The short version
- One scheme exists. The Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme has operated since 1 July 2022. It compels vehicle manufacturers to sell service and repair information to independent repairers at no more than fair market value, and to offer it by the day, by the month and by the year.
- A second is being designed. A discussion paper released on 22 May 2026 proposed extending the framework to agricultural machinery and tightening the motor vehicle scheme. Consultation closed on 3 July 2026. No bill had been introduced when we captured this, and reporting suggests the law may not arrive until 2027.
- Consumer electronics are in neither. No phone, tablet, laptop or appliance maker is required to sell repair information, diagnostic software or parts to anyone in Australia.
- What you get instead is the consumer guarantees, including a manufacturer guarantee that spare parts and repair facilities be available for a reasonable time — which a manufacturer can switch off by telling you at the point of sale.
- Europe went the other way. Since 20 June 2025 a phone or tablet sold in the EU must carry a repairability score on its energy label, keep spare parts available for at least seven years, and get operating system updates for at least five.
What the motor vehicle scheme actually does
The scheme was created by the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme) Act 2021 and commenced on 1 July 2022. In outline, a manufacturer that gives its dealer network diagnostic procedures, wiring diagrams, software updates or on-board computer codes must make the same material available for purchase by independent repairers and registered training organisations, at a price no higher than fair market value.
The design detail that gives the scheme its teeth is the pricing granularity. A manufacturer must offer the information by day, by month and by year, or for a period the repairer nominates. That is what stops a workshop being charged for a twelve-month subscription to fix one car.
It is also what produced the scheme’s first enforcement action. In September 2024 the ACCC issued an infringement notice to Honda Australia, which paid $18,780. The ACCC alleged that between 1 July 2022 and 6 May 2024 Honda offered its diagnostic software only as a yearly subscription, denying independent repairers the cheaper daily and monthly options. Contraventions of some scheme provisions carry penalties of up to $10 million each, so the amount paid says more about the infringement-notice mechanism than about the ceiling.
Reasoning beyond the sources: one infringement notice in the scheme’s first years can be read two ways, and both readings are defensible. Either compliance is broadly good, or the regulator is not looking hard at a scheme whose beneficiaries are small businesses that mostly resolve problems commercially. We have not seen data that settles it, and we would treat a confident claim in either direction with suspicion.
On the government’s own account the scheme has worked. A ministerial release dated 6 February 2026 credits it with a $2.4 billion annual increase in automotive industry turnover and with lowering barriers for independent workshops. That is an assertion by the portfolio responsible for the scheme rather than an independent evaluation, and we flag it as such.
Tractors next, on a timeline nobody will commit to
On 1 December 2025 the National Farmers’ Federation announced it had secured a commitment to extend the framework to farm machinery. The substance arrived on 22 May 2026, when the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, the Minister for Small Business and the Minister for Agriculture jointly released a discussion paper. Feedback closed on Friday 3 July 2026.
The paper covers more than tractors. Alongside the extension to agricultural machinery it proposes improvements to the motor vehicle scheme: access to information held in electronic logbooks, access for data aggregators and tool manufacturers, and expanded access to higher-risk repair information with safety and security safeguards attached.
The economic case is a Productivity Commission estimate that extending the right to repair to agriculture could lift annual GDP by about $97 million through grain output alone, purely by cutting machinery downtime during harvest. Julie Collins framed it as choice: the reforms “will give farmers genuine choice about who repairs and services their machinery”. Andrew Leigh put the two sectors side by side: “Whether it’s repairing a car or a tractor, Australian drivers and farmers deserve access to choice and competitive prices.”
Neither release mentions consumer electronics. As at 10 September 2026 we have found no bill before Parliament, and rural reporting has suggested the legislation may not be drafted and presented until 2027.
So what do you actually have when a phone dies?
