The new ALP MP for Chifley, Ed Husic, tweeted triumphantly this morning that the media had picked up his comments about price differences between Apple products in Australia and the US. Why, demanded Husic, could Apple charge a couple of hundred dollars more for the same product when it was sold in Australia?
For Ed's sake, I hope his outraged hand-wringing was the product of calculated populism because the alternative is that it was the result his ignorance about some pretty basic economic principles.*
Apple charges more for its products in Australia because it can. The Australian and US markets for Apple products are susceptible to price discrimination. You can't order products from the US Apple store to be delivered in Australia, and very few, if any, people are willing or able to buy products in the US, ship them to Australia and re-sell them at a profit. In fact that might breach Apple's terms of sale. As a result, since it faces segmented markets, Apple can charge the profit-maximising price in each market, which will mean that some markets face higher prices than others.
If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be pretty pissed if they did anything else. And as cool as Apple's products are, they're not like the monopoly providers of baby formula or HIV drugs or something. They're well within their rights to maximise the profits they make from selling gadgets to hipsters and fanbois like Husic.
So if Ed was actually asking why they do it, that's the answer. If on the other hand he was engaging in stupid populism he should take a long hard look in the mirror. Unless he'd be willing to act to solve the problem, he should shut up about it. Now acting could mean supporting a boycott of Apple products (Husic was the first MP ever to deliver their maiden speech from an iPad so that seems unlikely) or it could mean some more interventionist policy like forcing Apple to peg its Australian price to its US price. The first would make him look like a petulant hipster and the second would make Apple, at the margin, less willing to do business in Australia.
I guess I'd prefer the shut up option. Husic has a parliamentary platform to express ideas and advocate for causes. If he thinks it is a good idea to waste that on whinging about being charged an extra $100 for a MacBook Pro I suggest he chalk this up as a massive #firstworldproblem an get back to helping the people of Chifley, many of whom I'd be couldn't give a shit if he was overcharged for an iPad they can't afford in the first place.
* As in this is covered in intermediate micro courses at university (even the crap intermediate micro course I took). So yeah, if you don't have an uni degree in economics, maybe it's news to you. But if you're a federal MP and mouthing off about something, maybe you could just ask someone who knows what they're talking about first.