Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Treasury Laws Amendment (Australian Consumer Law Review) Bill 2018. Labor has always been on the side of consumers. It was Labor that introduced the Trade Practices Act in 1974 and Labor that created the new Australian Consumer Law in 2010. It was a Labor federal government which, in negotiating the 2009 intergovernmental agreement on Australia's consumer protection arrangements—which preceded the Australian Consumer Law—built in a requirement that the new laws be reviewed within seven years. The Australian Consumer Law review was commissioned in 2015 and issued an interim report in December 2016, with its final report to federal, state and territory consumer affairs ministers submitted in March 2017. When these ministers met for their annual meeting in August 2017, they agreed on 15 recommendations for implementation, while referring a number of the other recommendations for further review, consultation or policy work.

Labor supports this bill because it clarifies, corrects and strengthens Australia's consumer protection and product safety regime. The measures in this bill have been agreed by state and territory consumer affairs ministers, consulted on extensively both through the review process and in an exposure draft, and are so uncontroversial as to be almost boring. But these measures do not fully implement all the provisions agreed by the government with the states. Of the 15 recommendations agreed to, 10½ are in this bill, one has been legislated in a previous bill, and two will presumably be enacted through regulations.

The measures in the bill are important, sensible and measured. They include provisions easing evidentiary requirements for private litigants through an expanded follow-on provision, enabling them to rely on admitted facts from earlier proceedings; amending the ACL and the ASIC Act to extend unconscionable conduct protections to publicly listed companies; amending the definition of 'unsolicited services' to allow the false billing provisions to apply to false bills for services not rendered; clarifying that the unsolicited selling provisions can apply to public places; enhancing price transparency in online shopping by requiring that any additional fees or charges associated with preselected options are included in the headline price; strengthening the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission powers to obtain information about product safety by broadening the power to apply to any person, including a consumer likely to have relevant information rather than just the supplier; enabling regulators to use existing investigate powers to better assess whether or not a term in a standard form contract may be unfair; and amending the ASIC Act to clarify that all ACL-related consumer protections that already apply to financial services also apply to financial products.

Three other proposals agreed by the federal, state and territory consumer affairs ministers have been or are expected to be implemented through other legislative vehicles. These include ACLR proposal 18, to increase maximum financial penalties available under the ACL. Labor took this policy, a tenfold increase in maximum penalties for anticonsumer conduct, to the last election, and we have been calling on the Turnbull and now Morrison government to implement it as a matter of urgency. We were pleased when the government announced that it would adopt Labor's policy in the 2017 budget. Legislation to implement the increased penalties was introduced into this house on 15 February this year.

While we welcome this progress, 1½ proposals agreed by federal, state and territory ministers remain outstanding. The second half of one proposal, relating to unsolicited selling, is nowhere to be seen, while another recommendation to strengthen product safety recalls was featured in the exposure draft but removed from this bill for reasons known only to the assistant minister. This includes an important reform contained in ACLR proposal 7 to clarify and strengthen voluntary recall requirements by introducing a statutory definition of 'voluntary recall' and increasing penalties for failure or refusal to notify a voluntary recall, proportionate with other ACL penalties. These proposals were included in the exposure draft of this bill; however, they have been excluded from the bill as presented to the parliament. The government has not told us why or what happened to it. We don't know if the government has abandoned the change, contrary to the agreement it struck with states and territories last year, or if, like so many other consumer reforms, it has just kicked it off into the long grass.

This is not unusual behaviour from this government. The coalition is yet to explain why it took six months for a compulsory recall of deadly Takata airbags, leaving millions of ticking timebombs on our roads. The potentially lethal airbags have been found to have misfiring inflators capable of firing shrapnel through a vehicle's cabin, risking life and limb of the driver and passengers. They can turn a minor accident into a fatal crash. Missing Takata airbags are believed to have killed over 20 people worldwide, including at least one Australian. The alpha airbags have been identified as particularly dangerous, with a failure rate of one in two compared to a failure rate of one in 400 for other Takata airbag models. As early as August 2017, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission told the House Standing Committee on Economics that the risks associated with Takata alpha airbags were such that they must be replaced immediately. ACCC chairman Rod Sims also revealed that, as the Takata recall was voluntary at the time, there was little enforcement action they could take to ensure everything possible was being done to replace the airbags. The following day, Labor called for the then minister responsible for product safety, the current Deputy Prime Minister, to use his emergency powers under section 132J of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 to issue an immediate, compulsory recall for Takata airbags. This was done amid growing concerns about the inadequacy of the voluntary recall process and the renewed urgency around the alpha-type airbags. Then what happened? It took another six months, until February 2018, for a compulsory recall to be issued. What was the then Minister McCormack waiting for?

Maybe those opposite don't want to change the law around recalls, because they would prefer to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to product safety for Australian consumers. This is emblematic of the government's half-hearted approach to improving Australia's consumer protections and its constant duckshoving of the portfolio between different frontbenchers. Those opposite make the right noises, rolling around consumer reforms that are already in train through reviews that Labor started, but in the end they always squib it. We have seen the government drag its feet with the payday lending reforms, we have seen it try to flummox consumers around measurement labelling and we have seen nothing but talk in relation to improving consumer protections for retirement home residents. Labor, on the other hand, will always work to improve outcomes for Australian consumers, with or without the government.