MURRAY JONES:
And businesses could be banned from increasing prices in the middle of a transaction or forcing customers to hand over unnecessary personal details as the federal government pursues a ban on unfair trading practices. Now, just yesterday, the Prime Minister, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones unveiled Labor’s plan to stamp out what are called dodgy business tactics. Of course, some of them are always already covered by Australian Consumer Law, but as things change in the marketplace, I guess we’ve got to keep up with some of these changes. My special guest this morning joining me online, the Minister for Financial Services and Assistant Treasurer. Good morning, Stephen Jones, how are you today?
STEPHEN JONES:
Good morning, Murray. Good to be back with you. Very well, thank you.
MURRAY JONES:
Nice to talk to you. And look, let’s just quickly run through these. I’ll just summarise them to kick us, to kick us off. But practices on the chopping block include subscription traps, where businesses make it difficult for users to unsubscribe from their services. Needless warnings that customers have a limited time to confirm their purchase, creating a false sense of urgency or artificial scarcity. Pricing tactics that add extra fees and charges throughout a transaction are forcing consumers to provide unnecessary personal details when buying a product or subscribing to a service, and also deliberately obscuring customer service details, making it tricky for users to share a complaint or to seek a refund. And I guess these are reflecting some of the changes that we’re seeing, certainly to online sales Minister.
STEPHEN JONES:
One hundred per cent, so, a lot of it is focused on new marketing or sales practices that are used almost exclusively online, but not completely exclusively. The one that comes to mind is like the subscription trap. Big front door, very easy to sign up to a streaming service or something like that, but almost impossible to unsubscribe. Almost impossible. So, you’ve given them your credit card details and they’re taking the monthly or the annual deduction from there. Impossible to get out. You know, some of them did really dodgy things, like ensuring you can only call during business hours, but it’s an overseas phone number operating on a different timeline. So, some of these really crazy unfair stuff. So, that’s subscription traps.
And then the one that many of your listeners will be familiar with, having to take out an account for everything, a tap and go service, using your QR code to buy a cup of coffee. And you’ve got to upload what seems like 100 points of ID, equivalent to getting a home loan just to buy a cup of coffee. Those whole heap of these things, they drive consumers nuts. And they can be costing us literally thousands of dollars that we don’t need to or want to spend. And we’ve got to ensure that consumer law keeps up with these changes in practices.
MURRAY JONES:
Let’s talk a little bit more about the pricing tactics that add extra fees and charges throughout a transaction. You see a price and you think, yeah, that’s a fair price. I’m prepared to pay that. You go ahead and then suddenly you find that there’s all these additional ones along the way.
STEPHEN JONES:
Yeah, we call this drip pricing. You see an advertised or the sticker price and you go, right, that’s good. That’s the best deal going. You get in there and you start signing up to purchase the product or the service or the ticket. And as you go along, they’ve added a marketing fee, a billing fee, some other sorts of fee or charge that’s been added on there. Absolutely, you know, could have been advertised in the sticker price, but hasn’t been. It’s deceptive. It really is in the grey line, or whether it’s illegal under current law, we’re going to make sure that it is. It’s deceptive trading practices and we want to knock it off.
The other one is dynamic pricing. Your listeners might have heard about this. Big if you were recently in the UK when Oasis started their reunion tour, they had dynamic pricing for it. It means you go online to buy the ticket, but there’ll be, you know, a thousand other people online at the same time trying to buy the ticket. So, the price goes up, the price goes up and down, depending on how many people are online at that point in time trying to buy the ticket. It’s been used here in Australia for sporting events and other things as well. We want to knock this one on the head as well. You’ve just got to be truth in advertising, there’s a price for a service and it should be clearly declared.
MURRAY JONES:
Yeah. And certainly they stick with it. If they declare out there, this is the price for the particular tickets or whatever it might be, they should stick to it. Interestingly, even while we’re talking this morning, I’m actually getting a few messages from listeners and without mentioning airlines, but certainly let’s go back to this one about actually providing a refund. Obviously, a lot of companies hate having to give a refund, but in circumstances where they’ve not been able to provide the service or do what they say that they need to do, often they make it very difficult for people to get hold of somebody they’ve got to jump through hoops just to get a refund when they’re legally actually entitled to a refund as well.
STEPHEN JONES:
Absolutely. Store credits, airline credits, all of these sort of things are quite common practices now. You’re legally entitled to a refund if the product is defective or doesn’t do what it said, or the service doesn’t do what it said it’s supposed to do. You’re legally entitled to a refund. But instead of giving you what you’re legally entitled to, they’ll offer you store credits or they’ll offer you airline credits or something in the alternative, which means you’ve got to come back to them to purchase the goods, even though you might have been dissatisfied with what you got from them in the first place. Again, this is another one on the grey area of existing law. We’re going to ensure that the grey is removed and there’s a bit more black and white.
MURRAY JONES:
And it’s interesting, and it’s certainly reflecting what we said at the beginning of our discussion here, I guess the changes, the way things are happening in real‑time with respect to apps, online sales and all that type of thing. I remember getting back at about midnight from a flight from Brisbane into Cairns one night and I decided to grab the Uber service. And so I had my Uber sorted out. It was on the way, I could see it coming towards me on the map, and it suddenly just disappeared off the face of the earth and thought, what the hell’s going on here. So, from a 40, I think it was about a $40 fare. I decided to put it back in and requested the fare again, requested the Uber. It went to about $110 the second time around. And so I guess coming back to what you were saying about some of these dynamic charging and what’s happening there, I guess that’s another one that you’re looking to basically crack down on by the sounds of this.
STEPHEN JONES:
Looking at all of these. Exactly. When is it fair, and when is it unfair –
MURRAY JONES:
I thought it was unfair don’t you worry.
STEPHEN JONES:
I agree. This is not a defensive Uber in their pricing model, but they’ve declared the price at that point in time. What happens with so many of these other services. They don’t even declare the price at the point of entry. So, yeah, that’s what’s misleading about it and that’s what’s tricky about it. So, all of this stuff, we need to change the law to ensure that we’re keeping pace with these changing practices, particularly online, but not exclusively. Your listeners might have, you know, might have had the experience where they’ve walked in to a store and there’s a sign there that says, we never give refunds. Well, the law says if you’ve bought, purchased a product and it’s defective and it doesn’t work the way it said it’s supposed to work, so it’s not fit for purpose, then the customer is entitled for a refund.
MURRAY JONES:
Yeah, lawfully.
STEPHEN JONES:
So, yeah, sometimes it’s the problem, the fault of the manufacturer, but sometimes it’s not. And, you know, these things, I think, particularly when people are focused on cost‑of‑living crisis Murray, when people are trying to make ends meet, what they don’t need is dodgy marketing practices, particularly by these big online multinational platforms. They don’t need to be ripped off there as well.
MURRAY JONES:
They’ve already got so much marketing power and I guess when it comes to actually getting people by the short and curlies, they know how to do it well. Great to talk to you this morning. Some important reforms there and, of course, some changes to what’s happening, particularly with consumer law Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones. Have a great day and we’ll talk soon. Cheers.
STEPHEN JONES:
Good to be with you.