Consumer Guarantees Act.
Among other things, the Act already gives the following guarantee regarding repair:
When someone sells goods to a consumer, the manufacturer of those goods needs to make sure repair facilities and spare parts are available for a reasonable amount of time. Consumers can take legal action against a manufacturer who doesn’t comply.
But if the seller tells you before you buy that they don’t guarantee the availability of spare parts or repair, then they don’t need to make that option available to you when something goes wrong. They can go straight to replacement or refund.
Suppliers can choose to repair or replace a faulty item. If they “cannot reasonably be expected to repair the goods”, they can instead give a refund.
Davidson’s bill would amend the Consumer Guarantees Act to give consumers more rights around repairing faulty goods.
Under the proposed revision, you as a consumer could request that a seller provide you up-to-date information, spare parts, software and tools for diagnosing, maintaining and repairing goods you have bought.
Any digital information they give you – for example repair manuals – must be free of charge. They could charge you for the real cost of providing a paper copy, if you request that.
The seller could charge you for spare parts, software, tools and repair services, but they would have to be fair about the price – they couldn’t inflate it just because you’re in a tight spot.
This bill would remove the part of the Act that lets a seller off the hook if they tell you in advance that they can’t repair something.
Davidson’s bill also would also make it so you can get your stuff repaired by any skilled repairer, and use third-party replacement parts without automatically voiding your guarantee. So you would no longer need to use “official” repairers or parts.
The other main change the Bill proposes is that it adds the ability for you, the consumer, to request repair instead of replacement. Currently it is up to the seller to decide whether they repair or replace.
The supplier would have to repair the item in a reasonable amount of time. If they can’t manage that, you could either accept a replacement or refund, or take the item to another repairer and require the seller to cover reasonable costs of repair.
Who’s for it?
An update on the Green Party’s website quotes Marama Davidson saying the Bill “combines climate action with cost of living relief”.
“Passing this would be a win for regular people over big corporates who build obsolescence into their products so people have to keep coming back to replace their things and spend more of their money.
“This is something that would benefit not only households but also businesses – from hairdressers to farmers – by enabling them to fix the appliances and tools they rely on to do their work.”
Paul Smith, right to repair advocate and former head of testing at ConsumerNZ, told RNZ the Consumer Guarantees Act in its current state does not obligate manufacturers to repair.
“In fact, there’s a crazy loophole that says you have to, as a manufacturer, you have to provide repair assistance, unless you don’t provide repair assistance and you just tell people that upfront.”
He said evidence from countries like the United Kingdom that have similar right to repair laws did not back up the idea that they drive up costs of goods.
“We did some research overseas, because they’ve had right-to-repair laws for for a number of years in quite a few places now, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that the costs go up.”
Repair Network Aotearoa, which operates repair cafés around the country and advocates for right to repair, has a page on its website dedicated to supporting the Bill. The organisation says it ran a recent survey showing that 77% of New Zealanders supported introducing right to repair legislation.
“We need legislation because repair is usually difficult, expensive and often impossible,” the website says. “The desire for repair legislation comes from frustration and how hard it is to repair stuff. Respondents commonly said they don’t know if a product is repairable or where to go to get things repaired. Many report limited access to local repair services and think professional repair is expensive.”
The group also said right to repair legislation was improving things overseas. “The regulations have had practical results in the UK. For example, the Electrolux UK repair website has a step-by-step process to diagnose faults. Consumers can choose to find an expert repairer or get additional help to tackle the problem. Spare parts (from simple seals to complex control boards) can be identified and bought at a reasonable price from the Electrolux online store.”
(Disclosure: My company Wordshop is currently engaged in some pro bono work with Repair Network Aotearoa. The organisation has not provided any input on this article other than what I have sourced from their website.)
Who’s against it?
Eric Crampton, chief economist at think tank The New Zealand Initiative left a detailed comment on a Newsroom story, saying it wasn’t hard to see how the Bill could go wrong.
“For a start, manufacturing a good to make it consumer-repairable can increase the overall lifetime cost of the product – if it increases the manufacturing cost by enough. It will never be obvious to regulators which goods are in that category and which are not.”
He wrote that the Bill would effectively prohibit importing goods that don’t meet a “bespoke New Zealand standard” of repairability, and that as such a small market, we don’t have the power to force international manufacturers to change their game.
“If large foreign markets require it, then manufacturers would set that production line. And we have no rules against parallel importation in NZ. If people wanted the more expensive (but easier to repair) version, they’d be able to get it. If they wanted.”
James McDowall, former Act Party MP and head of advocacy at automotive industry lobby group the Motor Trade Association (MTA) wrote last year that the MTA supported the right to repair in principle, but not this particular bill.
“… we are concerned that this proposed law treats all consumer products as equal and simple to repair.
