Jerome Laxale (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I support this bill, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026, because it's an important piece of legislation to make transacting out there in the real world better and fairer for consumers. We have a simple, unwritten rule here in Australia that underpins our entire society, and that's the fair go. It's a concept that says: if you work hard you get ahead, and if you spend your hard-earned money you get what you pay for. We know that's under pressure right now, and it's important for every government to make sure they take steps to enshrine the fair go into everything that we do. No matter what you're buying, whether it be a coffee, petrol at the bowser—I think we'll need to update that saying to 'electricity from an EV charger'—or a room in a hotel, you deserve to be treated with basic honesty. For too long there's been a great gaping hole in our laws, a gap that's allowed some businesses to exploit, manipulate and trap Australians when they transact in basic, everyday transactions. Today this legislation seeks to plug that hole.

Our laws right now are very good at catching a bold faced lie. If you buy a table online and the business ships you a photo of a table, that's misleading and deceptive conduct, and businesses will rightly be pulled up. But what this bill does is tackle two big problems that currently exist in our competition and consumer laws: subscription traps and drip pricing, and I'll go into those a little bit later. These things happen to exist because of the deliberate and manipulative practices of some of these online businesses in particular—the subtle user-interface and user-experience design that's meant to mislead customers into paying more for an item than its initially advertised for, the overly complicated menus when trying to unsubscribe from a subscription service, or even the discrepancy between how easy it is to sign up to a service and how hard it is to unsubscribe from that same service. This is unfair, and we believe it needs to be addressed with good, targeted regulation.

We need to move from a 'whack a mole' approach, where we're fixing things case by case, to preventing this from occurring in the first place, and that's what this bill does. It tells businesses in no uncertain terms: if your profit margins rely on trickery or your revenue relies on nuisance, then your business model will no longer stack up. The reform sets a clear and consistent standard of fair conduct across all sectors, improving consumer confidence and protections whilst also encouraging healthy competition.

We've all been there. We've subscribed to that seven-day free trial—which is meant to be free, but they still ask you for your credit card details even though it's meant to be free, so you've got to put them in. Then life happens. You forget. You're dealing with an emergency. Your kids need help with their schoolwork, or you have to drive around town to take them to sport. Then suddenly money's taken from your account. Then comes the real nightmare: going through that same process to try and cancel, which is a lot harder than you think. Signing up is easy—one click here, one click there. With Apple Pay, your credit card details go straight through, even though it's a free trial. But trying to cancel? That's an entirely different story. Sometimes you try calling, but it's an international number that's only open in the small hours. You try to cancel online, and then you have to navigate through a maze of menus and screens with different variations of, 'Are you sure?' Then they try and upsell you into staying for longer.

This bill says to everyone, including small businesses: 'Enough. We deserve to be treated fairly here and, if it takes seconds to enter a subscription, it shouldn't take a diary appointment and an hour to cancel.' Australians deserve transparency for cost, duration and renewal. They all must be upfront and prominent. We deserve reminders. We live in a very technologically advanced world. It's not hard for a company to send a 'free trial is ending' prompt or just not to grab credit card details in the first place. The good news is there are some businesses doing great work here. They're already doing this. What this bill seeks to do is bring everyone else up to that standard that Australians expect—that fair go that I mentioned at the start of my speech.

This bill also outlaws drip pricing. There's nothing more frustrating than booking a hotel room, a concert ticket or a movie ticket for an advertised price of $100, only to find that it's $130 by the time you reach the checkout. Where did these extra costs come from? Booking fees, admin fees, service fees—fees on fees. This is what drip pricing is, where mandatory transaction or service fees are excluded from the price Australians see and they only become evident right at the end of the purchase process, when you're already hooked in. When prices aren't upfront, competition fails. The businesses that are doing the right thing and showing the all-in price look more expensive than the ones hiding those fees and extra costs until later in the checkout process. This bill will mandate that all mandatory fees must be shown alongside the base price from the very beginning. What you see should be what you pay—no surprise hidden fees, no admin fees, no gotchas right at the final click. This bill is clear. This does not stop advertising for small business. It doesn't stop legitimate persuasion or upselling. It stops manipulation and deception.

For a long time, some big corporations viewed Australian Consumer Law fines as just the cost of doing business, a small tax on their path to more profits each and every year. Penalties matter, so we need to disincentivise these dodgy practices from engaging in this behaviour fully. We need them not to think it's just a cost of business. So, within this bill, maximum penalties under the Competition and Consumer Act will increase as well, from $10 million to $100 million, so that they ensure that businesses of all sizes face meaningful consequences for unfair and deceptive conduct. This bill sends a message: if you choose to manipulate Australians, if you choose to trap them in subscriptions they don't want, you'll face tougher penalties that'll hit the business's bottom line.

Some of you may know that I used to run a small business, and from that I know that these unfair practices don't just hurt individuals; they hurt small-business owners, particularly franchisors, who are often hit with massive fees as part of their franchise. It's like David and Goliath. I'm pleased to say that the government will be consulting this month on extending unfair trading protections to small businesses as well. What we're after here is a level playing field that will help local mum-and-dad shops compete with global giants, because that's what they deserve—a fair go.

In Bennelong, as it is across the country, people are feeling the pinch of the cost of living. This bill is one piece of a much larger puzzle to protect consumers from unfair business practices and dodgy fees. It's part of a lot of reforms we've done since coming to government. We've done merger reform—the biggest overhaul in 50 years—to stop anticompetitive takeovers. We've had a supermarket price gouging crackdown, increasing ACCC funding by $30 million to target price gouging. We've attacked shrinkflation by strengthening the unit pricing code so that you know whether you're getting less for more. And we've made the food and grocery code mandatory to protect our farmers from the big squeeze by the big supermarket duopoly. Every dollar saved from a zombie subscription and every hidden fee made outlawed by this bill is a dollar that stays in a family's budget to save or spend on their loved ones or themselves or invest in their future.

These changes have been carefully considered. They're pragmatic and they're methodical. We want to get this right because progressive reform like this is hard to come by. The digital economy has fast outpaced our laws, and this bill is the government's signal to say, 'We're catching up.' If this bill is passed, these changes are due to commence on 1 July 2027, giving businesses time to adjust their systems and their coding and rewrite their websites.

This bill seeks to protect Australians at the checkout. It rewards honest businesses and puts power back in the hands of Australian people, restoring that fair go at the supermarket and at the checkout. It ensures that Australians don't fall into subscription traps and get charged random amounts just before they forget to cancel that subscription at the end of a seven-day trial. And it ensures that, when an Australian clicks buy, they don't get landed with an extra 10 or 20 bucks in additional fees. It's time to end these traps. It's time to end these tricks. I commend the bill to the House.

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