Right to Repair Lessons from Australia's Success

Discover the groundbreaking journey behind Australia's Right to Repair legislation as we sit down with host, Stacey Miller, and her guests, Stuart Charity, CEO of the Australian Aftermarket Automotive Association (AAAA), and Lesley Yates, AAAA's Director of Government Relations. These trailblazers unravel the decade-long advocacy effort that culminated in a historic legislative victory in June 2021. By tactfully addressing automakers' concerns over intellectual property and safety, and drawing on international alliances with groups like the Auto Care Association, Stuart and Leslie showcase how strategic cooperation and relentless dedication can overcome formidable opposition.

Hear how a grassroots campaign brought Australian politicians face-to-face with independent repairers, catalyzing unprecedented bipartisan support. Through hands-on workshops and education, this initiative illuminated the pressing challenges faced by repair shops, hastening the bill's progress through Parliament. This inspiring story not only underscores the shared global momentum of the Right to Repair movement but also offers invaluable insights for advocates in the United States and beyond. Join us for an essential conversation on sustained advocacy's power to drive meaningful change.

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Chapters

• 0:13 Global Right to Repair Legislation Success
• 12:30 Right to Repair Success and Challenges

Transcript

Stacey Miller: 0:13

Welcome to Auto Care On Air, a candid podcast for a curious industry. I'm Stacey Miller, Vice President of Communications at the Auto Care Association, and this is Traction Control, where we chat about recent news from the global to the local level and what it may mean to the industry, featuring guests on the front lines. Let's roll Well. Today I have with me in my studio Stuart Charity, who is the CEO of AAAA, which is the Australian Aftermarket Automotive Association oh, I had to slow down while I was saying that and I also have Leslie Yates, who is Director of Government Relations at that same organization. Welcome to you both, Thank you.

Stuart Charity: 0:54

Thanks for having us.

Stacey Miller: 0:55

Oh, you guys traveled a long way to Las Vegas for Apex 2024.

Stacey Miller: 1:00

Always a pleasure to have you in studio and at Apex and I'm really excited to have this conversation because we just had an election day. We ended our Congress, we're looking forward to 2025 and reintroducing our Repair Act, which is the right to repair, and every year here actually at Apex, we convene an annual meeting called the Associations in Motion, an annual meeting called the associations in motion, and that brings together global leaders of associations across the countries to discuss really vital issues, one of them being right to repair, one of them being workforce development, another one being trade show development and industry development and really exciting stuff, and we've had a really phenomenal time collaborating with you guys on right to repair. Uh, what areair, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities and what are the commonalities across the globe, of which we're finding there are many. So we have a bit of envy here in the States, because I know in Australia, your Right to Repair bill passed. So congratulations to you both and I would love to hear let's start with you, Stuart.

Stuart Charity: 2:03

What happened?

Stacey Miller: 2:04

when did it pass happen and what does that mean?

Stuart Charity: 2:07

Yeah, thanks, stacey, and I've got to say we couldn't have got our right to repair bill without the support of the Auto Care Association.

Stacey Miller: 2:16

Many, many years ago.

Stuart Charity: 2:17

It was a 10 year journey to actually get the legislation through Parliament and we reached out to Auto Care and we've had great support all the way along and learnt so much from your Massachusetts legislation on how to structure the messages, how the car industry were going to try and fight the legislation and just some tactical things, and it's really been instrumental. So we went on a 10-year journey and we ended up in June 2021 getting our federal bill through both houses of parliament within a space of about a two-week period, and a big celebration, and it's now been in place for about two and a half years.

Stacey Miller: 3:01

Wow, and how quickly were you guys able to implement that. So it passed. And then how did you make sure that that was effective?

Lesley Yates: 3:10

We didn't have a great deal of time but you know, when you fight for a law so hard, you can't really complain that they've passed it.

Stacey Miller: 3:18

So we just had to scramble and again leverage the NASDA experience.

