The provisions

Two definitions in two different instruments, and they are not mirror images: only the small amount one has a security limb, and the term ceilings differ.

A small amount credit contract may not impose an interest charge at all. Its price is an establishment fee of up to 20% of the adjusted credit amount and a monthly fee of up to 4% of it, and nothing else but default fees and government charges.

Section 32A(4)(b) puts small amount credit contracts outside the annual cost rate cap entirely, which is the clearest thing the Code says about how these two products are meant to be priced.

The obligation this product line exists to discharge. It is to obtain AND consider, and only the first half of that is a thing software can show.

The protected earnings amount is 10% of the consumer’s available income — income less PAYG withholding — and it applies to every consumer. Until the Financial Sector Reform Act 2022 commenced it was 20% of gross income and applied only where at least half the consumer’s income was a social security payment. A figure taken from an account of the old regime commits MORE than twice as much of a household’s income as the law now allows — twice over, once on the percentage and again on the move from gross income to net.

Two rebuttable presumptions of unsuitability used to apply to small amount credit contracts — that the consumer is in default under another one, and that the consumer has been a debtor under two or more of them in the preceding 90 days. Reading the compiled Act, Schedule 4 Part 1 of the Financial Sector Reform Act 2022 repealed all four subsections that raised them: ss 118(3A), 123(3A), 131(3A) and 133(3A). That reading was reproduced on 26 September 2026 from compilation No. 52 of the Act on the Federal Register: none of the four sections has a subsection (3A) any more. Either fact is still worth putting in front of an assessor, and a lender’s own policy may make either one a referral.

Two further obligations this engine does not model, recorded because a lender in this market has to meet them and because leaving them out would suggest the list above is the whole regime.

Two things on this page are gaps rather than findings, and they are printed here because a list of provisions that quietly omitted them would read as complete.

What “consider” means in ss 117(1A) and 130(1A). The subsections require a licensee to obtain and consider ninety days of transactions and balances. No judgment construing the word “consider” in either subsection was found. ASIC v The Cash Store Pty Ltd (in liq) [2014] FCA 926 is the leading responsible-lending decision, and it was decided on conduct predating these subsections. So this software reports what was obtained and says, every time, that whether it was considered is a question about a person’s reasoning.

Whether ASIC has made the determination ss 124B(2) and 133CB(2) contemplate. Since the Financial Sector Reform Act 2022, the warning statement a small amount credit lender must display and give is whatever ASIC determines by legislative instrument, and the Schedules of the Credit Regulations that used to prescribe it — Schedules 7, 8 and 9 — were repealed by F2023L00540. No current determination was found on the Federal Register of Legislation or in ASIC’s own index of legislative instruments. That is a search that came back empty and not a finding that none exists, and a lender should check rather than rely on this sentence.