Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) | Hansard source

The coalition supports strong consumer protections because Australians should not be misled. They shouldn't be ripped off, and bad businesses need to be held to account. Law created in this place must be unambiguous and workable in the real world. That matters. These are issues that we need to address, though, with the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill 2026.

The coalition's amendments that we will be moving are simple yet substantial. These amendments would make this bill clearer, better targeted and more workable for businesses that will be impacted by these changes. They are practical. They preserve the consumer protection objective of the bill. Importantly, they reduce further uncertainty in what is already a period of great uncertainty for businesses. Those amendments, I believe, will improve this bill. The coalition amendments insert words like 'unfairly' before 'manipulate' in reference to the offence. They insert the word 'material' before 'detriment', and, importantly, they delay the start for small businesses under $10 million aggregate annual turnover until 1 July 2030 to reduce the $100 million a year compliance costs on small businesses.

Labor could and should accept these amendments. It is Labor policies and economic mismanagement that has actually contributed to small business insolvencies being at record levels in this country, where real household disposable income is down, energy costs are up, never-ending compliance costs are piling up and businesses that are already stretched to their limits are being tested again. Who on earth would want to run a business under Labor? Let me tell you who would. They are Australians with aspiration, Australians who deserve a fair go, Australians willing to have a crack. Labor should care about them.

Everywhere, business owners are telling me the same thing: the cost and complexity of running a business has never been higher and the government support that they get to reduce it has never been lower. Small businesses are this country's employers. They create jobs. The owner of a small cafe in Mount Barker, the family hardware store in the Barossa, the independent travel agent in the Adelaide Hills—these are the people who will bear the compliance burden of this legislation while their larger competitors absorb it through legal departments. They'll just move on.

This bill creates a broad new general prohibition on unfair trading. The problem is: who decides what is unfair? That question matters more than anything else. This bill, unfortunately, does not answer it. To answer it, the bill says that practices that manipulate consumers or distort their decision-making and then lead to a detriment, including non-financial detriments like wasted time, are unfair. This in effect is Labor now legislating against wasted time. This legislation actually lays the table for what will be a lawyers' picnic. Labor promised they would cut red tape and boost productivity, but they did not do the work to make that happen.

The reality is that this bill results in an estimated $123 million per year in annual regulatory costs, with $103 million of that falling on 1.5 million small businesses. In South Australia, you don't have to go far. Just walk down the streets of rural towns on the Yorke Peninsula or on the Eyre Peninsula. Store after store has closed down. You see the same in suburban Adelaide and in the city of Adelaide. It's becoming much worse. They don't need more costs. What they need are less costs.

CPA Australia told the Senate Economics Legislation Committee that Labor's new capital gains tax would result in $500 million of compliance costs for taxpayers each year, plus an additional $800 million in the first year alone, because people will need to re-evaluate their assets—more costs, more businesses that have to comply. Labor was so far off when it claimed the cost to businesses in that little exercise would be $88 million a year. That's a far cry from what the experts said it would cost. In truth, the real cost is eight times what Labor said. Labor is clueless. It has no solutions and it didn't do the work.

In contrast, the coalition's focus is rewarding hard work, boosting small-business investment and allowing small businesses to immediately write off assets costing up to $50,000, not $20,000. The coalition's tax-back guarantee will ensure hardworking Australians keep more of what they earn and will deliver an automatic tax cut that gets bigger every year—stopping inflation by pushing workers to pay more tax when they are no better off is bracket creep; Labor loves bracket creep—and that is what backing small businesses and backing hardworking Australians actually looks like. The reality is businesses will pass costs that are passed onto them by this legislation to consumers. A small business that spends $20,000 a year managing compliance requirements is a small business that doesn't employ more staff, doesn't upgrade its equipment and doesn't invest in its own future. There are impacts from red tape. There are impacts from greater compliance when you haven't actually measured the value return not just to the business and not just to ordinary Australians but also to us, in here, when we make legislation.

The coalition is open to targeted reforms on drip pricing and subscription traps. Cancelling a subscription should not be harder than signing up. Consumers should know when a free trial becomes a paid subscription. The option to opt out should be clear and accessible. Consumers should know when a temporary discount ends, they should know how to cancel the subscription, and it should be simple and clear—without being run around in circles. Consumers across Australia know that frustration well, so elements in this bill are great, and the coalition supports consumer protections that make those things less of the experience of a consumer.

But here is what's not sensible and what this parliament should be asking loudly. While subscription traps on streaming services are rightly covered by this new law, guess what? Union memberships will not be. For many unions, you can sign up on a simple website form, but if you want to leave there are mandatory waiting periods and requirements to sign special letters. That sounds exactly like the kind of trap this very bill is meant to prevent. So what we see here is a classic case of this government applying new rules to everyone else but refusing to apply them to their union masters. Again, we see it. It cannot be a rule for one and not for another. The Labor government must come clean on why they are exempting unions from this. Why don't you tell voters it's because they are your masters? That's what you should be telling them: the truth. But we don't hear that often from the other side.

We heard repeatedly across Senate estimates and the Senate inquiry into this legislation that people want better protections. Labor rushed this bill, did not consult the industries or stakeholders affected and failed to provide modelling for its impacts in the same way it failed to provide modelling and proper consultation on its so-called budget tax reform bill. No modelling—just a catchy bill, with a bit of a connection to the content of that heading of the bill, and some headlines, with nothing sitting beneath it that substantiates exactly what they're doing. 'Don't worry about the detail; we'll sort that out later.' That's Labor's way. We've seen that over and over again. We want to know how many consumers will and won't be protected under existing law, and what is the measurable benefit? If this government cannot answer those questions, because it didn't bother to find out before it introduced this bill, then consumers and businesses should be disappointed.

We will support this bill, but, in the interests of small business and Australians, the government and the crossbench should accept our amendments. Labor's hallmark is more legislation, more bureaucracy and more power concentrated in the hands of government, and bills that protect and preserve the union movement. The coalition will instead stand for consumers, small businesses, clear laws and common sense, so the economy can thrive and provide a benefit to all Australians, including small-business owners and workers who deserve a government that backs them—not one that buries them in red tape and walks away and protects its union masters, not one who gives the unions special treatment at the expense of all others. That's not the way you preserve a fair go. That's not the way you leave no-one behind. None of that applies when you apply legislation to businesses and don't apply it to the unions.