Australia has no general right to change your mind, and some of the strongest product guarantees anywhere. Those two facts together surprise almost everyone.
The Australian Consumer Law sits as a schedule to the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 and applies nationally, enforced jointly by the ACCC and the state and territory fair trading offices. It replaced a patchwork of state statutes with one set of rules, which makes an Australian file simpler to run than a Canadian one.
Unlike the European fourteen days, Australian law gives no general right to return something because you changed your mind. Shops that accept change-of-mind returns do so as a matter of their own policy, and that policy is what binds them. Cooling-off rights do exist, but for specific things such as unsolicited sales and certain contracts, not for retail generally.
What Australia gives instead is a set of statutory guarantees attached to every consumer sale. Goods must be of acceptable quality, fit for any purpose the consumer made known, match their description, and match any sample or demonstration model. Services must be rendered with due care and skill.
These cannot be excluded, restricted or modified. A term that purports to do so is void. A sign saying no refunds does not change the position, and neither does a warranty card that claims to be the buyer's only remedy.
The remedy depends on how serious the problem is, and the choice of remedy follows from that.
| Severity | Who chooses | Remedy |
|---|---|---|
| Major failure | The consumer | A refund or a replacement, at the consumer's election, plus compensation for any consequential loss. |
| Minor failure | The supplier | Repair, replacement or refund, but it must happen within a reasonable time. Fail that, and the consumer can escalate to the major failure remedies. |
A failure is major where a reasonable consumer would not have bought the item had they known, or where it is substantially unfit, unsafe, or departs significantly from its description. Arguing that a failure is major is often the whole of an Australian file, because it decides who picks the remedy.
The guarantees do not run out after twelve or twenty-four months. They last as long as is reasonable given the nature of the goods and what was paid. An expensive appliance carries a longer expectation than a cheap one, and a manufacturer's one-year warranty expiring says nothing about whether the statutory guarantee still applies. Sellers routinely conflate the two.
The ACCC takes national and systemic matters; individual refunds go to the state or territory fair trading office, which will contact the business. Beyond that, each state has a civil and administrative tribunal that hears consumer claims cheaply and without lawyers. For a seller with an Australian business number this route is real and sellers know it.
We establish whether the failure is major, because that decides whether the consumer or the supplier picks the remedy, and we say so explicitly in the first letter. Australian businesses recognise the language of the consumer guarantees, and a letter that uses it correctly is answered far more often than one that does not.
The guarantees cannot be contracted away. We set out in the first letter why the failure is major, because that decides who picks the remedy.