Lesley Yates: 3:23

So we already had a model of information sharing that we could leverage and, again, we couldn't have really hit the ground running without the support of AutoCare and NASDEF, because we effectively cooperated with your existing system. But yeah, it took a while. We still had people months after the legislation, stuart, saying wait, what? What happened? There's a law and the good news, once you've got a law, is it's easy to explain to the industry how the world has changed and to the automakers no, that's against the law. Great, and that's an easy message to put out there. So it took a while for people to catch up, but the messaging is quite simple it's against the law to withhold service and repair information from independent mechanics. That's it.

Stacey Miller: 4:08

I mean such a vital victory when we talk about the scope of this issue, because the more we talk about it obviously AutoCare has talked about it a lot on the state level and we got really deep into the federal level over the past couple of years but realizing it's a global issue and different countries are at different places when it comes to the law right, I think South Africa also had a victory. Europe has been working to get it passed, but I don't think they've been as successful In Canada. Same thing right. So they had a right to repair law, like a formal law that they passed, but not an automotive specific one.

Stacey Miller: 4:40

So we're trying to follow all these things very closely and it seems like there's a lot of commonalities across the countries when it comes to the opposition to these laws, and I'm so in awe of the fact that you guys were able to overcome that opposition. What type of things did you hear from the automakers in-country, if anything?

Stuart Charity: 4:58

One of the disadvantages we have is the automakers are very powerful. They've got a lot of lawyers and a lot of influence over government.

Stuart Charity: 5:06

But the advantage we have is they're global companies, so they operate in the same way in every single market. So it doesn't matter where you go, the arguments are the same. So the arguments were that it was their intellectual property that there were safety risks. You can't give technicians information on high voltage because they'll electrocute themselves. You can't get security concerns, so repairers are going to steal their customers' cars. That's not a very good business model Intellectual property, you know.

Stuart Charity: 5:44

But the good thing was that we actually knew what their arguments were going to be before they even made them, because of the international experience. So we actually put together and we're actually sharing this as a resource for the rest of the world. We put together a list of what the arguments the car industry would make and what really is happening. And we gave those to our legislators and said the car companies are going to come to you and they're going to lobby and they're going to tell you these things. This is what you're going to tell you. And they're going to tell you and this is what the truth is and in fact we had our alternative prime minister launching that they were going to support a right to repair legislation if they were elected into the next parliament. And he was reading from our brochure Wow. So that's a real advantage to have that kind of insight into how the car companies are going to fight us and to have our arguments already laid out and makes it a lot easier to prosecute it.

Lesley Yates: 6:45

Yeah right, I think it's a good message about advocacy that we can get so caught up in, why we're right that we need this information, because consumers should have a choice of repairer, and we forget that we need to counter what they're going to say. And it was really powerful to say here's what we think, but the car company is going to come in the door after us. The automakers are going to tell you and these are their top three arguments and let us answer that for you now. So I think it was a lesson that we had to learn. It was a little hard fought, but I think that anticipating what your opposition is going to do is quite clever.

Stacey Miller: 7:20

I mean it's weird, but it's comforting to know that they're using the same talk track across the countries. Because when you said that in my mind I was like, oh, I know the answer to that. I know the answer to that, leslie. You had described the document that you made the excuses and the reality. You had said that was a little blunt. You characterize it as blunt and I'm kind of jealous. I want to get a chance to read through that, because maybe we need to be a little bit more blunt in some of this language as well.

Lesley Yates: 7:48

Yes, I think so. In Australia we talk quite plainly and when I showed this is the advantage of us belonging to a global network, because the excuses are all the same and when I put forward how we answer, those people's eyebrows went up. I said you can't say that. I said, oh yeah, we did and we look. We have to stop short of saying they're lying. That's not going to be helpful. But yeah, we know how to point out a falsehood in very plain English. Gosh.

Stacey Miller: 8:16

Yeah, I like the word lie. I think our document said myth busting at the top and I felt like it was.

Lesley Yates: 8:24

so it's not a myth, it's a lie.

Stuart Charity: 8:27

They're doing it very intentionally to support their commercial interests. There's no myths about it.

