This is an interesting article outlining that Australian businesses plan credit card surcharges. And explaining that:
"The Reserve Bank of Australia re-regulation assumed merchants wouldn't surcharge as this would push customers away, but the surcharging sea change that is taking place now seems to be having the opposite effect."
Now, interestingly, the Australian Reserve Bank did look at the Dutch situation, where the no-surcharge rule was lifted but had no effect on merchant pricing behaviour. Yet, the reason for this little effect in the Netherlands may have been the limited spread of credit-card use in the Netherlands and the availability of a good and cheap POS-debit-card-system as an alternative.
Which may go to show that you just can't copy policy reasoning from the one country to another.
