The Trade Practices Act: A hard act to follow? Online consumers and the new Australian consumer law landscape

As on line traders have been poor at developing consumer trust in e-commerce, the law plays a crucial role in creating such trust. At the start of2010, we published a paper outlining a model to serve as an international best practice standard for the protection of e-commerce consumers. In this article, which was written with the assistance of a generous grant from the auDA Foundation, we have applied that best practice standard to assess how effectively protected Australian e-consumers are under Australia's recently reformed consumer law landscape.\nWe focus on two areas of central importance to the effective pro­ tection of e-consumers in which Australian law fails to provide adequate protection. First, the law must ensure that consumers are afforded access to appropriate information. Second, it is of fundamental importance that the law caters for access to appro­ priate dispute resolution mechanisms.