CHOICE February 2026

How does time work? I still don’t feel like I have a handle on it. Example: I feel like 2025 went quickly. Abnormally quickly. At the end of last year, I found myself having a lot of those, “how is it December already” conversations with friends and colleagues. But at the same time, some things that happened in 2025 already feel like ancient history. My son started high school last year? No he didn’t, he’s been there for years. The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown was released in cinemas last January? Hasn’t that movie been out for five years now? Small wins often come on a monthly or weekly basis, but the fundamental shifts occur over time As a father of two children, I often hear other parents use…

The days of being mistreated by businesses nearly every time we transact online may finally be coming to an end. In October last year, the federal government vowed to ban unfair business practices (also known as unfair trading) in the digital realm and beyond. In November last year, Assistant Minister Andrew Leigh – whose portfolio includes productivity, competition, charities and Treasury – gave a press conference at Parliament House in which he committed to moving forward with the unfair trading ban. “Specifically, we’re going to be getting rid of two practices that have been a scourge for Aussie consumers: subscription traps and drip pricing,” Leigh said, adding that subscription traps “are a problem for three out of four Australians who have subscriptions”. Leigh pointed to cases of drip pricing where…

Consumer advocates have welcomed new details on how Australia’s Scams Prevention Framework (SPF) will operate, but say the protections will take too long to come into force and could be better designed. The draft codes for the framework were released late last year, just after the ACCC revealed that Australians lost $260 million to scams in the first nine months of 2025, a 16% increase on the same period in 2024. The Consumer Action Law Centre says this “surge” came while laws to establish the SPF had “been left to gather dust” since they were passed in Parliament in February. Australians lost $260 million to scams in the first nine months of 2025 The SPF will use the threat of a $50 million fine to force banks, telcos and social…

You might remember that last year, CHOICE launched a campaign demanding that the Commonwealth Bank pay back millions of dollars in fees unfairly charged to customers on low incomes. As part of that campaign, we asked CHOICE members and supporters to sign a petition, calling on CommBank to do the right thing and refund these fees. The response was huge. 27,141 people signed on over the weeks that followed. And in November, after we gave CommBank its fourth ever Shonky Award, we made sure the bank got the message – by delivering a basket of lemons to its Sydney head office, and then presenting the petition the following week along with a special trophy commemorating its multiple Shonky ‘wins’. Two days before Christmas, the pressure told when CommBank announced it…

The Federal Court has ordered online tech giant Google to pay $55 million in penalties for engaging in anti-competitive behaviour when it made deals with Telstra and Optus to pre-install the search engine on Android mobile phones. The ACCC, who brought the case, says the deals between 2019 and 2021 required Telstra and Optus to pre-install Google Search on the phones and not allow the pre-installation of any other search engine. Telstra and Optus in return received a share of ad revenue generated from Google Search on the phones. “This penalty should send a strong message to all businesses that there are serious and costly consequences for engaging in anti-competitive conduct,” says ACCC deputy chair Mick Keogh. “Our market economy is predicated on businesses competing freely with each other, which…

Australians will have to wait a little longer to be rid of pesky card surcharges, after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) delayed a final decision on its proposal to ban debit and credit card surcharges until March. Back in July when it released its draft proposal, the RBA said the move would save consumers an estimated $1.2 billion per year, while businesses would save a similar amount through steps to reduce the interchange fees they pay to card providers. Predictably, not everybody is happy with the proposal. The RBA has faced some strong criticism, as the range of stakeholders who profit from the existing payments system try to preserve their positions. Last year, a CHOICE survey found that two in three people (66%) have often experienced businesses adding on…