From a recent ABC news article:
❝In Canberra, Dr Michelle McCann runs one of the few laboratories in Australia that conducts commercial testing for solar panels.
[...]
Dr McCann said some overseas manufacturers were sending poor-quality solar products to Australia, knowing they would not be checked.
“What we can conclude is that in some cases, unfortunately they know that we are not really checking the quality of what is coming into Australia always, and there are a lot of companies out there … some of them are cutting corners where they can to make extra money.”
She said Australia does not have a rigorous culture of testing imported solar products.
“When there's no expectation that your product will be checked, then there's a little bit more flexibility … to ship out the poorer-performing product that inevitably results from any production line.
“Australian consumers are notorious, and known overseas, for caring a lot about price and not caring about quality, and when that happens you get the cheaper product. And the cheaper product is not the better-performing product.”❞
Are we as Australians not embarrassed to have that reputation?
Until there are more people in Australia who care about the quality of what they purchase rather than grabbing the cheapest (and expecting to get something just as good as a brand that's been tested and approved and comes with warranty), this will probably continue. I wonder whether it's something to do with the well-known cynicism of the average Australian... Perhaps Australian consumers think that the higher price of verified and approved brands is a con and that they really can cut out the middleman to buy at a price that they think the item SHOULD cost.