The consumer guarantees in the Australian Consumer Law, which are automatic, cannot be contracted away, and sit on top of any manufacturer warranty. Three of them matter for repair.
| Guarantee | What it gives you · Where it stops |
|---|---|
| Acceptable quality | Goods must be safe, durable, free of defects and do what such goods ordinarily do. · “Durable” is not defined in years. What is reasonable depends on price, description and the nature of the product, which is exactly the ambiguity a consumer has to argue through. |
| Repairs and spare parts (a manufacturer guarantee) | The manufacturer or importer must take reasonable action to ensure spare parts and repair facilities are reasonably available for a reasonable time after purchase. It applies even though you bought from a retailer. · It does not apply at all if you were told at the time of purchase that parts and repair facilities would not be available after a certain time. |
| Remedies | For a major failure you choose: refund, replacement, or repair. For a minor failure the supplier chooses, and may insist on repairing it within a reasonable time. · Nothing entitles you to do the repair yourself, to buy the part, or to see the service manual. |
Read the middle row again, because it is the whole argument in one line. Australia’s spare parts guarantee is real, it binds the manufacturer directly, and it can be disclaimed at the counter by a sentence in the paperwork. The ACCC’s own guidance says so plainly. Nobody has to publish a price list, hold stock for a fixed period, or sell a part to anyone outside their own service network.
There is one further obligation, and it is the one most people meet without noticing. Under section 103 of the Australian Consumer Law, a repairer must give you a written notice before accepting goods for repair where the goods can store user-generated data, or where the repairer’s practice is to use refurbished parts or to hand back a refurbished unit instead of your own. The refurbished-goods wording is prescribed: “Goods presented for repair may be replaced by refurbished goods of the same type rather than being repaired. Refurbished parts may be used to repair the goods.” The data warning can be in the repairer’s own words. A sign on the wall or a line on a website is not enough — the notice has to be handed, emailed or posted to you, and where it sits inside another document it must be easy to see and clearly set apart.
That notice is worth knowing about for a practical reason rather than a legal one. It is the moment you find out that the phone you hand over may not be the phone you get back.
The recommendations that were made, and what became of them
None of this is for want of advice. The Productivity Commission ran a full public inquiry into the right to repair, sent its report to government on 29 October 2021 and had it released on 1 December 2021. It found significant and unnecessary barriers to repair for some products. Its recommendations included a new guarantee obliging manufacturers to supply software updates for a reasonable period, ACCC guidance on how long common household goods should be expected to last, pecuniary penalties for suppliers and manufacturers who fail to honour consumer guarantees, and a super-complaints process letting consumer organisations act on behalf of the public.
Almost five years on, the motor vehicle scheme is the piece that was built. The rest is still in the policy pipeline. Consumer Affairs Ministers met in November 2025 and listed, among the priorities for 2026, introducing prohibitions and penalties to make the consumer guarantees and supplier indemnification regime more effective. The ACCC has said publicly that failing to honour a consumer guarantee should itself be a contravention carrying penalties. It is not one yet.
What did pass is broader and blunter. The Treasury Laws Amendment (Doubling Penalties for ACCC Enforcement) Act 2026, passed on 26 March 2026, lifted the maximum corporate penalty for competition and consumer law contraventions from $50 million to $100 million per contravention. That matters for misleading conduct and unfair contract terms. It does not reach a manufacturer that simply stops making a part, because that is not a contravention in the first place.
What Europe now requires, for comparison
The contrast is not theoretical, and it is not distant. Two EU instruments — Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 and Energy Labelling Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/1669 — started applying to smartphones, cordless phones and tablets on 20 June 2025.
| Requirement (EU, from 20 June 2025) | Detail |
|---|---|
| Repairability score on the label | A new energy label rates not just energy efficiency but reliability, durability and repairability, alongside battery endurance, protection from dust and water, and resistance to accidental drops. It applies to models already on shelves, not only to new releases. |
| Spare parts, seven years | Key spare parts must be supplied within 5 to 10 working days, for at least seven years after the model stops being sold in the EU. Indicative spare parts price lists are to be published. |
| Operating system updates, five years | At least five years of operating system updates from the date the last unit of the model is placed on the market. |
| Battery endurance | At least 800 full charge cycles while retaining at least 80 per cent of initial capacity. |
| Physical durability | Minimum resistance to accidental drops, scratches, dust and water. |
In the United States the fight has moved on to a narrower and more technical question: parts pairing, the practice of serialising a component so that a device recognises only the specific part it left the factory with, and degrades or warns when a genuine replacement is fitted. Oregon and Colorado have legislated against it, Colorado’s provisions taking effect in January 2026. Published accounts of the exact commencement dates and the model years captured are inconsistent, so treat that detail as unsettled and check the statutes before relying on it. The direction of travel is not in doubt.
