Australia moves to ban fake discounts and hidden fees

By James Dore · 2026-09-23

The gap in the law

Australia's consumer protection rules ban misleading conduct, unconscionable behaviour and unfair contract terms. A whole category of manipulative commercial tactics sits just below those thresholds, and nothing currently catches them. Treasury opened consultation in November 2024 on amending the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) to add a principles-based general prohibition on unfair trading practices, alongside specific bans on certain named conduct.^[1]

The EU has had a comparable framework for years. Australia is only now moving to match it.

What the ACCC wants banned

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) submitted its formal response to Treasury in December 2024, backing both the general prohibition and targeted reforms.^[2] Four specific practices were named.

Subscription traps make it easy to sign up and deliberately hard to cancel. Drip pricing hides mandatory fees until late in the checkout process, so the price shown first is never the price paid. Dark patterns are design choices in digital interfaces built to nudge users toward choices they would not otherwise make. Fake urgency, the countdown timer that resets every time you visit a product page, pressures a decision that does not need to be made right now.

The ACCC's December 2024 submission recommended the prohibition apply to both business-to-consumer and business-to-business conduct, and extend to financial products and services.^[2] That scope is wider than most marketers would have expected.

ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe said the commission has been advocating for an unfair trading practices prohibition to be introduced into the Australian Consumer Law to better protect consumers and small businesses.^[5]

From consultation to commitment

Policy consultation can sit in a drawer for years. In December 2025, the Commonwealth government and all state and territory consumer ministers jointly endorsed a Decision Regulation Impact Statement recommending exactly what the ACCC had proposed: a general prohibition on unfair trading practices combined with specific reforms on subscriptions and drip pricing.^[3]

A Decision Regulation Impact Statement precedes legislation. It is the point in Australia's policy process where government formally commits to a reform direction before drafting the bill. Getting every state and territory minister to sign on is the hard part, and that step is now done.

The EU's Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, which the ACCC used as a structural comparator in its submission, maintains a non-exhaustive blacklist of commercial practices always considered unfair: false scarcity claims, misleading omissions, aggressive sales tactics. Australia's proposed framework would work similarly, with a general prohibition anchoring a set of specific, named bans.

The enforcement preview

Digital Imaging Express Pty Ltd, trading as digiDirect, paid $99,000 in penalties on 21 September 2026 after the ACCC issued five infringement notices for misleading strikethrough discount claims that breached the existing ACL.^[4]

ACCC Deputy Chair Mick Keogh said digiDirect's advertising may have misled consumers into thinking they were getting a genuine discount when in reality the products were rarely advertised and almost never sold at the higher strikethrough price, and the suggested discount was illusory.^[4]

The strikethrough discount works like this: a crossed-out "was" price sits next to a lower current price, implying a saving. If the higher price was never a real price, the saving does not exist. Under the proposed blacklist, manufactured discounts of this kind would sit alongside countdown timers and hidden fees as conduct the law formally prohibits, rather than something pursued only through case-by-case enforcement.

For agencies and brands running digital marketing in Australia, the tactics that have driven conversion rates for years are being named, catalogued and lined up for legislation. A bill has not yet been introduced, but every state and territory minister signed off on the reform direction in December 2025.

James Dore

James Dore is Strategy Director at Bushnote, a leader in SEO and AEO in Australia. He writes on search, AI and the technology decisions shaping government and industry.