ACCC Chair reinforces a full enforcement and compliance agenda for 2023-2024

This article was co-authored by Tehneya Deweerd.

On 7 March 2023, nearly one year into her tenure as ACCC Chair, Gina Cass-Gottlieb has unveiled the ACCC’s 2023-24 Compliance and Enforcement Priorities. The priorities this year build on many of the priorities and sectors of focus identified by former Chair, Rod Sims last year.

Facing the immediate effects of the declining economy and clearly at the forefront of the ACCC’s focus are consumers. The price of essential services, environmental and sustainability issues and manipulative marketing and advertising practices will continue to strongly feature in the ACCC’s priorities. New to the enforcement priorities are scam detection and disruption, and unfair contract terms in consumer and small business contracts.

The ACCC’s eye also remains squarely on concentrated sectors, such as energy, financial services and digital platforms and those predisposed to cartel conduct, including in the supply chain.

Figure 1: 2023-24 enforcement and compliance priorities 

We provide a snapshot of some of the ACCC’s key enforcement and compliance priorities relevant to our clients below.

Ensuring legitimate environmental and sustainability claims/initiatives – the ACCC will again prioritise its work on identifying consumer and fair trading issues in relation to environmental claims and sustainability, and is expanding its focus this year to also include competition and product safety concerns. It recently released the results of its internet sweep of potential ‘greenwashing’ claims that highlighted key problems in the way a large number of businesses are marketing their environmental credentials. The ACCC has commenced investigations for alleged misleading environmental claims and established a new internal taskforce that will examine and seek to influence a range of issues where environmental and sustainability issues interact with the application of competition and consumer law.

Essential services – with the rising cost of living, consumers are vulnerable to the effects of misleading and/or anti-competitive conduct, the ACCC will again focus on the energy and telecommunications sectors. Add to this, the ACCC’s mandate relating to pricing and competition issues in gas markets and enforcing the Federal Government price cap, and the ACCC can be expected to be very active in these sectors.

Promoting competition and investigating allegations of anti-competitive conduct in the financial services sector – as the cost of living and interest rates continue to rise, the ACCC will focus on promoting competition in financial services through a range of tools including market studies, enforcement action, and compliance and engagement activity. The ACCC has recently announced its inquiry into retail deposit markets which will look at how banks set interest rates, as well as other terms and conditions.

Anti-competitive arrangements – exclusive arrangements by traders that are in a position of market power will remain an enforcement priority for the coming year with foreclosure of competitors being of concern. Competition and consumer issues in global and domestic supply chains, with a focus on transport and logistics will also be a priority.

Unfair conduct and standing by your product – the ACCC will reinforce its support for an economy wide ban on “unfair trading practices” to address certain business practices that occur online and offline, including by digital platforms.

The ACCC will also undertake a review of standard form business terms and conditions across a number of different sectors as it awaits the commencement of new laws later this year that will prohibit and impose civil penalties for breaches of the unfair contract terms provisions.  

Separately, the ACCC has signalled that consumer guarantees are the issue most commonly reported to the ACCC. It has signalled it will continue to push for reforms, including making it illegal to not comply with a consumer guarantee and for a manufacturer to not indemnify a supplier that does give a consumer a remedy.

Enduring priorities – some conduct is considered so harmful to consumers and competition that they remain enduring priorities of the ACCC, including cartel conduct, anti-competitive conduct, product safety, vulnerable consumers and First Nations consumers.

We are working with our clients to traverse these matters on a daily basis. Please contact us for further information or assistance.