PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Ms CLUTTERHAM (Sturt) (11:23): We are all consumers. We all need to purchase goods and services for personal or household use. Australians participate in the consumer marketplace by contracting to agree to pay a certain amount of money in exchange for the provision of goods or services.

All day, every day, there are thousands of consumer interactions, contracts and exchanges. You cannot live and participate in life today without being a consumer. Some people consume more than others, but, whatever the nature and number of transactions Australians participate in as consumers, the system must be fair, simple and trustworthy, with contemporary and effective protections in place.

We know that there are things that consumers can do to protect themselves. They can carefully read all the terms of a contract before signature, get legal advice, ask questions, shop around, check the quality of goods, ask to see samples of previously delivered services and be sure about what it is they want or need. They can also keep copies of receipts and other transaction documents.

But caveat emptor, or 'buyer beware', should not and does not extend to accepting unfair or unequal practices. That is why the Albanese Labor government has a laser focus on Australia's competition and consumer framework, including improving protections against current and emerging unfair trading practices. It did so by introducing a general prohibition on unfair trading practices towards consumers, strengthening protections against drip pricing by requiring transparency on transaction based charges and introducing protections against subscription practices that are detrimental to consumers and small businesses, who also procure and use goods and services.

Drip pricing is a practice where a consumer buys a service at what appears to be a reasonable price and then experiences death by a thousand cuts—little price creeps here and there—where new fees, previously unexpected, start to come in. We've all bought a ticket to a concert, to a show, to live sport or to a movie and then experienced an inexplicable and proportionately large booking fee being tacked on at the end of the transaction.

You still want the ticket, so you pay the booking fee. Now, businesses will be required to disclose these mandatory transaction based charges like booking fees at the same time that they display the base price. This is only fair.

The consumer can then decide earlier in the process whether they wish to proceed with the transaction or not. This reform doesn't prohibit businesses from charging a booking fee. It recognises that there are in fact legitimate reasons to do so.

All it does is ask businesses to be upfront about these costs. This is entirely reasonable. We have also addressed subscription traps.

Subscriptions to streaming services, newspapers, gyms, style guides, blogs, software services—they're often designed on the assumption that consumers will forget to cancel free trials, will simply shrug off renewals or will find it difficult to find out how to cancel and therefore just roll on with it. I've spoken previously in this place about my attempt to cancel a subscription to a style app that I signed up to following my last birthday, as I'd hit my mid-40s and decided it was time to become a little bit more stylish.

Predictably, the app was not a revelation; it was a giant waste of money, so I proceeded to try and cancel before I got trapped in an endless renewal cycle. Cancelling was quite the exercise. I wanted out, but I kept being directed to offers, promises and alternatives on a web page that was clearly designed to make it hard for me to find and activate the cancel button.

I had to trawl through the app, go to settings on my phone, get a couple of codes and then click on a link in an email that was eventually sent to me. I'm all for businesses promoting their products, but why couldn't I just press a button and cancel? I, and my fellow style-app Australians, will now be able to do that, because subscription services will have to clearly disclose that a customer is entering into a subscription, what it costs, how long it runs, how it renews and how it can be cancelled, with cancellations required to be straightforward and easy to find.

This is all part of the Albanese Labor government's agenda, which is to make the marketplace fairer and more transparent for consumers.