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Australia bans the effect, not the intention

Section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law prohibits a person, in trade or commerce, from engaging in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive, and the prohibition is written to the conduct and its likely effect without any element of intent or of actual consumer loss.

Copy that a team believed and a lawyer waved through still breaches this if an ordinary Australian buyer would be led into error, which makes the reasonable-reader test, not the drafting intent, the thing worth arguing about before launch.

94

94 of a possible 97Tier A, primary document or measured outcome. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 97, however good it looks.

Verified August 6, 2026Rechecked every 365 days, next by August 6, 2027.

Constraint

Held since January 1, 2011A rule, law or policy that limits what you may do or say. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

Section 18 is amended to add a mental element, a materiality threshold or a requirement of proven consumer loss, or a superior Australian court holds that intent is required for a contravention.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

  1. Tier Aregulation

    Office of Parliamentary Counsel (Federal Register of Legislation): Competition and Consumer Act 2010, Schedule 2 — the Australian Consumer Law (C2004A00109, compilation 165)

    18 Misleading or deceptive conduct (1) A person must not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive. (2) Nothing in Part 3‑1 (which is about unfair practices) limits by implication subsection (1).

    The whole section. Its brevity is the point: there is nothing in it to qualify, and the absence of a mental element is visible on the face of the text rather than inferred from case law.

    Read 2026-08-06 · Open government · page hash 4bb6c2116d45

  2. Tier Aregulation

    Office of Parliamentary Counsel (Federal Register of Legislation): Competition and Consumer Act 2010, Schedule 2 — the Australian Consumer Law (C2004A00109, compilation 165)

    29 False or misleading representations about goods or services (1) A person must not, in trade or commerce, in connection with the supply or possible supply of goods or services or in connection with the promotion by any means of the supply or use of goods or services: (a) make a false or misleading representation that goods are of a particular standard, quality, value, grade, composition, style or model or have had a particular history or particular previous use

    Section 29 sits beside section 18 and carries a pecuniary penalty where section 18 does not, so the specific representation and the general prohibition are enforced through different doors.

    Read 2026-08-06 · Open government · page hash 4bb6c2116d45

History

  1. v1created

    Initial entry from primary legislation, read 2026-08-06. Titles resolved through the Federal Register of Legislation's catalogue API, which reports in-force status; the text comes from the Register's unpacked EPUB at the dated version path, because the document pages are a JavaScript shell and the `/latest/` alias silently serves part one of any multi-part Act.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

  • au
  • advertising
  • claims
  • consumer-law
  • enforcement
  • compliance

Cite this entry

“Australia bans the effect, not the intention”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:au:misleading-conduct-needs-no-intent, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/au--misleading-conduct-needs-no-intent. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

For a deck, a brief or a chat.

Free to quote, cite and act on. Not to resell or redistribute — the sources ask that of us, and each one’s terms are named. Machine-readable: entries.json carries this record under the id omr:au:misleading-conduct-needs-no-intent, with the same evidence and falsifier.

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