Product Standards
Product standards provide a method for determining whether a product is safe and they ensure the community is protected from unsafe or dangerous items.
Standards Australia
Standards Australia publishes Australian Standards, which provide manufacturers and suppliers with benchmarks for safety and quality. The Australian Standards are designed to help manufacturers and suppliers ensure that a product is fit for its purpose and consistently performs in the way it was intended.
There are two types of Australian Standards: Voluntary Standards and Mandatory Standards:
- Voluntary Standards are not legal requirements; however, they provide manufacturers with a benchmark for product safety and quality; and
- Mandatory standards contain safety, labelling and design requirements, which must be met by law. They are established when there is a clear risk to consumers if certain standards are not met.
An Australian Standard can be made mandatory when:
- it can be demonstrated through injury data research and analysis that a particular product or group of products (such as toys) have the potential to cause injury; and
- an industry is not voluntarily supplying goods that meet the safety requirements of a standard; or
- other approaches such as industry codes of conduct or consumer education are not successful or viable.
Mandatory Standards
Mandatory standards stipulate design, construction, or labelling standards that manufacturers and suppliers are required by law to meet in order to ensure that the products they are supplying are safe. Mandatory standards are created for products that could pose a particularly high risk to consumers.
Two types of mandatory standards exist, both of which protect consumers by creating minimum specifications with which products must comply in order to be suitable for sale.
- Safety standards require goods to comply with particular design or construction rules (such as those for motorcycle and bicycle helmets) or to carry certain warning labels (such as those for children's nightwear and flotation toys); and
- Information standards require prescribed information to be provided with goods often in a particular way.
It is a criminal offence to supply goods that do not comply with a mandatory standard. Penalties for non-compliance range from $20,000 to $100,000.
Further information regarding product standards, including the option to purchase relevant standards, is available from Standards Australia or from our product safety database.