Council of Australia Has Found That Nearly Three in Four Lighting Products Sold Through Popular Online Marketplaces Fail to Meet Australian

The industry body is calling for online retailers to remove non-compliant products from their Australian websites. The LCA assessed 131 lighting products purchased from platforms including Temu, AliExpress, Amazon, eBay and Kogan, finding 73 per cent were non-compliant with Australian standards. Three downlights selected for independent laboratory testing all failed a required safety test and caught fire when exposed to heat and flame.

Two of the samples were destroyed during a high-voltage strength test. The report noted that two of the products that failed laboratory testing could not be identified, traced or recalled because they did not carry a model number. "Even armed with laboratory evidence of serious safety defects, a regulator would struggle to identify the responsible supplier, compel a recall, or prevent the same product being re-listed the following day under a different seller name, the report said.

"These are the two ways electrical products kill people: fire and shock, said LCA chief executive Malcolm Richards. "This is no longer a question of whether someone gets hurt. It is a question of when, and of who will be held responsible when it happens, and right now the answer to that is nobody." Richards said the products are available at a "very cheap and attractive" price, warning that homeowners buying them "think they're upgrading their lighting but all they're going to do is ignite a significant fire or cause a shock to someone in their own home.

The report found Temu and AliExpress scored the worst, with none of the lighting products sampled from those platforms passing compliance. Only 8 per cent of tested Amazon lighting products passed, along with 12 per cent of eBay lighting products." Richards said the council wrote to the platforms in June with the results, and Temu was the only platform to remove all of its 240V lighting products from its Australian website, while Amazon, AliExpress and Kogan did not respond. "Temu proved this is fixable in a week, said Richards.

"The others had the same evidence for two months and are still selling. That is a choice, not a technical problem. The council has called for the online marketplaces to pull all unregistered 240V lighting products from their Australian listings, and for more regulatory powers and legal accountability for online marketplaces selling electrical products.

Bea Sherwood, senior campaigns and policy advisor at consumer advocacy group Choice, said research showed about 6 per cent of people buying products on online marketplaces suffered an injury or property damage due to an unsafe product. "We're not seeing isolated reports or incidents, we're seeing people who have experienced harm multiple times from buying products online," she said. Sherwood described Australia's product safety regime as "a bit of a patchwork system, noting that many people assume products sold online must be safe, "but that's actually not the case.

She said Choice had similar experiences to the LCA when trying to raise concerns with the platforms, and that the online marketplaces had proved unwilling to remove dangerous products. We need the government to step in to make sure that everything that people buys is safe, because at the moment it is not.