“With average vehicle costs coupled with growing complexity in our industry, this could not be further from the truth. An automobile is not a toaster.”
He wrote that the Bill could shut the door on the wider concept of right to repair, and that automotive repair needed a separate law.
“Developing legislation that mandates fair access to repair information is a powerful step, but we do not believe the proposed overly simplistic legislation comes even close to meeting the needs of our industry.”
This is written in an American context, but Alex Reinauer, a research fellow at libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute has written an article detailing arguments against the right to repair movement that include:
- In order to make up for increased compliance costs and resulting decrease in production, manufacturers would increase prices of goods;
- More standardisation and decreased profits would stifle innovation;
- Right to repair laws impede on companies’ rights by forcing them to distribute intellectual property (e.g. repair manuals) and enter into “compulsory contracts” with unapproved repairers;
- The repair market is not a monopoly that needs breaking up – there is a vibrant and competitive market of repairers, many of which are small businesses; and
- “Planned obsolescence” isn’t a big problem, because most people break goods through their own fault before the warranty period is up.
My cuppa tea
I want to tell you two quick stories to kick this off. The first is about my Roborock vacuum cleaner.
It’s a new-ish entrant to the market, but it’s a reputable brand, and I bought it from PB Tech, a reputable shop. I bought it new, specifically because I wanted to the protection of the Consumer Guarantees Act, which doesn’t cover things bought second hand on Trade Me or Facebook Marketplace. I’m a nerd like that.
I dropped the vacuum and broke it. Totally my fault. A little piece of plastic that holds the body together just snapped off, and it lost its ability to suck. To me, this looks like an easy repair. You either just replace the broken housing, or get someone with plastic welding skills to reattach the snapped bit.
I went back to PB Tech. No dice. I emailed Roborock directly. No dice. Can’t be repaired in New Zealand, they said. I took it to an independent specialist vacuum cleaner repair shop. No, the repairer said, we only have the repair manuals for certain brands, and this isn’t one of them.
So I made an insurance claim. I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the vacuum, so it’s sitting in a box in the garage. It’ll go to landfill one day.
Technically, the Consumer Guarantees Act and Right to Repair Bill wouldn’t cover me in this situation, because the product wasn’t faulty; I broke it. But I subscribe to the argument that the flow-on effect would make parts and repairers more available even for people like me.
The second story is about Toyota Land Cruisers in Zambia. I spent time working at a safari camp, where due to lack of supply and lack of money, pretty much everything had been repaired and repaired and repaired again. The Land Cruisers they took tourists out on were ancient. I doubt they had many of their original parts. But they kept going and going, and when something went wrong we would go to the hardware store in town and get a generic replacement part, then our unqualified but very skilled mechanic would fix it all up.
Toyotas are famous for their durability and reparability. And I think Toyota as a company puts paid to most of the arguments against right to repair. It is a reputable and profitable company. Its brand does not suffer when bad mechanics sometimes do bad repairs on Toyota vehicles. In fact, by making vehicles easy to repair, Toyota has likely prevented many bad repairs over the years.
So yes, I support this bill. There are a couple of arguments against right to repair I do find compelling.
The first is that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by putting up barriers to international companies. This is a genuine concern. New Zealand is such a small market that the likes of Apple could just say “that’s too hard” and stop supplying us with iPhones.
If enough companies were to do that, it could have a serious effect on our consumer choice, and lead to monopoly behaviour by the companies that remain. That’s bad for anyone who buys things.
The thing that gives me confidence we’ll be ok is that other countries are pushing through similar laws. The UK has had them in some form since 2021, the EU introduced a right to repair directive last year, and several US states including California and New York have their own local repair laws. We can piggyback on these giants, so there is no “bespoke New Zealand standard”, as Eric Crampton put it. Companies are already having to change their manufacturing practices to accommodate laws in these enormous markets, so it shouldn’t be a major issue for them to supply the same goods in New Zealand.
Right to repair is a global movement. It’s probably fair to say we would have suffered if we had lead the charge, but now we’re somewhere safe in the middle of the peloton.
That’s especially true when you consider that the bill will go hand-in-hand with increasing local repair capability. There is already a network of repair shops for all sorts of goods, supported by repair cafés, for-impact organisations, neighbourhood tinkerers and YouTube tutorials. We’ll be ok.
Another good argument is that there will be a cost to companies. Companies employ people, they sell us things we want, and they buy things we produce. It’s a bad thing if company profits take a hit, unless that is balanced out by some other benefit. Remember as well, that it’s not just multinational manufacturers that bear the costs – it’s also small local manufacturers. Plus, when suppliers put up their prices, local shops suffer because they either need to reduce their profit margin or put up prices, which tends to lead to fewer sales.
The real question here is: is it worth it?
