Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

For those who don't understand, small account credit contracts are loans for between 16 days and 12 months with a value of up to $2,000. There are more than 200 authorised SACC providers. Consumer leases, on the other hand, are leases for household goods, with terms greater than four months, excluding novated leases. As of the second half of 2017, there are approximately 500 lessors in the market, predominantly around four large firms. SACC consumers, on average, take out about 3½ SACC loans a year, and 30 per cent of households with a SACC consumer have one or more SACCs at a particular time.

The history of this goes back some 20 years. It was the Liberal-National government back in the late nineties that put in place the construct of Centrepay. Centrepay provides a capacity for people to have bills and otherwise paid for out of their Centrelink benefit. There are nine service categories and, of course, one of them deals with the area of consumer leasing. Payday loans in themselves are not possible through Centrepay. Centrepay today puts out $2.6 billion worth of bills that are paid for vulnerable Australians. It's quite extraordinary. There are 646,000 consumers using Centrepay to assist with paying bills and invoices over nine different sectors.

In 2009 the National Consumer Credit Protection Act came in and the states ceded their authority. In 2010 those opposite, to their credit, limited consumers with over 50 per cent of their income from Centrelink to no more than 20 per cent gross for small account credit contracts. Nothing in consumer leasing was done by those opposite at the time. In 2013, again to the credit of those opposite and in response to COAG, the small account credit interest rate was limited to four per cent per month, or 48 per cent across the board, with a 20 per cent establishment fee. Again it was for SACC, and, again, there was nothing in the consumer lease space.

Those opposite had numerous opportunities in previous governments to deal with the consumer lease space and did nothing—nothing! It is this government that has stepped up with a review to understand the issue of consumer leasing and how it works.

Mr Keogh interjecting—

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