Burns victim's family furious about Temu 'safety pledge'

Ten-year-old Daniella Jacobs-Herd refuses to go to school most days, traumatised by schoolyard taunting of the scars marking her face, neck and arms.

"She's still really into trying to make herself look beautiful with perfume and makeup because she just doesn't feel pretty," Daniella's mother, Hannah Jacobs-Herd, said.

"She's a trooper, but she has her scars, and it's very hard."

In July 2024, Daniella suffered horrific burns while wearing a fluffy hoodie her grandmother bought as a birthday present from online retailer Temu.

Four months after the incident, Temu recalled the hoodie for non-compliance with mandatory safety standards.

In June 2026, nearly two years after the incident, Temu has voluntarily signed up to the Australian Product Safety Pledge.

Consumer watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said it would hold the Chinese retailer to standards of "[enhanced] transparency and accountability" beyond Australian consumer law.

In a statement, Temu said joining the voluntary pledge reinforced its commitment to product safety.

"Joining the Australian Product Safety Pledge reinforces our ongoing efforts to strengthen product safety and compliance on the platform, building on our existing safeguards and supporting a safe online marketplace," the spokesperson said.

But the online retailer did not respond to the ABC's questions about the improved standards it had implemented since joining the pledge, whether it blocked the supplier of the hoodie from its platform, or whether suppliers or Temu were liable for product safety.

For Ms Jacobs-Herd, who is in the process of legal action against Temu, the retailer's commitment to the pledge is little comfort.

In a statement to the ABC, Ms Jacobs-Herd's lawyer Taylor Hamilton said Temu maintained it was an intermediary platform and their claim about the non-compliant hoodie should be directed to the "supplier".

Ms Hamilton said despite repeated attempts to contact the supplier, there had been no response.

"It makes me so angry; it's sickening because they're targeting families that are low-income earners and want to give their children the best of the best at a cheaper price," Ms Jacobs-Herd said.

"And it [can come] with the cost of significant trauma for the rest of their life."

'Whack-a-mole'

Introduced by the ACCC in 2020, the Australian Product Safety Pledge is a set of voluntary commitments to proactively prevent the sale of unsafe products.

Online retailers Amazon, AliExpress and eBay were the founding members, with Temu and Gumtree following in June.

Pledge signatories are assessed and approved by the ACCC before joining, and an ACCC spokesperson said Temu had updated its systems to meet the pledge commitments.

But consumer advocacy group Choice said in the months before Temu joined the pledge, it found toy teethers posing a choking hazard and a novelty lighter on the platform.

In a recent complaint to the ACCC, Choice said "a substantial volume" of unsafe products were being sold by pledge participants.

The consumer watchdog later found non-compliant products including butterfly knives, gel blasters and novelty cigarettes and lighters for sale on Amazon, AliExpress and eBay.

The companies removed the products when contacted by Choice, but senior campaigns and policy advisor Bea Sherwood said the reactive "whack-a-mole" approach was overwhelming the resources of Choice and the ACCC.

Calls for overarching safety laws to end 'bandaid' approach

Choice is calling for the introduction of laws prohibiting the sale of unsafe goods at online and in-person stores to bring Australia in line with the European Union, Canada and the US.

A general safety provision would also bring Australian law in line with public expectations after a 2024 Choice survey found most consumers mistakenly believed businesses were legally required to ensure all products were safe to sell.

Ms Sherwood said it would also close a loophole in Australian law that allowed platforms to claim they were merely facilitating the sale of products provided by suppliers, and thus avoiding liability.

"It is really hard for legal action to be taken for penalties to be given when it isn't Temu itself that is selling the products," she said.

"We're just essentially putting bandaids on top of bandaids, trying to kind of fix this problem in such a patchwork way with the combination of mandatory standards and the product safety pledge, all these measures that don't actually tackle the core problem."

Government progressing product safety reform

The 2026-27 federal budget included $6.6 million allocated over three years to strengthen Australia's product safety framework, including advancing online marketplace reforms.

The federal minister responsible for Australian consumer law, Andrew Leigh, told the ABC the reforms would include the introduction of mandatory safety obligations for online marketplaces and increased penalties, but did not confirm whether the government was considering a general safety provision.

Ms Jacobs-Herd said she "learnt the hard way" that Australia's laws did not provide proactive protection for consumers.

"I used to think there was a [general safety provision] like we're asking for the government to do now," she said.

"The government needs to do something to put something in place because there are so many parents out there who already think that the government is protecting us from these things when they're not."

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