TRANSCRIPT – DOORSTOP – CANBERRA

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
DOORSTOP PRESS CONFERENCE
MURAL HALL, PARLIAMENT HOUSE
WEDNESDAY, 1 APRIL 2026 

SUBJECTS: Albanese Government banning unfair trading practices; ACCC; AI; fuel supply 

ASSISTANT MINISTER FOR COMPETITION, ANDREW LEIGH: Good morning, my name is Andrew Leigh – the Assistant Minister for Competition. I'm very pleased to be joined this morning by two of Australia's leading consumer advocates, Stephanie Tonkin and Erin Turner, and by a number of my Labor colleagues who have been campaigning hard for this reform. Carol Berry, Libby Coker, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Tania Lawrence, Louise Miller-Frost, Gabriel Ng, Madonna Jarrett and Renee Coffey. So just a delight to have all of these colleagues here who have been working really hard on this issue of banning unfair trading practices.

Today is April 1, and it should be a day for whoopee cushions and tall tales, not for subscription traps and hidden fees. Yet for too long, Australians have had to put up with the frustration of subscriptions that are easy to get into but hard to get out of. Frankly, there's some subscriptions in Australia that are tougher to get out of than an escape room. We have a situation where Australians are signing up to subscriptions for gyms and newspapers, online services. All terrific services in their own right, but in some cases finding them so hard to cancel that they're choosing instead to cancel the underlying credit card because they can't cancel the subscription itself. That ends with these laws. These laws will ban subscription traps and make it clear to companies offer offering subscriptions that they need to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to get into it in the first place. Subscriptions will continue. Subscription traps will be a thing of the past.

The legislation will also get rid of drip pricing. Drip pricing is that practice where you see a cheap headline price and then additional fees get added on like rabbits in a veggie patch. Eventually you find yourself paying a cost that was higher than you thought you'd be paying at the beginning. If Australians see a headline price, they should know that it includes all mandatory per-transaction fees, and that's exactly what the bill that I'm introducing to Parliament today will do. It will ensure that Australians don't suffer the indignity of seeing additional fees added through the transaction that are unavoidable.

These reforms are great for consumers, but they're also good for businesses. Right now, honest businesses are out there offering subscriptions that are easy to cancel and honest prices that include every fee you will pay. And yet they are being undercut by dodgy players who are using subscription traps and drip pricing. This reform will not just be good for consumers, it'll be good for competition. This law will be backed by some of the biggest penalties around. Maximum penalty of three times the benefit gained from the breach, 10 per cent of turnover, or $100 million thanks to Labor having increased those maximum penalties which were just $10 million dollars when we came to office.

It sits on top of a range of important consumer and competition reforms; reforming the Unit Pricing Code and cracking down on shrinkflation. Putting in place a significant review of our supermarket competition settings. The biggest overhaul of our merger laws in 50 years to get more efficient scrutiny of large mergers happening in Australia. A national competition policy backed by a $900 million Productivity Fund which has been estimated to add up to $5,000 to the household incomes of the typical Australian household. All of this is because Labor believes passionately in the power of competition to raise wages and lower prices. We believe in the power of competition to improve economic dynamism and drive productivity, and the importance of putting consumers first when we make our decisions. I'll hand over now to Erin and to Stephanie to say a few words, then happy to take your questions. Thank you. 

CEO OF THE CONSUMER POLICY RESEARCH CENTRE, ERIN TURNER: Hello everyone, I'm Erin Turner. I'm the CEO of the Consumer Policy Research Centre. Today is a day that Australian consumers can celebrate. The laws introduced today mean that we can trust that businesses will treat us fairly, or that they significant and meaningful penalties if they do the wrong thing.

We know that unfair business practices hurt Australians. Just one unfair practice – subscription traps have caught 75 per cent of Australians. This is where businesses make it so easy for you to hand over your money, but really hard to escape. They hide that cancelation button. They make you call a number in certain hours. They make you run around. You lose time, you lose money, you get added stress. That specifically ends with these new laws. The laws ban subscription traps and they introduce a broad ban on unfair business practices. These are things like extended warranties that give you no extra benefits to that, that you already have under the excellent Australian Consumer Law. Things like giving you the runaround with customer service, meaning you can't contact people, or making it hard to repair your products. These laws mean that you can trust businesses and that Australian regulators like the ACCC have the power to act when businesses do the wrong thing.

We know unfair business practice bans work. We've seen them work internationally. The Consumer Policy Research Centre has looked closely at how these laws work in the United States, the European Union, Singapore and the United Kingdom. We've seen them work in action. Just one example, in the United States, they’ve used their unfair trading laws to take action against Epic Games, the producers of Fortnite. This company made it so easy for people to accidentally pay for in-game purchases, including children – they tricked them into it. As a result of that, the regulator was able to use their unfair trading laws in the United States to fine the company over $200 million and return $245 million back to consumers who lost money. That's the power of these unfair trading laws. I'm very excited to see them in action in Australia. Thank you.

CEO OF THE CONSUMER ACTION LAW CENTRE, STEPHANIE TONKIN: Hi everyone. I'm Stephanie Tonkin, the CEO of the Consumer Action Law Centre. We're also filled with joy about today's announcement. Unfair practices are a mainstay on our frontline services. Our frontline lawyers and financial counsellors are encountering significant harms, especially on people experiencing financial difficulty or experiencing vulnerability. So some examples of what we see beyond subscription traps and some of the practices that Erin has described. Carnapping: a consumer's car is taken to a repair shop, where they have little choice but to sign repair documents they can give lawyers linked to the workshop broad authority to litigate in the consumer's name, even when the consumer is insured and not at fault. If the claim is defended or the other party is insolvent, the consumer can be left bearing the costs. They may have been insured the whole time, but they've been manipulated out of that opportunity.