Lesley Yates: 8:32

Right. Sometimes I wonder when we we're always the underdogs in this. All throughout the world, the aftermarket are the underdogs. We're fighting some very huge commercial interests and we are fiercely independent. That's who we are. And sometimes I wonder why we're playing the game according to rules that they set. We're a bit too polite.

Stacey Miller: 8:54

We are very polite, and I'm very proud of the way that we've interacted throughout this process. I don't know about you guys, but when we started this fight in Massachusetts, you know, we didn't pick the fight right. Like, we identified that there was an issue, we asked them to come to the table. They wouldn't come to the table. Thus, we had to go the legislative route and, you know, the moment we did that, they chose to slander our industry, you know, and it's we could have said a lot of things back. We could have called out their lies, we could have slandered them for some of their practices, but we haven't done that. Because, you know, though, this is a David and Goliath fight. Like, we actually don't want to sling the stones, we just want to place them nicely where they belong and make sure the person can keep driving Right.

Stuart Charity: 9:40

That's a great point, and I think there's a couple of things. Here. We are actually telling the truth and we're defending consumers' rights. At the end of the day, this is about a car owner's basic rights to be able to choose who repairs their vehicle, what parts are fitted on it, and to go to their trusted person, whoever that is, and they shouldn't be directed by anyone, any sort of technological or market barrier. So fundamentally, that's what this is all about, and it's so fantastic that we're on the right side and we can argue with integrity and we can sleep at night. That's right.

Stuart Charity: 10:18

The car industry is almost in Australia, hung itself as a lobby group. They not only in this space, but in virtually every engagement they've had with government, they're always trying to run a line and defend the truth or outright lie, and their credibility is shot. Now to the point where legislators come to us when the car industry has gone into them on a position and it might not even be, it might be on EV transition or an issue that we've got an interest in, but not necessarily a dog in the fight and they will come to us and say you know, the automakers have said this. What do you think? Because the government don't believe them anymore.

Stacey Miller: 10:57

Wow, wow, that's powerful. That's extremely powerful. I want to ask you a question about your campaign, because I think there was something very unique about your campaign that led to your success and it seems so simple, but it was very much an aha moment for me in that you guys really engaged your workshops or, as we call them here, repair shops, repair facilities. So tell me about how you engaged your workshops and why that was so powerful.

Lesley Yates: 12:00

It was powerful because of our footprint. So we knew very early that we have many more repair shops than there are dealerships, and Australia is a very big country. So we knew that we needed to find a way to show politicians how thick we were on the ground, because if you can't have your choice of repair, you're going to be driving hundreds of kilometers for the authorised dealership. So that's where it started, and then we thought what better way to show them than to bring them into the workshop, right? What is lovely about that campaign is that I think we saw about 80 politicians, so I think probably one in two Australian politicians was exposed to an automotive independent repairer. Australian politicians was exposed to an automotive independent repairer. And what is lovely about that is when Stuart and I were talking to workshops about hosting a politician because we identified which ones we wanted each of the workshops would say oh, I can't do that. You people talk to politicians. I don't Forgetting or not knowing that they're precisely the people that politicians want to talk to. They're real people, they're employers.

Lesley Yates: 13:05

A lot of our shops are family owned. There were always stories in the workshop of employing a young person who had gone off the rails or a contribution that they were making to the local football club. It's a beautiful story and they all worked, walked out converts. But the other added benefit for us as an industry association was, I think, our shops absolutely felt emboldened. I'm part of the campaign I'm making and we would say, constantly, you are making a difference. This isn't your industry association going to the hill constantly. Yeah, you're doing it. Yeah, that it's a two way engagement. We're really proud of that. We know now too, that when we have to do it again, we've already got workshops who are not going.

Stacey Miller: 13:48

Summit, which you just referenced, you know we bring our members to the hill or we advocate on the hill, but when you actually bring them to talk to their lawmaker and they walk the halls of congress and they realize that they can impact change, it makes you feel a lot less like one in a hundred and something million right, yep, and to bring as many people as together to support that mission, and then you actually made something happen. I I'm extremely jealous because this is what dreams are made of. This is what we need to happen in the United States to engage those repair shops. What was your education campaign like on the issue? I mean, did you feel like it was a pretty uphill battle to engage those workshops on right to repair or did they get it pretty, pretty quickly when you went out to them with that story?