Australia has no rule on parts pairing at all.
The practical consequence: the parts you cannot buy
The clearest illustration is Apple’s Self Service Repair store, which sells genuine parts, tools and manuals directly to owners. As reported in July 2026 it covers 65 products across 34 countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and 31 European countries — in 25 languages, with on-device calibration for new or used genuine parts. Australia is not among the 34, and has not been since the program launched in 2022. We have found no announced date for Australian availability.
Reasoning beyond the sources: the map of that program is close to a map of where repair legislation exists or is imminent. Whether the law caused the rollout or merely coincided with it, an Australian owner is downstream of decisions made about other people’s markets. Samsung has taken a somewhat more open line, selling components and working with iFixit, though we could not confirm the current Australian scope of that from a primary source and are not going to assert it.
The consequence for an independent repair shop in Sydney or Bendigo is mundane and severe. It sources parts through grey channels or salvage, cannot always calibrate them, and carries the risk itself. The consequence for you is that the cheap fix down the road is legally permitted and practically constrained, and that a manufacturer’s refusal to sell a $40 part is, in Australia, entirely lawful.
What to do about it now
- Claim against the retailer, not the manufacturer. The consumer guarantees run against the business that sold you the goods. The retailer cannot simply send you to the manufacturer, and cannot make you accept a repair if the failure is major.
- Decide whether the failure is major before you walk in. If it is, you choose the remedy. A phone that will not hold a charge after fourteen months is arguable; a phone that will not power on is not much of an argument.
- Do not accept “out of warranty” as an answer. A manufacturer warranty is an extra promise. The consumer guarantees run for whatever period is reasonable for goods of that price and description, and often outlast it.
- Ask, in writing, how long parts will be available — before you buy. If the answer is a disclaimer, you have learned something useful. If there is no disclaimer, the spare parts guarantee is live.
- Read the repair notice. If nobody hands you one, that is itself a compliance failure, and it is the document that tells you whether you are getting your own device back.
- Keep the evidence. Receipts, the fault described in writing, and dates. Every state and territory fair trading agency runs a free conciliation service, and every one of them starts by asking for those three things.
- If repairability matters to you, read the EU label. A model sold in Europe carries a published repairability score and a parts commitment. The same handset sold here is the same hardware.
The bottom line
Australia has demonstrated, in one sector, that a mandatory information-sharing scheme works: cars, since 2022, with a penalty regime behind it and a government claim of $2.4 billion in additional industry turnover. It is now applying the same template to farm machinery, on the strength of a $97 million estimate for grain alone.
Consumer electronics have no such number attached to them and no such scheme. What they have is a durability guarantee with no defined term, a spare parts guarantee a manufacturer can disclaim at the till, a repair-notice rule that mostly warns you about losing your data, and a set of Productivity Commission recommendations that turn five years old this December. Meanwhile the phone in your pocket, if it were sold in Dublin instead of Darwin, would come with a repairability score on the label and a seven-year parts commitment behind it.
That is not a gap in enforcement. It is a gap in the law, and the discussion paper that closed on 3 July does not close it.
Sources
Dates, figures and quotes above are drawn from these sources, captured 10 September 2026:
- ACCC — Consumer rights and guarantees: the set of automatic guarantees for products and services, and the repairs and spare parts guarantee — that the manufacturer or importer must provide spare parts and repair facilities for a reasonable time after purchase, that it applies even where the consumer did not buy directly from the manufacturer, and that it does not apply where the consumer was told at the time of purchase that repair facilities and spare parts would not be available after a certain time.
- ACCC — Repair notices: when a repair notice must be given, the prescribed refurbished-goods wording, the requirement to warn about possible data loss, the requirement that the notice be handed, emailed or posted rather than displayed as a sign, and the requirement that it be easy to see and clearly set apart where it forms part of another document.