Pawnbroking: providing very high-cost loans on security of an item that has sentimental value. This often encourages people in financial distress to extend payment arrangements month after month endlessly, and that's even where they cannot repay the principal lent. They can only meet the period fees and interest. They're just rolling over and over. Their information is distorted. They are manipulated into that ongoing contract and the financial harm that follows.

Multi-level marketing: predatory business models that entice people to buy into a scheme on the false promise of a lifestyle and profits that will never transpire. Only the top few will ever make money, and they never do make money, and they continue to extort the 99 per cent of other participants by encouraging investment in trading and products and working harder, deepening financial losses.

Even practices like lead generation: a consumer responding to an online ad for free beauty courses or free solar panels, submitting their details and then being targeted by unwanted, manipulative sales. Sometimes unconnected to the ad they've responded to because the leads are unsold without the consumers informed consent. These sales often do and we see leading to ongoing significant financial hardship. We look forward to testing the reach of this general prohibition against unfair trade practices, and we're really excited to see our regulators armed with the types of powers that they need to make sure that consumers, as Erin and Andrew said, that consumers can have trust in the businesses that they're working with, particularly as the people we're speaking to are really struggling in a cost-of-living crisis. Thank you.

ANDREW LEIGH: Thank you Steph. Very happy to take questions.

JOURNALIST: Is this going to be actively policed, or will it be reliant upon consumers reporting issues?

ANDREW LEIGH: It will indeed be actively policed. The expectation starts from today that firms will be complying with these new laws. They are backed by penalties, with the maximum penalty being 10 times higher than it was when Labor came to office. And because we worked this through with state and territory consumer ministers, it will be enforced not only by the federal regulator – the Australian Competition Consumer Commission, but also by the eight state and territory fair trading regulators. So there will be a lot of cops on the beat making sure that firms are doing the right thing.

JOURNALIST: What I guess, assurances do we have Mr Leigh, that that will be actively policed? I guess, probably people are in the public, perhaps a little bit cynical about these kind of ones. We've seen with the ACCC, they haven't really applied any fines with fuel. Again, there's policing that's happening across different measures. What assurances do we have that that'll actually be implemented?

ANDREW LEIGH: The ACCC is a very well-respected regulator, not only in Australia, but also around the world. It has never been better resourced, and it has significant penalties at its disposal. We are expecting the ACCC to work assiduously on enforcing these laws, and that's partly informed by the fact that the ACCC has been a strong advocate of the changes that Labor is bringing to the Parliament today. A ban on unfair trading practices, a ban on subscription traps and a ban on drip pricing haven't just been called for by terrific consumer advocates like Stephanie and Erin, but also by the competition watchdog itself which will do an excellent job of enforcing those laws.

JOURNALIST: When it comes to the penalties that are applied for these kind of practices – is there an expectation that they will be reviewed on a regular basis? Obviously with fuel we've seen the ACCC having to – well, the government having to double the penalties in a moment of crisis. Is there kind of a forward-thinking approach to how those penalties get reviewed in the future?

ANDREW LEIGH: So when we came to office, the maximum penalty was $10 million. That was the penalty that applied when fuel prices spiked above $2 a litre at the beginning of the Ukraine war, when Scott Morrison was Prime Minister. Within six months of Labor coming to office, we had laws in the Parliament to take that up to $50 million. We've done that because we want to make sure the Australian penalties are in line with penalties imposed in other jurisdictions. So we fully expect that those penalties will have an impact on firms. They are well above a simple cost of doing business and there's also the fact that alongside the maximum dollar penalties is a penalty up to 10 per cent of turnover. That is a very significant penalty for a multi-billion-dollar firm.

JOURNALIST: Will the government be looking to sign a memorandum of understanding with firm, Anthropic? I understand the CEO will be meeting with the Prime Minister today?

ANDREW LEIGH: That's a question for the Prime Minister and for the Industry Minister.

JOURNALIST: On the government's messaging around fuel, it's just been to use as much as you need and no more. Looking ahead to the budget in six weeks’ time, we're going to have hundreds of staff and lobbyists and other people flying into Canberra for in-person meetings and events here. Do you think that is appropriate? Is there any way that some of that activity could or should be done remotely to reduce the pressure on fuel?

ANDREW LEIGH: Look, I certainly encourage people to take the Murray's bus if they're coming into Canberra. It's an efficient way of getting here and a very pleasant way of traveling. We are now at stage two of the four stage approach, which is where Australians are urged to take what fuel they need. We have as much fuel coming into the country as we did before the Iran fighting started. We do not face shortages of supply, but we have seen some outages as a result of significant increases in demand. In some cases, increases of demand over 100 per cent. Just as COVID saw some supermarket shelves emptied of toilet paper, as there were spikes in demand, so too we've had a small number of fuel stations running out of fuel for relatively short periods of time. The message to Australians is take the fuel you need, but don't take more than that.

JOURNALIST: Is there anything you think the Parliament could be doing to lead by example on that front? Could more meetings be done by Zoom? Could fewer staff come to sitting weeks? Are there measures that Parliament could take to lead by example?

ANDREW LEIGH: Look I think that's a sensible conversation, and certainly occurring across my ministerial colleagues. People are very conscious of the need to make sure that travel ensures value for money, and to do those virtual meetings when we can. Any other questions? Thank you everyone.