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9 Mar, 2021 Author Ranina Sanglap
Australia s buy-now-pay-later players may need more regulation to protect customers after the point-of-sale credit industry has grown rapidly in recent years, helped in part by an absence of oversight, experts say.
Companies such as Afterpay Ltd., Zip Co. Ltd. and Brighte Capital Pty. Ltd. have attracted droves of consumers, especially younger buyers on e-commerce platforms, by allowing them to pay for their purchases in installments and not charging them interest. That has also led to criticism of their lending practices, mainly from customers being charged heavy late fees.
Buy-now-pay-later, or BNPL, players have so far avoided regulation as provisions of the Australian National Consumer Credit Protection Act of 2009 do not apply to certain types of loans, including interest-free credit for a short term. The industry adopted a code of conduct for self-regulation from Mar
Image source: Getty Images
Australia is currently approaching its 10th year of wage stagnation and underemployment, and Professor Ross Garnaut, the University of Melbourne’s Professorial Research Fellow in Economics, believes the situation is worse than we think.
Professor Garnaut was quoted by the ABC as saying the increasing incomes of Australia’s largest earners have been disguising falling wage growth for everyday Australians.
EY.com reported there are approximately 44 million hours each week of spare capacity in Australia’s labour market. That equates to $649 million a week not reaching household pockets.
In his new book
, Reset: Restoring Australia after the Pandemic Recession, Professor Garnaut has described the Australian economy between 2013 and 2019 as the “dog days”, and said the government’s actions keep Australian’s underemployed.
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