Your Right to Repair

Campaigns » Your Right to Repair

The VFF’s campaign for the right to repair farm machinery

Barriers to the repair of farm machinery such as difficulty accessing parts and restrictions on using independent repairers are serious and long standing for Australian agriculture. 

Farmers do not share the same consumer rights in comparison to many similar industries when it comes to farm machinery maintenance and repair.

While many individual dealers and manufacturers provide excellent products and service, there remain very few avenues of recourse for consumers in the event something goes wrong.

That’s why the VFF strongly supports the need for greater competition and consumer protections within the agricultural machinery after-sales market. We also are calling for the Australian Consumer Guarantee to be amended to include agricultural machinery.

The VFF is leading advocacy efforts to see these changes are made. 

How you can help us fight for right to repair

The Productivity Commission recently released a draft report on the Right to Repair in Australia, including a discussion of barriers to repair for agricultural machinery and the potential to establish a right of repair for such machinery.

To assist with the analysis for its final report, the Commission is seeking additional information about the repair experiences of agricultural machinery owners.

Farmers can undertake a short survey to provide feedback on any recent repair they have had to undertake on their machinery. These responses will help build a strong case for the rules we need. 

The survey takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete and closes on 26 August 2021. 

Further updates on our Your Right to Repair campaign will be posted to this page. To discuss this issue with the VFF, please contact the Policy Team at [email protected]