Vendor blogs love to imply that AI voice agents occupy some regulatory grey zone in Australia. They don’t. The Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (Cth) defines a “voice call” to include “a call that involves a recorded or synthetic voice” — words that predate anyone strapping a large language model to a SIP trunk. An AI agent making outbound sales calls to Australian numbers is a telemarketer, full stop. This post sets out what the law mechanically requires, what ACMA enforcement actually looks like using two of its own actions as evidence, and why the Act’s maximum penalties are expressed in penalty units rather than dollars.
At a glance: Australia has no AI-specific telemarketing carve-out. A sales call from an AI agent is a “telemarketing call” under the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 — the Act’s synthetic-voice definition covers it explicitly. You must wash lists against the Register (a wash only protects calls made within 30 days), call inside the Industry Standard’s permitted hours, identify who is calling and why, and terminate on request. ACMA enforces this: the Federal Court imposed A$1.5 million on V Marketing Australia plus A$60,000 personally on its sole director in March 2025, and Tabcorp paid over A$2.7 million in July 2026 for breaches including unwashed, out-of-hours and unidentified calls.
The synthetic-voice clause: why an AI agent is a telemarketer
Two definitions do all the work. Section 4 of the Act defines a voice call as a voice call in the ordinary sense, or “a call that involves a recorded or synthetic voice” — whether or not the recipient responds by pressing buttons. Section 5 then defines a telemarketing call by purpose: a voice call to an Australian number where a purpose of the call is to offer, advertise or promote goods, services, land or investment opportunities, or to solicit donations. Put together, an autonomous agent cold-calling prospects to book sales appointments makes telemarketing calls. The obligations attach to whoever makes or causes the call to be made — the business running the campaign as much as the platform placing the calls. There is no exemption for “it was the AI’s decision to dial.”
What the Do Not Call Register Act mechanically requires
Section 11(1) is the core prohibition: a person must not make, or cause to be made, a telemarketing call to an Australian number registered on the Do Not Call Register. Registrations never expire — section 17 says a registration “remains in force indefinitely” — so a number scrubbed clean in 2019 is still off-limits today. Three practical points matter for anyone running AI outreach:
- The 30-day wash window. Section 11(3) gives a safe harbour only where the number was washed against the Register within the 30-day period ending on the day the call was made. Mechanically: every list your agent dials must have been washed in the last 30 days, on a rolling cadence for long campaigns. A wash from six weeks ago protects nothing. What the wash itself involves in practice, and what it costs to run one on a rolling cadence, is set out in Do Not Call Register washing for AI diallers.
- Consent overrides the Register — but it decays. Section 11(2) permits calls to registered numbers with the account-holder’s consent. Schedule 2 defines consent as express, or reasonably inferred from conduct and business relationships — never inferred from the mere publication of a number. Critically, express consent lapses after 3 months unless given for a specified or indefinite period (Schedule 2, clause 3). Consent records need timestamps and scope, not a checkbox.
- Designated calls are exempt; sales calls are not. Schedule 1 exempts calls from government bodies, registered charities, political parties and candidates, and educational institutions. A commercial sales campaign will never qualify.
Section 12 adds a contractual duty AI-platform buyers routinely miss: an agreement engaging another party to make telemarketing calls on your behalf must contain an express provision that they will comply with the Act. If your vendor contract is silent on Do Not Call compliance, you may already be in breach — before a single call is placed.
The Industry Standard: hours, identification, termination, caller ID
The Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017, made by the ACMA and still in force, layers conduct rules on top of the Act. For telemarketing calls (research calls have slightly wider hours):
- Permitted hours (section 8): weekdays 9 am to 8 pm, Saturdays 9 am to 5 pm, no Sundays, and no calls at all on the listed national public holidays (New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, or substitutes). Time is measured at the account-holder’s usual residential address — not your dialler’s timezone.
