Transcript
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Good morning and welcome to National Consumer Congress 2024.
Today we are joined by a range of consumer advocacy and assistance groups, legal and other experts, industry representatives, state, territory, and federal government agencies as well as our colleagues from New Zealand.
I would especially like to acknowledge and thank Allison Burns, OAM, Founder and President of Bella’s Footprints Foundation for being here today and her powerful advocacy work which was instrumental in bringing about the world’s first mandatory button battery safety standards, which we are now actively enforcing.
I also extend my congratulations to Allison on being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the King’s Birthday honours list for her for her tireless advocacy regarding button battery safety.
It is fitting that this year’s theme “The Road Ahead,” will focus on the next steps towards reducing harms and improving outcomes for consumers. This year’s theme applies especially to keeping consumers safe and the important role our product safety priorities play in achieving this.
2024/25 Product Safety Priorities
Each year the ACCC sets new product safety priorities, allowing us to refocus our work on the safety issues posing the most risk of harm to Australian consumers.
Consumers rightly expect the products they buy are safe.
The ACCC works with other regulators to identify and address the risk of serious injury and death from safety hazards in consumer products. In developing our priorities, we consider information from a range of sources to identify product safety risks, including consumer reports made to the ACCC’s Infocentre, mandatory reports made by businesses, voluntary recalls, and market surveillance.
I want to recognise and thank the Product Safety Consultative Committee, now entering its fourth year, which helps to facilitate engagement with key stakeholders across a range of fields on consumer safety issues.
The committee gives us crucial insight into the community’s experiences with products. This in turn helps inform our product safety priorities as well as our engagement with a broad range of stakeholders on product safety issues.
Product safety is a shared goal. Building collaborative partnerships across government, the private sector, academics, legal experts, and consumer groups, helps to support this goal.
The priorities that I am announcing today will guide the work we do to protect consumers now and into the future.
This year, we are focusing on five key priorities.
Young children’s product safety - nursery products
The safety of young children will be a significant focus of our product safety work throughout 2024-25. We know this group are among the most vulnerable to harm from unsafe products.
This year, we will focus on the safety of nursery products including furniture, baby bottle self-feeding devices and infant sleep products.
Tragically, reports indicate that 151 babies in Australia died in inclined sleep products such as rockers, bouncers, and propped items since 2001.
Infant sleep products have been a priority area for the ACCC since 2019. We have made significant strides towards developing safety standards for these products as well as increasing consumer awareness of infant sleep safety, including a safe sleep campaign.
We will take appropriate regulatory action where necessary on these issues. We will also be raising awareness and encouraging compliance with new standards for toppling furniture and any future infant sleep product standards.
As part of our young children’s priority, we continue to monitor for new and emerging risks. One such emerging risk are baby bottle self-feeding devices. These are of particular concern to the ACCC. These devices are designed for babies to bottle feed with little to no supervision from a caregiver and can pose a choking risk. There have been a number of international safety warnings and recalls of self-feeding devices, which are predominantly sold online in Australia.
Product safety online
This leads me to our next priority – product safety online – as we look to strengthen our approach to meeting the challenges consumers face today in the digital economy.
We’ll be encouraging best practices to reduce the safety risks from goods sold online, including targeted engagement with online marketplaces aiming to reduce the prevalence of unsafe product listings on their sites.
The challenges posed by online sales, particularly those direct to consumers from an overseas seller, are shared with many other countries. We will continue to work with domestic and international regulators to identify and address common product safety risks.
Sustainability and product safety
As we support Australia’s transition to a net-zero economy, we also want to ensure consumers have confidence in the safety of sustainable products.
By including sustainability as a product safety priority, we are focused on actions that support the safety of products necessary for the transition to a more sustainable economy.
We will continue to raise awareness of lithium-ion battery safety risks and hazards. The ACCC recently accepted an enforceable undertaking from LG to increase its efforts to alert and protect consumers from faulty energy storage batteries that can overheat and catch fire without warning.
Electrical products will be an important focus of our sustainability priority work. We will work collaboratively with other government agencies to progress the harmonisation of the electrical safety regulatory framework for household electrical consumer products. This review seeks to improve safety levels while ensuring regulation is fit for purpose, efficient and effective. The review will present a reform action plan to the government in the second half of this year.
More generally, there has been a notable shift towards more sustainable consumption with a growing number of second-hand marketplaces online, particularly as cost-of-living pressures continue to impact consumers. To help keep consumers safe, we are developing guidance about product safety issues for people buying or selling second hand goods online, including specific guidance for suppliers and consumers in online marketplaces.
