New Australian Consumer & Product Safety Laws come into effect 1 January 2011 - are you ready?
Consumer Law Changes
Introduction
Effective as of 1st of January 2011, Australia will have new Consumer and Product Safety Laws.
The main features of the new laws are as follows:
●National consumer protection and fair trading laws
●Enhanced enforcement powers and redress mechanisms
●A national unfair contract terms law
●A new national product safety regime
●A new national consumer guarantees law
Australian Consumer Law (ACL)
Australia will have a single, national consumer law. The laws will cover the following specific areas:
●General law: covering misleading or deceptive conduct, unconscionable conduct, false or misleading representations and related offences,
information standards and country of origin representations
●Consumer guarantees: covering what consumer guarantees apply to goods and services, who is responsible for these guarantees and
when remedies, such as refund repair and replacement are available
●Product Safety: covering the new national product safety regime
●Sales Practices: covering unsolicited supplies, unsolicited consumer agreements, pyramid schemes, multiple pricing, lay-by agreements,
referral selling and harassment and coercion
●Unfair contract terms: covering the new national unfair contract terms law, which took effect on 1 July 2010
The area likely to be of most relevance to our clients, is the new Product Safety regime.
We have summarised these laws for you in point form on the following pages. Please click on the following links to see the details or contact us to find out more about the new laws.
Next Steps
What You Need To Do
Clearly you will need to familiarise yourselves with the new Laws to ensure that your business can implement procedures to comply with the new requirements. The summaries we have provided via the above links can assist you in this regard.
Then you will need to consider how your business can prepare to meet the new requirements. SFI can help you with this process
How SFI International Can Assist You
SFI International are developing add-on functionality for our Care suite of CRM programmes to assist business in meeting the statutory requirements that will be in place from the beginning of 2011.
We are particularly working on solutions that will allow you to easily meet the new product safety reporting requirements that apply in the case of serious injury, illness or death through the use of standardised forms.
We will be implementing flexible web-based compliance solutions that can meet the needs of the smallest business through to the largest global corporation. Global companies must be particularly vigilant in meeting localised requirements such as these new laws.
We can work with your company to implement the systems and procedures you need to meet the obligations of the new laws.
Contact us today to find out how we can assist you or to learn more about the new laws