Stuart Charity: 14:44

it was interesting, they got it. They were a little bit nervous and and we've taken workshops to to canberra our parliament house as well and that was a very, very successful exercise and they were terrified, uh, and most of the workshops were were pretty apprehensive, I've got to say. But we, we had a uh, a system, so we, so we would brief the workshop and assure them that they're just people. The legislators are just people. They're actually living in their local electorate and they want to meet them as businesses and we just tell them to tell their story. If Leslie and I go to Canberra and we can go in and out of offices and being a legislator you would have different interest groups coming in and out of your office all the time and their eyes start to roll over. But get them out of Canberra, out of those offices and into a business and get the business to educate the legislator on exactly what the issue is. So talk about their business, but then talk about how a lack of access to information is impacting on their ability to function as an efficient business and their ability to be able to offer customer service and services to the people that live in that legislator's electorate and every one of those 80.

Stuart Charity: 16:02

Federal members of parliament that went to an electorate sorry, went to a workshop came out knowing exactly what the issue was and exactly what the solution was, which is a legislative solution. So, whether they're in the opposition or in a minor party or in government, the call to action was speak to the minister, write to the minister, speak to the shadow minister, make a representation, so you have this sort of grassroots support coming through the parliamentary system. So by the time the legislation was introduced, it didn't go off to committee, it just went straight through. We had politicians from both sides, both major parties and minor parties, all lining up to support it. In fact, they were all claiming credit for it. It was absolutely fantastic.

Stacey Miller: 16:47

I mean, is there other legislation that you hear about that is able to have that sort of fast track through the parliament?

Stacey Miller: 16:59

Because we're sitting here, the process is very long, right? That's probably the biggest bummer about the political process that it can bring people down a little bit. We've introduced the Repair Act twice. Now is very long, right. That's probably the biggest bummer about the political process that you know can bring people down a little bit. We've introduced the Repair Act twice now and you know each Congress is two years and here we are starting over again and it's like you have a very finite time to get a lot of things done and there's a lot of other priorities. So I mean to hear that yours was kind of fast-tracked because of all that pre-education. There's a lot of hope for us because now we've done this federal level education for the past four years. Now let's just say knock on wood, year five is going to be the magic year, because I hope there's not one legislator that hasn't heard about right to repair, whether it's automotive, electronics, agriculture. I mean it has permeated our culture.

Lesley Yates: 17:41

Yes, yeah, people are very aware of while we've been running Right to Repair. We've got a much longer history in the repair movement than repair generally, but in a way they've caught up with us. I remember we used to talk a great deal about recycling and now we're talking reuse and repair as the top of that tree. The most important issue now is can we repair the products? So I think one of the reasons I think, stacey, we sailed through Parliament is that we were clever in allowing them to think it was their idea.

Lesley Yates: 18:15

I do think that if you don't care who gets the credit, you can actually achieve anything. So for our Greens party, we ran a sustainability argument and they stood up and said yes, this is our idea, because this is more sustainable if we can repair products, including cars, and there's an issue about maintaining the emissions integrity. Our party that cares about small business and entrepreneurship said that businesses should be rewarded for competing on price and quality, not a repair barrier, and our more progressive or union-orientated parties talked about skilled professionals and about the workforce. So, yeah, they all stood there and said this was my idea and we were happy for it to be their idea.

Lesley Yates: 19:00

I think the other thing about the workshop visits is it wasn't just that one-off visit. We encouraged the workshops to continue when things did get stuck. We did get stuck in other areas in committee reporting, or we had federal inquiries that recommended a law, and then no one did anything for six months. And the benefit of engaging with the shops is they had the politician's email address. So they'd say remember me, here's a picture of us. You came to visit us, what's happening? Because I haven't heard anything for six months. So, instead of us being the ones going back on that treadmill, and we did. We also had our workshops ringing up or just ringing the politician's staff saying hello, it's me again.

