Weekes v Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

This case started with a complaint to the ACCC about White Lady Funerals, a business of InvoCare. Mr Steven Michael Weekes alleged false claims by InvoCare and stayed in contact with the ACCC over a lengthy period. The Court record shows that the ACCC later treated the matter as “NFA”, meaning no further action.

The judgment gives a useful picture of how the matter was handled. The ACCC accepted the accuracy of a summary stating that the complaint had been marked no further action because it was not a priority, the information did not merit investigation, it was seen as an individual or localised dispute, and it was considered outside the ACCC’s scope because it concerned the Sex Discrimination Act. The ACCC later told Mr Weekes that the Australian Human Rights Commission was best placed to consider his report.

The dispute that reached the Federal Court was not about whether those original allegations were right or wrong. It was about what happened after the ACCC had effectively closed the matter. In April 2024, the ACCC’s Acting Chief Executive Officer told Mr Weekes that the ACCC is an economy-wide regulator, cannot pursue all matters brought to its attention, is not established to resolve individual disputes, and uses reports to build intelligence and inform broader or systemic priorities. The CEO said the matter was closed and that future correspondence would be read and filed but not answered.

Despite that, on 7 February 2025 Mr Weekes sent a further submission and covering letter. He did not ask the ACCC to exercise a specific statutory power. Instead, he argued that there was a structural bias within the ACCC’s regulatory enforcement framework and asked for formal acknowledgement of several points about impartiality and the ACCC’s duties. The ACCC did not reply. Mr Weekes then went to the Federal Court, arguing that the ACCC had a duty to decide whether to address that submission and that more than four months of silence was an unreasonable delay.

The legal issue was narrow but important. Mr Weekes relied on section 7(1) of the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth). That provision allows a person aggrieved by unreasonable delay to seek review where someone has a duty to make a decision to which the Act applies. So the threshold question was whether the ACCC had a duty to make the decision Mr Weekes said was overdue.

The ACCC objected to the competency of the application. Its position was that no provision of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth), or any other enactment, required it to decide whether to address Mr Weekes’ February 2025 submission. If there was no such duty, there was no “decision to which this Act applies” under the ADJR Act, and the Federal Court had no jurisdiction to hear the case.

The Court referred to the High Court authorities Griffith University v Tang and Fuller v Lawrence. For business readers, the two-step test can be put simply. First, is the decision one that legislation expressly or impliedly requires or authorises? Secondly, does the decision itself affect legal rights or obligations in a way that comes from the statute? If the answer to either step is no, the ADJR Act cannot be used to challenge delay in making that decision.

Perry J held that Mr Weekes had not identified any reviewable decision under an enactment. On the first part of the test, the Court accepted that a decision can sometimes be impliedly authorised by legislation. But that did not help here. Mr Weekes did not identify any provision of the Competition and Consumer Act or any other statute that created a duty to decide whether to address his February 2025 submission about structural bias.

The Court treated that absence as significant. The judgment said that, at most, any ACCC decision not to pursue the February 2025 submission was authorised only in a very general sense by the Competition and Consumer Act. That was not enough. The connection between the text of the Act and the alleged decision was too remote for the decision to have the character of one made under the Act.

On the second part of the test, the Court held that Mr Weekes had also failed to identify any specific substantive power under the Competition and Consumer Act that could eventually be exercised in a way affecting legal rights or obligations. In other words, he had not shown that the alleged decision was a statutory step that itself changed legal positions or was an essential preliminary to a later statutory decision of that kind.

The Court also noted that Mr Weekes’ February 2025 submission and covering letter did not invoke any specific ACCC power or function. They raised a broader concern about structural bias and sought formal acknowledgement of certain propositions. That made it even harder to characterise the ACCC’s silence as a failure to make a statutory decision.

The Court upheld the ACCC’s notice of objection to competency and dismissed the application. Perry J held that there was no “decision … under an enactment” and therefore no “decision to which [the ADJR] Act applies” within the meaning of section 7(1) of the ADJR Act. Because that threshold requirement was not met, the Federal Court lacked jurisdiction to hear and determine the application.

The Court therefore did not move on to any broader merits question about the original complaint against White Lady Funerals or InvoCare. It did not decide whether the ACCC had handled the complaint well as a matter of policy. It did not decide whether the alleged structural bias existed. It decided only that the application fell outside the Court’s jurisdiction under the ADJR Act.

The Court also ordered Mr Weekes to pay the ACCC’s costs as agreed or assessed. Although the Court accepted that Mr Weekes genuinely believed he had brought the case in the public interest, it said the ordinary rule on costs should apply because the application clearly fell outside the Court’s jurisdiction and the ACCC was wholly successful on that point.

Businesses should read this case carefully for what it does and does not say. It does not announce a new consumer law rule. It does not say that the ACCC must ignore complaints. It does not say that a business is safe simply because the ACCC took no further action on one complaint. Instead, it confirms a practical point about regulator process: the ACCC can triage, prioritise and close matters without necessarily making a reviewable statutory decision that a complainant can challenge in court.

The judgment records the ACCC’s explanation that it is an economy-wide regulator, cannot pursue all matters, is not established to resolve individual disputes, and uses reports to build intelligence about broader or systemic issues. For businesses, that means a complaint may still matter even if the ACCC does not investigate it immediately. The information may remain on file and may contribute to a wider picture if similar complaints arise later.

So if your business becomes aware of an ACCC complaint, the sensible response is operational rather than procedural. Review the underlying conduct. Check advertising claims, website statements, sales scripts, customer disclosures, refund practices, complaint handling and internal records. If the issue overlaps with another legal area, such as discrimination law, identify the correct legal framework and regulator rather than assuming it is only an ACCC issue.

This case is also a reminder that complainants face a real threshold problem if they try to force a regulator to answer correspondence through judicial review. Unless a statute requires the regulator to make the decision in question, the case may fail before the court ever considers the substance. That is useful context for businesses dealing with persistent complainants who believe the ACCC must keep responding indefinitely.

If your business is named in a complaint that may have gone to the ACCC, use the complaint as a prompt to review the relevant documents and conduct. Even where the regulator does not actively pursue the matter, repeated complaints can point to a pattern that is worth fixing early.

Start with the customer-facing material connected to the complaint. That may include advertising copy, website claims, social media posts, brochures, quotations, terms and conditions, invoices, refund policies, call scripts and complaint correspondence. Check whether statements are accurate, current, supported by evidence and presented in a way that is unlikely to mislead.

Then look at your internal process. Make sure staff know how to escalate complaints, preserve records and avoid making inconsistent statements. If the issue touches another legal regime, such as anti-discrimination law, privacy law or industry-specific regulation, work out whether specialist advice or a different regulator is relevant. The judgment in this case shows that forum selection matters. A complaint may be outside the ACCC’s practical focus even if the complainant strongly disagrees.

The judgment was delivered by Perry J in the Federal Court of Australia on 10 December 2025. The originating application for judicial review was dismissed, and the applicant was ordered to pay the ACCC’s costs as agreed or assessed.

The decision should be read as a jurisdictional ruling under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth). It is not a merits ruling on the original complaint about White Lady Funerals or InvoCare, and it does not establish a new substantive obligation for businesses under the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) or the Australian Consumer Law.