CHOICE October 2024

Alright fine. I’ll admit it. I don’t have the healthiest relationship with food. At literally any point in my life cycle you can get a solid read on my mental state, purely by observing what I’m shoving in my gob. If I’m glugging down four litres of water a day and politely eating overnight oats for breakfast, things in my world are likely good. If I’m sinking three or four cans of Coke Zero a day and smashing halal snack packs for lunch, things are almost certainly suboptimal. You can get a solid read on my mental state, purely by observing what I’m shoving in my gob What came first? The stress or the snack pack? It’s difficult to say but, either way, when I become more soft drink than…

Australia’s consumer protections for travellers have always been lacking and hard to enforce. But we truly experienced what this meant during the pandemic, with mass flight cancellations and delays, appalling customer service and a routine runaround to get a refund – or more likely the dreaded flight credit that was harder than Monopoly money to actually use. Over the years, we’ve heard from thousands of consumers with travel horror stories – including having to drive across the state to make it to funerals and weddings on time due to cancelled and delayed flights. CHOICE has been campaigning for new protections for travellers for a long time, even giving Shonky Awards to the industry-run ‘Airline Customer Advocate’, which does little more than forward complaints to airlines, and Qantas – twice, for…

Telco consumer advocates and the federal government have welcomed the decision from Telstra and Optus to delay the shutdown of their 3G networks. The companies were originally planning to turn off their services in late August, but have postponed the shutdown until 28 October. In addition to devices that only use 3G, the shutdown will also affect 4G-enabled mobile phones that revert to the older technology when the user dials triple zero. Carol Bennett, CEO of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, says this makes the shutdown “a matter of life and death”, and says the extension “gives us a final opportunity to reduce these risks and ensure Australians are ready for a post-3G communications landscape”. Telstra and Optus are the only remaining providers of 3G coverage in Australia. The…

With the recent collapse of Bonza and the withdrawal by Rex of services between Australia’s capital cities, competition in the airline sector has dwindled even further. With only two carriers – Qantas and Virgin – flying Australia’s busiest routes, airfares could go up and quality of service could go in the opposite direction. Though their market shares were small, the presence of Rex and Bonza drove down fares. It’s an issue that’s on the ACCC’s radar. “The concentrated nature of Australia’s domestic aviation industry reinforces the importance of the ongoing transparency and scrutiny we bring through our monitoring role,” says ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey, adding that consumers “generally enjoy lower airfares where there is more competition on a route”. The regulator’s August domestic airline competition report also contains a bit…

TPG has become the latest phone and internet service provider to promise it won’t sign agreements with Google that make it the exclusive default search engine on TPG-supplied devices. The court-enforceable undertaking to the ACCC comes after Telstra and Optus made similar promises to the competition regulator in July. “We are pleased that all three mobile network operators in Australia have responded to the ACCC’s competition concerns,” says Commissioner Liza Carver. “This undertaking is another important step towards providing Australian consumers with more choice about the digital platforms and services they use, and to encourage more competition in these markets.” The ACCC found that TPG had made exclusive agreements with Google to pre-install Google’s search service as the default on Android devices it provided to consumers. The competition watchdog previously…

Major telco outages such as M the November 2023 Optus meltdown have far-reaching consequences, affecting everything from banking to emergency services. And it’s often at these times that the communication skills of the affected telecoms fall short. Earlier this year the federal government directed the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to come up with enforceable industry standards to improve how companies communicate with customers, particularly when their services stop working. The Telecommunications (Customer Communications for Outages Industry Standards) Direction 2024 requires the ACMA to make new rules to ensure telcos keep customers informed and updated through website updates, email alerts to customers, social media updates and radio and television news bulletins, rather than providing little more than unhelpful silence. “The Optus outage shone a light on systems and processes…