Having extensively suffered the NZ tax before moving across the ditch - but still suffering a lesser version of it here - I suspect it's a question of scale for

Having extensively suffered the NZ tax before moving across the ditch - but still suffering a lesser version of it here - I suspect it's a question of scale for packaging and distribution. That switch is probably a relatively niche item when compared to some generic TP-Link switch, and AU & NZ are basically the only countries to use the Type I plug. That means the production run for that switch is tiny - it's probably not even a full days run, which means the economy of sale is reduced. On top of that, the middle man is probably distributing a tiny amount of these to each store, so they can't just pull out pallets from the shipping container and put them on a truck, individual items probably need to be pulled out and re-packaged. All this adds cost.