CHOICE July 2021

It might seem odd to devote an edition of CHOICE to travel right now, but we are a nation of travellers and while COVID-19 has closed our international borders, many of us are still hitting the road at every opportunity. Resorts from Broome to Tasmania are booked out for months in advance, and hotels and restaurants are struggling to find enough staff. The Queensland government has even resorted to offering free airfares and cash payments to people willing to move north for tourism jobs. Until recently, this travel has been limited to Australia but the new concept of ‘travel bubbles’ has opened the doors to New Zealand. This has me reflecting on CHOICE’s relationship with our neighbours across the Tasman. If the vision of our founders had been realised, I might have…

In 2019, we gave AMP a Shonky Award for what we described as its “grossly underperforming superannuation division, which has the lowest customer satisfaction ratings on record and boasted no fewer than a million-plus inactive accounts across its AMP Retirement Trust and Super Savings Trust products in 2018”. And now this: in late May, ASIC announced that it was taking several divisions of AMP – including super, financial planning and life insurance – to court. The charge? According to the regulator, “these entities were involved in charging life insurance premiums and advice fees to more than 2000 customers despite being notified of their death”. The acts of fleecing the deceased occurred from May 2015 to August 2019. They involved deducting about $600,000 in life insurance premiums and financial advice fees from the…

Breville’s The FoodCycler ($499, breville.com.au) is a food disposal system that’s claimed to reduce your household waste by more than 80% of its original volume, turning food waste into odourless, nutrient-rich “EcoChips”. It aims to minimise the amount of household food waste going into landfill each week. How does it work? The FoodCycler operates in three cycles to pulverise and dehydrate food waste – a drying, grinding and cooling cycle. The average cycle runs for four to six hours, plus the cooling cycle. It has a collection bucket that sits inside the unit that you fill with food waste. We ran three different tests with a range of food waste. One cycle ran for four hours, another for seven hours and 40 minutes (due to the amount of moisture in the bin) and…

The Victorian government will ban electricity and gas retailers from using high-pressure sales tactics for energy retail sales, such as door-to-door sales and cold calling. The ban will come into effect at the end of 2021 The government will also introduce fines of up to $1 million for energy retailers that wrongfully disconnect vulnerable customers. Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change Lily D’Ambrosio says the Victorian government is “banning high-pressure sales tactics like unsolicited door-to-door sales and cold-calling to protect Victorian households from being taken advantage of by dodgy energy companies”. The Consumer Action Law Centre has welcomed the move. CEO Gerard Brody says, “These new laws should mean fewer Victorians will experience wrongful disconnections or intrusive door-knocking or cold-calling.” The government says it will also ban solar businesses under the Solar Homes…

Basic hospital policies offer the lowest tier of health insurance at the lowest price point. Because they give you very little cover, we don’t recommend them from a health perspective. But if you want to reduce your burden of tax and loadings, here are the cheapest policies in each state (yearly premium for a single person without the health insurance rebate): ACT and NSW: Frank Basic (Plus), $500 excess, $1139. Cover: None in private hospitals, but it covers a range of services in public hospitals, plus emergency ambulances. Victoria, Northern Territory and South Australia: HCF Accident Only Basic, $750 excess, $1204 in Victoria, $450 in the Northern Territory and $1111 in South Australia. Cover: Emergency ambulance, and private hospital for the initial treatment after an accident if you go to emergency within 24 hours.…

Internet service providers Dodo and iPrimus have been fined $2.5 million by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for misleading claims about their NBN speeds. Both providers are part of Vocus Group, which is the fourth-largest telecommunications provider in the country. The companies both admitted inappropriate testing methodology when calculating their typical evening-speed claims, which were advertised between March 2018 and April 2019. “Accurate information about broadband speeds, particularly during the busy period when consumers are most likely to use their services, is essential for consumers to be able to compare broadband offers and pick the best service for their needs,” ACCC chair Rod Sims says. “The ACCC brought this case because we were concerned that the methodology which the Vocus Group used as the basis for its speed claims cherry-picked…