News & Insights

Every year, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announces its key focuses for the upcoming year through its compliance and enforcement policy and priorities (enforcement priorities).

The ACCC is Australia’s regulatory body to ensure businesses comply with the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) (the Act). The consumer watchdog also has broad powers to enforce action against businesses in breach of the Act. By laying out their priorities, this is the ACCC’s clear signal to businesses to get across these areas of compliance or expect penalties enforced by the regulator.

Compliance and enforcement priorities 2023-2024

As covered previously, significant regime changes will take place as of November 2023. These changes will impose higher penalties on consumer and small business contracts with unfair contract terms. The higher penalties could be a five-fold increase, and more. Coming as no surprise, Chair of the ACCC, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, announced ‘unfair contract terms in consumer and small business contracts’ as an enforcement priority.

Amongst others, the ACCC also highlighted other 2023-2024 enforcement priorities for businesses such as:

• empowering consumers and improving industry compliance with consumer guarantees, with a focus on high value goods including motor vehicles and caravans;
• competition and consumer issues in global and domestic supply chains, with a focus on transport and logistics;
• consumer and fair trading issues relating to manipulative or deceptive advertising and marketing practices in the digital economy;
• consumer and fair trading issues arising from the pricing and selling of essential services, with a focus on energy and telecommunications;
• scam detection and disruption, supporting the implementation of the National Anti-Scam Centre;
• competition and consumer issues relating to digital platforms; and
• promoting competition and investigating allegations of anti-competitive conduct in the financial services sector, with a focus on payment services.

Enduring Priorities

As well as the yearly priorities, the ACCC also has ‘enduring priorities’ it continues to focus on. They are:

• cartel conduct
• anti-competitive conduct
• product safety
• consumers experiencing vulnerability or disadvantage; and
• conduct impacting First Nations Australians.

Ensuring continual compliance in line with the ACCC’s enforcement priorities

With the ACCC revealing their enforcement priorities, Macpherson Kelley’s specialised Commercial team can tailor a training program to assist your business’ navigating the impending regime changes and continual compliance with the Act.

The information contained in this article is general in nature and cannot be relied on as legal advice nor does it create an engagement. Please contact one of our lawyers listed above for advice about your specific situation.