Productivity Commission draft report: Review of Australia's Consumer Policy Framework

The Productivity Commission has released its Draft Report of the  Review of Australia's Consumer Policy Framework.

A key point of the draft report is the need for national consumer regulation with a sole national regulator (possibly the ACCC).

The first step in creating a nationally coherent consumer policy framework should be the introduction of a single generic consumer law applying across Australia. This should be based primarily on the consumer provisions in the Trade Practices Act.

• The ACCC should be solely responsible for enforcing the product safety provisions nationally.
• The case for making it the sole national regulator for all of the new generic law should be actively explored.
• In the meantime, individual States and Territories should be given the option of referring their enforcement powers for all of the new law to the ACCC.

There should also be a CoAG oversighted review and reform program (akin to the National Competition Policy legislation review process) to:

• identify and repeal unnecessary industry-specific consumer regulation, with a particular focus on removing regulations that apply in only one or two jurisdictions;
• dentify other areas of specific consumer regulation applying in most or all jurisdictions where divergent requirements and/or lack of policy responsiveness are particularly costly; and
• determine how these costs should be reduced, with explicit consideration of the case for transferring policy responsibility to the national level.

However, in two areas of current State and Territory responsibility - consumer credit provision (including finance broking), and the consumer protection aspects of energy services - the case for a national approach is well established. Hence, the transfer of responsibility to the national level should occur without further review.

To complement this broad reform program for specific consumer regulation, improvements should be made to some of the particular regulatory requirements applying to consumer credit, utility services and home building.

The Commission is seeking comment from interested parties on its draft report through written submissions and/or attendance at public hearings to be held early in 2008. The closing date for written submissions is Wednesday 6 February 2008.

Released with the draft report is a consultancy report, Comparison of Generic Consumer Protection Legislation, by Professor Stephen Corones and Professor Sharon Christensen, Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology.