The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has unveiled its compliance and enforcement priorities for the financial year ahead, putting cost-of-living pressures high in the spotlight.
Chair of the ACCC, Gina Cass-Gottlieb said the Commission’s priorities for 2023-24 “must and do” reflect the issues impacting the Australian economy, consumers and businesses.
“The present key issues of cost-of-living pressures, the price of essential services including energy and telecommunications, the integrity of environmental and sustainability claims, ever increasing losses to scams, consumer and fair trading harms from manipulative marketing practices in the digital economy and the always high risk to markets, business rivals and consumers from anti-competitive conduct, strongly feature in our priorities,” Ms Cass-Gottlieb said.
She said the ACCC’s focus on environmental claims and sustainability would broaden beyond consumer and fair trading issues to include competition law and product safety considerations.
“We’ve established a new internal taskforce focused on sustainability that will build our expertise, inform and coordinate our efforts across the Agency,” Ms Cass-Gottlieb said.
“In particular the taskforce will examine and seek to influence a range of issues where environmental and sustainability issues intersect with the application of competition and consumer law, including product safety.”
She said the ACCC would again focus on the energy and telecommunication sectors to address consumer and competition issues in essential services, with the energy sector to account for a substantial share of the Commission’s compliance and enforcement efforts in the year ahead.
Ms Cass-Gottlieb said manipulative and deceptive practices in connection with digital services would continue to be a key priority for the ACCC.
She said scams continued to wreak tremendous personal and financial damage on consumers and the Australian economy.
“Our Scamwatch service will continue to support Government Agencies and industry participants in the disruption of scams,” the ACCC Chair said.
“Ensuring we all get the benefit of competition in the financial services sector will remain a priority for the ACCC in the coming year.”
Ms Cass-Gottlieb confirmed that the ACCC would also maintain its enduring compliance and enforcement priorities, including conduct impacting First Nations consumers, cartel conduct and anti-competitive conduct more broadly.
Further information on the ACCC’s 2023-24 priorities can be accessed at this PS News link.