Emerging technology and product safety
As we consider the road ahead, we are alert to the probability of product safety risks associated with the use of emerging technology in consumer products. I’m sure you will agree that the pace of change in product innovation feels faster than ever. With all the benefits from new product categories come new risks, or at the very least, new manifestations of existing risks.
We will seek to better understand these risks by engaging with key stakeholders and our international counterparts. As with online product safety, the challenges posed by emerging technology are commonly shared across borders. However, we will also consider how the Australian consumer product safety framework can be applied to support safe and responsible practices in relation to the use of emerging technology.
Improving product safety data
Our final priority, which is relevant across our work, will be to bolster our capabilities in identifying emerging product safety issues quickly and effectively with improved data. We fear there is so much that we are not aware of and there is lost opportunity to get ahead of a product safety problem before the worst possible scenario occurs.
To do this we will work in partnership with Australian data experts, continue to explore new sources of data and improve internal intelligence capabilities to support efficient, data-driven decision making. We will also have a renewed focus on the mandatory reporting regime, which requires suppliers to promptly report to the ACCC any death, serious injury or serious illness associated with a consumer good they have supplied. Our focus will be on both education and enforcement of these requirements.
Compliance and enforcement
Our product safety priorities go hand-in-hand with our compliance and enforcement priorities. The product safety and enforcement teams work closely together to ensure our approach is strategic and consistent.
Following the introduction of the world’s first mandatory button battery safety standards, the ACCC completed a national surveillance program in partnership with state and territory consumer protection agencies last year. More than 400 businesses were examined and found more than a third of products containing button batteries failed to include mandatory warnings.
Following compliance and enforcement action, over the past 12 months, the ACCC has issued infringement notices to Repco, Supercheap Auto, and Innovative Mechatronics Group for supplying aftermarket car key remotes that did not include the warning information and safety advice required under the mandatory button battery information standard.
Tesla Motors Australia also paid $155,000 for failing to comply with the mandatory safety and information standards for products powered by button batteries.
This week is the two-year anniversary of the button battery safety standards. There are no excuses anymore – suppliers should be aware of their obligations and have thorough quality assurance processes in place. The ACCC will continue to take enforcement action where appropriate.
There have also been enforcement outcomes for alleged non-compliance with Australian Consumer Law. Online national retailer Riff Raff Baby paid more than $130,000 dollars in penalties after the ACCC issued it with eight infringement notices for allegedly making false or misleading statements about its comforter toys being safe for sleep from birth.
As we look to the road ahead, we will encourage businesses to familiarise themselves with the requirements of the new information standard for toppling furniture including providing safety warnings. This new standard was recently introduced following an ACCC recommendation to the government. Businesses have a 12-month transition period to comply. This was an important milestone, as there are more than nine hundred Australians – many of them young children - injured and requiring medical assistance every year as a result of toppling furniture.
Product safety regulatory framework
Mandatory standards play a critical role in the product safety framework. They serve to lift minimum safety standards across around 50 product types. The ACCC continues to support Treasury in progressing amendments to mandatory standard provisions under Australian Consumer Law. These amendments will make it easier for mandatory standards to recognise a wider range of voluntary overseas and Australian standards as they evolve over time. Once fully implemented across all existing mandatory standards, we estimate businesses could save at least $500 million per year on regulatory costs. It will also mean safer and cheaper products for consumers.
Product safety is, of course, central to the notion of consumer protection. However, it is also critical to the notion that competition in markets leads to better consumer outcomes. Competition must not be at the expense of safe products, leading to injuries or death. A robust consumer product safety framework helps ensure that competitive markets are delivering better consumer outcomes.
The ACCC will also continue to work with Treasury to ensure consideration of further reform options to improve the safety of consumer products.
Unlike most OECD countries, Australia does not have a general safety provision that prohibits the sale of unsafe goods. Instead, the ACCC responds to safety issues once products are already in market, through supplier voluntary recalls and injury reports from suppliers, consumers, or other stakeholders.
The introduction of new laws to prohibit the sale of unsafe goods could put a clear obligation on manufacturers to ensure their product is safe before it enters the market.
Conclusion
Consumer safety must be at the forefront of decision making for policy makers, regulators, and businesses as we consider the road ahead.
As consumers face many challenges – all of which are amplified by cost-of-living pressures - our efforts to better protect consumers are more important than ever.
The discussions we have today will help inform the work we do to address the most prevalent product safety issues consumers face.
I would now like to introduce you to CHOICE CEO, Ashley de Silva who is moderating our first panel session of the day on the state of product safety in Australia today.