A long-running subscription rip-off ended with refunds and a $10 million penalty. More importantly, it showed what government can achieve when it sides with consumers against corporate power.
Usually there is enough folly and perfidy in Australian politics to fill many columns every week. This week, though, the story is one of a politician doing what politicians are supposed to do: improve the well-being of their constituents, especially in the face of big corporate interests.
It began when the ice-maker in our fridge stopped making ice. Yes, I know this is very much a first-world problem, even in the tropics. That was in November, 2022.
We turned to self-help and Google, as you do, and came across “Just Answer”. I felt sure there might be a simpler and cheaper solution than replacing the fridge. There was a fee of only few dollars, so why not.
It was nearly a year later that I noticed an entry on the credit-card statement saying: “JUSTANSWER *REPAIRM, 1800727139 AUS. • RETAIL PURCHASE-INTERNATIONAL 20/01 $53”. Hang on, I thought, that was months ago and was supposed to be $5 not $53.
I checked back through previous months’ statements to find 10 payments of $53 recorded on the 23 rd of each month.
“The underhand cads,” I said to myself – or words to that effect.
I wanted some answers from “JustAnswer”. So, I rang them. The usual “we are experience longer than usual waiting times” came through. It is self-evidently a lie because the longer than usual waiting times are so usual that they are now part of the standard recorded message.
By the time you get an answer, you are fuming. This is why corporate la-la lines and public counters are festooned with “zero-tolerance” messages. Sane, mild-mannered customers have been driven to fury by the chronic understaffing of phone helplines and counters by corporations and governments.
Anyway, my request for a refund of the nine $53 monthly payments was met with a refusal and an explanation that I had “subscribed” to JustAnswer for $53 a month indefinitely. I told the minion that I intended to complain to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and that I hoped the ACCC would inflict a lot of pain on his company.
He at least agreed to unsubscribe me – without referring me back to their website where the unsubscribe button was harder to find than a Monet painting without a haystack.
While all this was going on, one of the, if not the, most effective and diligent Ministers in the Labor Government had been at work.
Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, has been working on consumer protection since coming to office in 2022. He has especially targeted hidden transaction fees and subscription traps.
“Too many Australians have clicked “buy” only to discover extra charges at the final screen or found themselves locked into subscriptions that are far easier to start than to stop,” Leigh said. “These practices chip away at household budgets and undermine trust in the marketplace.”
Leigh has steered through new prohibitions and penalties that reinforce consumer guarantees, improve supplier accountability, improve product safety, boost fairness and competition, particularly in the supermarket sector, by improving unit pricing, tackling shrinkflation, increasing funding for ACCC investigations and enforcement, cracking down on supermarket price gouging, expanding right‑to‑repair reform, banning non‑compete clauses for workers, and providing protections to small businesses and franchisees against unfair practices.
This sort of work should be the rule, not the exception, for Ministers.
It is part of the slow reversal of decades of private-sector worship – outsourcing and privatisation in the naïve belief that it would be more efficient and, because of competition, cheaper and that no-one in the private sector would immorally line their own pockets at the expense of consumers and the public.
Why hasn’t it happened with gambling? Surely, it should be just as hard for the gaming industry to defend exploitation of the vulnerable and addicted as it has been for the corporate sector to defend underhand practices. But they seem to have managed it. They have got the Albanese Government like a terrified rabbit in the headlights. And the Opposition is equally weak.
Voters, the public, and consumers are no longer willing to trust the private sector to efficiently, effectively and honestly deliver. Thirty years of experience tells us that that is folly. Ripping people and government off is in the DNA of big corporations. The disjoin between boards, shareholders and upper management, on one hand, and consumers, employees, and contractors, on the other hand, is so great that morality and fairness easily fall into the abyss.
We want government to act for us against these corporate swine. Voters, the public, and consumers have enough to aggravate them (climate change, plastics, cost of living, wars, access to health ad so on) without being exposed to the ravages of corporate greed.
If only governments could get rid of their dependence on corporate donations and their fear of well-financed corporate scare campaigns, they could attend to what they should be doing: looking after the well-being of voters. That is the way to get re-elected. Giving the ACCC more money and staff to fight battles that ordinary consumers (even those with law degrees) cannot fight on their own will endear voters to government. Government would be on their side.
As a result of ACCC action, we got an email last week (nearly four years after the rip-off) saying; “JustAnswer admits that, between 1 November 2022 and 22 August 2025, it misled Australian consumers about the total price they needed to pay to use the service. We represented that the total price was a one-off joining fee (for example, AU$2), when in fact a much higher ongoing monthly subscription fee was also payable to use our service. The ACCC brought a court action against JustAnswer for this conduct in the Federal Court of Australia. With JustAnswer’s agreement, the court has ordered JustAnswer to pay refunds to eligible Australian consumers who were misled.”
All the bogus monthly fees have been returned to us. Also, JustAnswer answered with a $10 million penalty imposed by the ACCC. Yippee!
The 1990s government attitude of sitting back and letting the private sector “get on with it” has given rise to the “gutful” attitude – a gutful of corporate greed and a gutful of government somnolence. It can be turned around by standing up not just to online corporate exploiters but also to the gaming, media, fossil-fuel, hi-tech, military-industrial corporates who ride roughshod over the broad public interest. That is the path to make whingeing One Nation irrelevant.
By the way, we never got the ice-maker to work and we now have a standalone one which works splendidly.
Republished from Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull has written for The Canberra Times for 30 years on a huge range of topics, but mainly legal and constitutional. He was Editor for seven years. He taught journalism at the University of Canberra, and is the author of ‘The High Court of Australia 1903-2003’ and ‘Canberra – Australia’s National Capital’. He is also a marine rescue skipper on the Great Barrier Reef with Marine Rescue Queensland.