Busy 12 months to come with five goals on the Rod Sims ‘to do’ list

ACCC chairman Rod Sims alongside Sydney Harbour. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Regulator in chief Rod Sims has a year to go in his third term as ACCC chair. And in that 12 months, he has set five goals which if achieved will have a lasting impact on corporate Australia.

The first is to build on higher consumer law penalties after the Consumer Law Act was changed in 2018 to allow much higher fines. “We haven’t taken full advantage of the new change. We got a $125m penalty against Volkswagen and $50m against Telstra, but that needs to happen more often so that boardrooms really take note of consumer law” he said. As Sims warned business in The Australian in December 2018, “Our job is to take people to court. Hit them hard. Send a message. That’s the only way we are going to get respect for the law.”

Goal two also targets the big end of town when in August he will prosecute changes to merger laws. Cases like the TPG Vodafone merger and AGL’s acquisition of Macquarie Telecom have steeled the regulator to advocate for more competition on price and service delivery.

“We’ve got a lot of issues to face as a country on merger policy and it’s going to come down to how much you are on the side of big companies getting bigger and stable returns versus how much you want competition and dynamism in your economy. I’m clearly in favour of the later. I’d like to have at least those argument adequately canvassed and debated.”

Thirdly Sims says he is determined to “keep on my privatisation bandwagon”, a reference to his frustration with governments selling assets as unregulated monopolies to get top dollar upfront. A decision by the regulator is pending on whether it appeals the Federal Court’s latest ruling on the Port of Newcastle.

In 2015 the ACCC stopped the Port of Melbourne raising rents by 750 per cent just as it was being sold by the state government. “We stepped in and through advocacy got them to back down, partly because there was an opposition in Victoria picking up our words and firing them at the government. It ended up being a 30 per cent increase which of course costs exporters and importers serious money and a drag on the economy.”

Fourthly, and crucially says Sims, he wants to see a reset of regulatory arrangements for NBN Co. in the prices it charges the telco retailers. “They don’t work at the moment, we’ve spent $50bn on this thing.” He argues that shutdowns have shown just how much Australians need the service. “The whole CVC pricing, the fixed price versus the variable price – Telstra, Optus, TPG Vodafone are very concerned that they get charged too much for the usage, so big issues there with how we price the NBN.”

The last goal is in digital platforms. Following the ACCC inquiry, Sims believes there is now a very successful media bargaining code in place in Australia. “The deals that have been done are what I was hoping for. Just about every media company has got a significant reward for the content they produce which is really important. Now we have to turn our attention to the apps market, the search market, the Adtech market and work out what the answer is in those areas. I’ll be putting a lot of effort in the next 12 months doing that working very closely with my international colleagues, with whom I’m very well connected.”