- Competition and Consumer Regulations 2010, reg 91 (AustLII): the regulation prescribing the form of the repair notice required by section 103 of the Australian Consumer Law.
- ACCC — Repair, replace, refund, cancel: the major versus minor failure distinction and who chooses the remedy in each case.
- Joint media release — Keeping machinery moving when it matters most: Right to Repair reforms for farmers and drivers (22 May 2026): the discussion paper, the proposed extension to agricultural machinery, the proposed improvements to the motor vehicle scheme covering electronic logbooks, data aggregators and tool manufacturers and higher-risk repair information, the consultation closing date of Friday 3 July 2026, the $97 million Productivity Commission GDP estimate, and the quotes from Julie Collins and Andrew Leigh. Consumer electronics are not mentioned in the release.
- Treasury Ministers — Right to repair delivering for motorists, small business and the economy (6 February 2026): the scheme operating since July 2022, the fair-market-value pricing obligation, the claimed $2.4 billion annual increase in automotive industry turnover, the $97 million agricultural GDP estimate, and the announcement that consultation on the agricultural extension would follow.
- ACCC — Honda pays penalty for alleged breach of car service and repair information sharing scheme: the $18,780 infringement notice, the alleged conduct between 1 July 2022 and 6 May 2024 of offering diagnostic software only by yearly subscription, the day/month/year pricing obligation, and the maximum penalty of up to $10 million per contravention for certain scheme provisions.
- ABC News — Right to repair reforms to be expanded to farm machinery (2 December 2025): the National Farmers’ Federation announcement of 1 December 2025 that the government had committed to extending the reforms to farm machinery.
- The Land — Farmers face unfair repair bills as fight to fix own gear drags on: the report that no legislation had yet been drafted and that the laws may not be delivered until 2027. Rural press reporting, cited as a secondary source.
- Productivity Commission — Right to Repair, inquiry report: the report sent to government on 29 October 2021 and released on 1 December 2021, its finding of significant and unnecessary barriers to repair, and its recommendations including a software update guarantee, ACCC guidance on expected product life, pecuniary penalties for consumer guarantee breaches and a super-complaints process.
- Treasury Ministers — Consumer Affairs Ministers renew commitment to protecting consumers, with an ambitious agenda for 2026 (November 2025): the 2026 priority of introducing prohibitions and penalties to enhance the effectiveness of the consumer guarantees and supplier indemnification regime.
- Treasury Laws Amendment (Doubling Penalties for ACCC Enforcement) Act 2026 (passed 26 March 2026): the increase in the maximum corporate penalty from $50 million to $100 million per contravention for competition and consumer law breaches.
- European Commission — New EU rules for durable, energy-efficient and repairable smartphones and tablets start applying (20 June 2025): Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670 and Energy Labelling Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/1669, the energy label covering repairability, battery endurance, ingress protection and drop resistance, and the durability requirements.
- Right to Repair Europe — Repairability labels, spare parts and longer support for smartphones and tablets as of June 2025: the requirement to supply key spare parts within 5 to 10 working days for at least seven years after the model stops being sold, at least five years of operating system updates from the last unit placed on the market, batteries rated for at least 800 cycles at 80 per cent capacity, that labels apply to models already on shelves, and that indicative spare parts price lists should be published. An advocacy organisation, cited alongside the Commission’s own release.
- OSnews — Oregon’s governor signs right-to-repair law that bans parts pairing and PIRG Education Fund — Failing the Fix (2026): the US state position on parts pairing, including Oregon and Colorado. We attempted to load the PIRG report directly and were blocked by the site, so the commencement dates in circulation are secondary and, as noted in the text, inconsistent between accounts.
- Apple — Self-Servicing Account Program and contemporaneous reporting on the Self Service Repair store: the program covering 65 products across 34 countries in 25 languages as reported in July 2026 — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and 31 European countries — with on-device calibration for new or used genuine parts, and Australia absent from that list. We could not find an Apple page listing Australia as a Self Service Repair region, and no availability date has been announced.
- Apple Newsroom (AU) — Apple to expand repair options with support for used genuine parts (April 2024): the calibration of used genuine parts, for context on the parts-pairing question.