Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Rod Sims (pictured) has paused in his busy worklife to reflect on a decade since the Australian consumer law was seriously transformed.
Mr Sims said the Competition and Consumer Act 2010, which came into effect on 1 January 2011, was a significant legal and economic reform.
“It heralded a new era in Australian consumer protection by introducing a single national consumer law and civil penalties,” Mr Sims said.
Speaking via a webinar at a Monash University National Commercial Law Seminar hosted at the Federal Court in Melbourne, Mr Sims said the introduction of the Australian Competition Law (ACL) was a game changer.
“It allowed the ACCC and State and Territory regulators to collaborate much more easily on consumer issues,” he said.
“The key change was the introduction of civil pecuniary penalties for consumer law contraventions.”
He said the penalties transformed the ACCC’s armoury when taking enforcement action in the courts against businesses for alleged contraventions of the ACL.
“This, in turn, has transformed compliance with the consumer law,” he said.
“For laws to be effective there must be serious and effective consequences for breaches of these laws.”
He said the ACL reforms also included giving the ACCC power to issue infringement notices, as well as issue public warning notices to alert consumers to a suspected breach of the substantive provisions of the ACL where it was in the public interest to do so.
“The introduction of consumer guarantee rights and an unfair contract terms regime were also highly significant reforms, particularly once the unfair contract terms regimes were extended to small businesses,” Mr Sims said.
However, while the ACCC had made good progress in enforcing the consumer guarantee and unfair contract terms provisions, further reforms were still required to ensure that these provisions could be effectively enforced.
“The ACCC is advocating for law change which makes a failure to comply with the consumer guarantee and unfair contracts term provisions a contravention of the ACL and subject to penalties,” Mr Sims said.
“The ACCC also continues to advocate for reforms to address key issues impacting consumers and small businesses,” he said.