- Identification (section 9): as soon as the call starts, the caller must give the business name, the name of any party that caused the call to be made, and the purpose of the call. The Standard anticipates automation: the individual caller’s given name is waived where “the call is made solely using a recorded or synthetic voice” — every other identification duty still applies.
- Synthetic-voice mechanism (section 12): recorded or synthetic-voice calls must provide a mechanism — pressing a button, or asking for an operator — for the recipient to request full contact and complaint-handling details.
- Termination (section 13): the call must end immediately if the recipient asks or otherwise indicates they don’t want it to continue. For an AI agent this is an intent-detection requirement: “take me off your list” mid-sentence must end the call, not trigger an objection-handling routine.
- Calling line identification (section 14): CLI must be enabled (no blocked numbers), and the transmitted number must connect callers back to the identifying information and remain answerable for at least 30 days after the call.
These duties compound with the number-provisioning and caller-ID work we’ve covered elsewhere — see our guides to getting an Australian number for an AI voice agent and what Australia has instead of STIR/SHAKEN.
What enforcement actually looks like: two ACMA actions
V Marketing (Federal Court, March 2025) — the case vendor blogs half-remember
The version circulating in vendor blogs — A$1.5 million plus director liability for over a million unscrubbed calls — is broadly right but blurry. Here is what the ACMA’s own media release of 1 April 2025 records from the Federal Court judgment of 31 March 2025:
- The Court imposed penalties totalling A$1,500,000 against V Marketing Australia Pty Ltd (by then in liquidation), and separately ordered its sole director, Michael Vazquez, to pay A$60,000 personally — two distinct orders, not one figure.
- The calls came in two tranches: 553,630 calls to registered numbers on behalf of solar business Balaska Pty Ltd (March–September 2017), and 548,688 calls for V Marketing’s own solar company, Your Choice Solar (February–September 2018). Total: 1,102,318 calls.
- The client got caught too: the Court declared that Balaska itself contravened section 11(1) by causing the first tranche — though it ordered no penalty against Balaska. Outsourcing the dialling did not outsource the liability.
Per the ACMA’s account, Justice Logan found there was no culture of compliance within V Marketing despite repeated ACMA compliance alerts, observed that the “contracting out” of telemarketing does not contract out the risk of potentially significant penalties, and said the penalty needed to be more than just a cost of conducting a telemarketing business. For AI outreach buyers, the Balaska declaration is the sleeper fact: the entity that causes the calls is on the hook alongside whoever places them — human or machine.
Tabcorp (July 2026) — all three duties breached at once
On 22 July 2026 the ACMA announced that Tabcorp Holdings Limited (TAB) had paid more than A$2.7 million in penalties for spam and telemarketing breaches. The findings read like a checklist of the obligations above: between February 2024 and June 2025, TAB made 351 calls to registered numbers without consent, 82 calls outside permitted hours, and nearly 4,000 calls without properly identifying itself as the caller and/or the purpose of the call. TAB also accepted a court-enforceable undertaking requiring an independent review of its telemarketing systems.
“When people join the Do Not Call Register or unsubscribe from marketing messages, they are making a clear choice,” ACMA authority member Samantha Yorke said in the release.
Note the arithmetic: 351 unwashed calls contributed to a multi-million-dollar outcome — and this was a listed company with compliance systems that leaked, not a boiler room. Per the same release, businesses have paid more than A$12 million in spam and telemarketing penalties over the preceding 18 months. The regulator also runs the adjacent SMS regime — if your agents text as well as call, see our post on Australia’s SMS Sender ID Register.
Maximum penalties: read them in penalty units, not dollars
Section 25 of the Act sets every maximum in penalty units, not dollars. For a contravention of section 11(1), a body corporate with no prior record faces up to 100 penalty units per contravention, and the total for contraventions committed on a single day is capped at 2,000 penalty units (s 25(3)). With a prior record that becomes 500 penalty units per contravention and 10,000 penalty units per day (s 25(5)). A person other than a body corporate faces 20 units per contravention and 400 units per day with no prior record, and 100 and 2,000 units with one (ss 25(4), 25(6)). When a dialler places thousands of calls a day, “per contravention, per day” is the phrase that should focus the mind.
