Industry insists: consumer code will address ACMA's issues

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 26 July 2011 08:32

IT Policy - Regulation

The telecomms industry has been almost unanimous in its responses to the ACMA's draft report of its 'Reconnecting the Customer' enquiry in claiming that a revised Telecommunications Consumer Protection (TCP) Code will address the ACMA's concerns. ACCAN does not agree.

The ACMA released the draft report of its year long enquiry on 1 June and has just released submissions to that report. The draft identified six major issues that had to be resolved: improved advertising practices; improved product disclosure information; the introduction of transparent customer care performance reporting; the provision of expenditure management tools for consumers to manage their costs; the adoption of best practice internal complaints-handling that meets the Australian Standard for Complaints-handling (AS ISO 100002-2006); changes to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman scheme - its governance and the prosecution of best practice standards and systemic issue reporting.

ACMA's preference is more regulation
At the launch of the enquiry and on several occasions during it, ACMA chairman Chris Chapman had hinted strongly that further regulation would be the outcome, and he re-iterated this on the release of the draft report, saying "The industry response [to the draft report] will certainly give an early indication of its readiness to effect the clearly needed step change - all in the interest of yielding materially improved consumer outcomes," but adding: "Further, more direct intervention by imposing industry standards and service provider determinations has been foreshadowed by the ACMA as the preferred approach for several of the proposals."

Despite this the industry is still pushing hard for the new TCP code to be the panacea for the problems identified in the report. Communications Alliance, in its submission, contended that the TCP code, when finalised, would address all the concerns raised by the ACMA in its draft report.

It noted that the ACMA's draft report was based on the current TCP code, not the draft of the new code that was supplied to ACMA on 31 March. "Consequently, this submission will indicate where industry believes that the revised code already fully or in part meets the ACMA recommendations," it said.

 

CONTINUED