Lesley Yates: 19:41

I think that's the great challenge of any right to repair movement. It's just having the resilience to get through that. Two steps forward, one step back. It's a hard slog. I think the three of us know that, that you've got to maintain your morale amongst us.

Stuart Charity: 19:55

It was a 10 year journey to be an overnight success. Basically, we had so many setbacks along the way and it stalled at so many places, but in the end we just built up so much momentum and politics is all about. You know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil and if you can elevate your issue to the top of the pile then you're going to get it looked at. And by that point we just had this irresistible momentum that you know. Even the dealers, the franchise dealers, joined and supported our campaign in the end. All these organizations that had been roadblocks all the way along all of a sudden wanted to jump on board because they all wanted to claim credit for it. So success has many parents, yeah it does.

Stacey Miller: 20:35

I love that saying. So, do you think Right to Repair is over or what? I hate to throw that out there, but I have to because obviously we had the first edition of Right to Repair, which was through the OBD2 port. What we're doing now covers that wirelessly generated information. We don't know what the vehicles of tomorrow are going to look like. We're still waiting on our Jetsons cars, but I mean, what do we think about the future at this point?

Lesley Yates: 21:01

Well, we think the fight for fair and open competition just goes on.

Stuart Charity: 21:05

It's never over.

Lesley Yates: 21:06

It's never over. It's never over. And the more automated vehicles get, the more nervous the legislators get, and nervous legislators tend to go towards authorized dealers or they start to introduce regulations that are not necessarily good for our independent workshops. So no, I mean as much as we would love Stuart to have seen the legislation pass through the House and had a couple of beers and said, well, we're done. Now we're never done. We've made a couple of compromises in our legislation that we'd like to go back and revisit. There will be a point at which our law is reinvested. You know, is it working? It can be better. It can be better. We've established a principle that independent mechanics get access to service and repair information, that consumers have choice. We've done that, but the devil's in the detail. A little we could do better and we're going to have to keep working on it.

Stuart Charity: 21:54

Of course, and we're actually working on that now. It's very likely that our scheme will get reviewed very shortly, so we want to make some changes. The government didn't put in a couple of key elements that support the multi-brand repairer the all-makes-all model repair data and the ability of the car maker to communicate with the car owner through the car itself, and that's a challenge for us, and we know that the car industry are using cybersecurity and other things as excuses for not doing that. But that's the next frontier of this campaign and we will do it together as a global automotive industry and take the car makers on, and I think we can win. And, as Leslie said, we're very confident because our government has put a line in the sand and said we're for the consumer, we're for competition and choice, we don't want any commercial interest to monopolize a market. So that principle is in place. So the technology changes, the market dynamics change, but the fundamentals don't change.

Stacey Miller: 23:18

That's right.

Stacey Miller: 23:19

Well, the battle will rage on, but we're so lucky to be fighting the same fight together, Really love the fact that we get to collaborate on this and that there's more to come.

Stacey Miller: 23:28

Couldn't have better partners in all of this. So I think the takeaway for our listeners today is, no matter where you are, if you're in the industry, educating yourself on the issue, if you deal with repair shops, if those are your end customer, educate them on the issue and help us get legislators to those repair shops. Help us activate those repair shops to be part of this process, because lawmakers want to hear from those businesses. They're a very important voice in this and if you're just a driver and you're not in the industry, talk to your repair shop about it, and if they don't know about it, direct them to one of your industry associations who can help you, because that's going to be critical in this fight as we reintroduce this bill in 2025. So more to come on that on Auto Care On Air. We'll keep you all updated. Stuart and Leslie, thank you so much for joining me.

Stuart Charity: 24:13

Thanks for having us.

Stacey Miller: 24:14

Absolute pleasure. Thanks, stacey. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Auto Care On Air. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast so that you never miss an episode, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review that helps others discover our content. Auto Care On Air is a production of the Auto Care Association, dedicated to advancing the auto care industry and supporting professionals like you. To learn more about the association and its initiatives, visit autocareorg Music. Thank you.