We deliberately do not convert those units into a dollar figure, and you should treat any page that does with care — including our own earlier version of this one. The dollar value of a penalty unit is fixed by section 4AA of the Crimes Act 1914 (Cth), whose authorised text at compilation No. 167 (compilation date 27 August 2026) still reads A$330. The Crimes (Amount of a Penalty Unit) Instrument 2026 (F2026N00424) sets the amount at A$364 from 1 July 2026 — but the note to section 5 of that instrument records that the amount “only applies to offences committed on or after 1 July 2026 (see subsection 4AA(8) of the Act)”, which tracks section 4AA(8) itself.
That matters here because a Do Not Call Register contravention is not an offence. Section 11(8) of the Act states that subsections 11(1) and 11(7) “are civil penalty provisions”, enforced by a civil penalty order under section 24. So the offence-framed indexation rule in section 4AA(8) does not settle, on the face of the text, which multiplier a court would apply to a civil penalty under this Act — and across a 10,000-unit cap the choice between the two published amounts moves the ceiling by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Confirm the applicable penalty-unit amount with your own adviser and against the authorised text of the Act rather than relying on any converted figure. Checked 4 September 2026.
Comparison: what the law requires vs what a compliant AI stack does
| Legal requirement (source) | What a compliant AI outreach stack does mechanically |
|---|---|
| No calls to registered numbers; wash valid 30 days (Act ss 11(1), 11(3)) | Automated wash of every list; hard block on numbers whose wash result is over 30 days old; re-wash scheduled inside the window |
| Consent overrides the Register; express consent lapses at 3 months unless scoped (Sch 2) | Consent stored per number with timestamp, source, scope and expiry; checked at dial time, not list-build time |
| Permitted hours at the recipient’s usual residential address (Standard s 8) | Dial scheduler keyed to each contact’s address timezone; weekday/Saturday windows, Sunday and public-holiday blackouts in code |
| Identify the business, the party causing the call, and the purpose at call start (Standard s 9) | Opening script locks identification lines before any pitch content; the agent cannot skip or reorder them |
| Mechanism for synthetic-voice calls to surface full contact details (Standard s 12) | In-call intent or keypress routes to a details/complaints handler |
| Immediate termination on request (Standard s 13) | Opt-out intent detection ends the call and writes a global suppression record across campaigns and channels |
| CLI enabled; callback number answerable for 30+ days (Standard s 14) | No CLI blocking; outbound numbers map to an answerable inbound line that survives campaign teardown |
| Outsourcing contracts must mandate Act compliance (Act s 12) | Platform agreements carry express Do Not Call compliance clauses; audit logs available to the client |
Zian’s outbound agents are built with this class of guardrail in the platform layer — suppression lists, calling-window enforcement and consent state checked at dial time rather than left to script authors. Evaluating AI outreach for the Australian market? Ask any vendor to walk you through each row of that table.
FAQ
Does the Do Not Call Register Act apply to AI voice agents?
Yes, explicitly. The Act’s definition of “voice call” includes “a call that involves a recorded or synthetic voice”, and its telemarketing test turns on the call’s purpose, not on who or what speaks. An AI agent calling Australian numbers faces exactly the same prohibitions as a human telemarketer.
How often do calling lists need to be washed against the Register?
Section 11(3) of the Act only protects calls where the wash result was obtained within the 30-day period ending on the day of the call. Practically, every active list needs re-washing at least every 30 days — and because registrations remain in force indefinitely, there is no such thing as a list that stays clean.
What hours can an AI agent legally call Australians?