I think so. The net benefit for consumers will outweigh the damage done by lost profits and increased prices.
I do have lingering concerns that increased prices will hit people with low cashflow. For example, if a low-cost smartphone goes up from $200 to $300, but also increases its lifespan from two years to four, that’s going to save someone on average $100 every four years. But if you don’t have the extra $100 to spend up front, it doesn’t help you.
Many people get by on low-cost, disposable goods. I think that’s a horrible system that keeps people in poverty, but I don’t have the answers to fix it. I hope that this bill would lead to the kind of innovation that makes better-quality goods available at those low prices simply because there is a market there, but I suspect some people would no longer be able to afford things they previously enjoyed.
In the long run, it’s a benefit. When you look at everyday savings, I believe there will be a net gain for people with not much money. If they have the opportunity to replace their battery today instead of having to fork out for a new phone, that’s an immediate win. And the price of repairs and parts will decrease as the third-party market opens up for items that were previously restricted by the fear of voiding a warranty.
Next argument: does this bill squash innovation? A totally fair question, but I’ll wrap it up quick. No. The cost of compliance is likely to be low, and the rule is applied evenly across the whole market. If anything, I think companies will compete with each other to innovate new ways of making products long-lasting and repairable.
This is backed up by, for example, the European Union’s long-standing directive that cars produced in the EU must be made of predominantly reusable and recyclable parts. This is a classic case of imposing costs on manufacturers. Have European car companies stopped innovating since this was introduced in the late 1990s? Quite the opposite: in 2021 BMW voluntarily developed a concept car that is 100% recyclable.
An argument I have a lot less time for, is the one that right to repair unfairly excludes products and companies from our market.
We already disallow goods that don’t meet our standards, for example food that doesn’t meet our safety standards, or cars that don’t meet our emissions standards. Right to repair proponents make the argument that this bill will prevent the import and sale of goods that damage the environment and harm consumers.
Are they right? Is it worth it? Again, I think yes. The proposed benefits might be overblown, but it is absolutely a good thing to reduce waste going to landfill and to give more power to people to repair their stuff.
While we’re considering the balance of rights, it’s worth noting that a lot of the arguments against right to repair focus on companies’ rights. That companies should have the right to decide what they sell, who they sell it to, to manage the reputation and condition of the goods, and to create contracts regarding warranty.
To start with, that boat on that last “right” has sailed in New Zealand. The Consumer Guarantees Act already provides essentially a universal warranty – we’re just deciding how to honour it.
Many laws involve decreasing the rights of one group to favour another. It’s a balance we need to make as a society. Libertarian ideas of personal rights appeal to me, and the conclusion I carry that to is that the rights of human beings should be worth more than the rights of companies. This is a clear case.
I should be able to get my stuff repaired, and I should be able to shop around.
This bill is antithetical to a certain business philosophy: the likes of Steve Jobs who created a global reputation on tightly-controlled, encapsulated devices. If you subscribe to the theory that this is a good thing, then you’ll likely oppose this bill. For me, I’ve always taken issue with the Apple method. I like that Apple devices are pretty and they work well, but I hate that they don’t allow me the flexibility to use them how I want. I understand not everyone needs that flexibility, but I think it should be available by default.
One thing I want to point out just because I’m pedantic and it annoys me: Marama Davidson was misleading when she said the bill would benefit businesses “from hairdressers to farmers”. The Consumer Guarantees Act does not cover business goods. It is a law that benefits “consumers” and specifically excludes types of goods mainly bought for business use. You could (and I do) make the argument that businesses will benefit from the downstream effect of having third party repairers and parts available in the market. It also covers things that are commonly bought for businesses and consumer use, like laptops. This is unlikely, however, to affect things like tractors which are not “consumer” goods.
One last note: some proponents of the bill, including Auckland University Professor and member of the Right to Repair Coalition Alex Sims, have noted that the Consumer Guarantees Act might not be the best home for this legislation. She suggests there may be a benefit to introducing an amendment to the Fair Trading Act, which would give the Commerce Commission power to enforce it.
I can see how this would be beneficial, especially if certain companies habitually or strategically breach the Act. But I also tend to think most of these cases will be small claims best resolved directly with the seller, or at the Disputes Tribunal, which is where Consumer Guarantees Act issues tend to land. Perhaps there’s the possibility of adding an amendment to the Fair Trading Act that would back up this amendment bill.
There doesn’t seem to be any serious opposition to this bill in New Zealand, and I suspect it will pass in some form. It’s even getting some props from the agricultural sector, not usually a natural bedfellow of the Green Party.
If you make a submission on this bill, remember it’s not just about whether you support or oppose it. If you think changes could improve it, then say so. It’s pretty easy for the politicians involved to make changes now, before its second reading in Parliament.