Under the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017 on the Federal Register of Legislation, telemarketing calls are limited to 9 am – 8 pm on weekdays and 9 am – 5 pm on Saturdays, with no calls on Sundays or listed national public holidays — measured at the account-holder’s usual residential address, and subject to any stricter state or territory rules.
Was the V Marketing penalty really A$1.5 million?
Yes — with a footnote the retellings miss. The Federal Court’s 31 March 2025 judgment imposed A$1,500,000 on V Marketing Australia Pty Ltd plus a separate A$60,000 personal penalty on sole director Michael Vazquez, over 1,102,318 calls to registered numbers across 2017–18. The client, Balaska Pty Ltd, was also declared to have contravened the Act by causing the calls, though without a monetary penalty.
How much is the maximum penalty under the Do Not Call Register Act in dollars?
Section 25 states the maxima in penalty units — up to 10,000 penalty units per day for a body corporate with a prior record of section 11(1) breaches — and we do not publish a converted dollar figure. The authorised text of section 4AA of the Crimes Act 1914 still reads A$330 at compilation No. 167 (27 August 2026), while the Crimes (Amount of a Penalty Unit) Instrument 2026 sets A$364 from 1 July 2026 for offences. Do Not Call Register contraventions are civil penalty provisions rather than offences (s 11(8)), so confirm the applicable amount before relying on any conversion. Checked 4 September 2026.
Do B2B calls to business numbers escape the Register?
Not reliably. Section 14 of the Act makes numbers eligible for registration when they are used primarily for private or domestic purposes, exclusively for fax, exclusively by a government body, or as emergency service numbers — but sole traders and home-office operators register the same mobiles they answer for business. The safe assumption is to wash every Australian number you dial, whatever your CRM labels it.
Sources and verification
| Figure / claim | Owner | Verified at |
|---|---|---|
| Synthetic-voice definition; s 11 prohibition; 30-day wash; indefinite registration; s 12 contract duty; Sch 2 consent; s 25 maximums | Federal Register of Legislation (Do Not Call Register Act 2006, Cth) | https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2006A00088/latest/text |
| Calling hours, identification, synthetic-voice mechanism, termination, CLI rules | Federal Register of Legislation (Telemarketing and Research Calls Industry Standard 2017) | https://www.legislation.gov.au/F2017L00323/latest/text |
| A$1.5m penalty; A$60,000 director penalty (Michael Vazquez); 553,630 + 548,688 calls; Balaska declaration; judgment 31 March 2025 | ACMA media release, 1 April 2025 | https://www.acma.gov.au/articles/2025-04/acma-welcomes-15m-penalty-federal-court-telemarketing-case |
| TAB A$2.7m+ penalties; 351 DNC calls, 82 out-of-hours, ~4,000 unidentified; Yorke quote; A$12m/18-month figure | ACMA media release, 22 July 2026 (MR 24/2026) | https://www.acma.gov.au/articles/2026-07/tab-pays-27m-telemarketing-and-spam-breaches |
| Penalty unit A$364 from 1 July 2026; s 5 note limits it to offences committed on or after that day (checked 4 September 2026) | Federal Register of Legislation (Crimes (Amount of a Penalty Unit) Instrument 2026, F2026N00424) | https://www.legislation.gov.au/F2026N00424/asmade/text |
| Penalty unit defined as A$330 in s 4AA(1); indexation under s 4AA(3); s 4AA(8) applies the increased amount to offences — compilation No. 167, compilation date 27 August 2026 (checked 4 September 2026) | Federal Register of Legislation (Crimes Act 1914, Cth) | https://www.legislation.gov.au/C1914A00012/latest/text |
| s 11(8) designates ss 11(1) and 11(7) civil penalty provisions; s 24 civil penalty orders; s 25 maxima in penalty units (100/2,000 and 500/10,000 for bodies corporate) (checked 4 September 2026) | Federal Register of Legislation (Do Not Call Register Act 2006, Cth) | https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2006A00088/latest/text |