A victory for common sense, the new credit act set 5 days as the period for which if you had not paid an account you could be listed as a defaulter on your credit file a really ridiculous piece of bureaucrat logic. But love him or loath him Alan Jones was able to make the minister George Brandis see some sense, see below the transcript -

In an interview with Alan Jones on 2GB on 26 March 2014, Attorney General George Brandis announced that the time after which late payments could be reported to Credit Reporting Bodies under the provisions of the Credit Reporting Privacy Code (CR CODE)will be extended from five days to 14 days.

The Attorney General acknowledged and thanked Alan Jones for his contribution in raising the issue. The transcript of the conversation reveals:

"Now when you raised this matter with me, the week before last Alan, the relevance of the five days was that was called the period of grace. In other words if a payment was due, let us say for arguments sake, on the 10th of April and it wasn't paid for five days beyond that then it was treated in the credit history of having been late. Five days, for all the reasons we discussed the week before last, does seem a ludicrously short period of time to treat a late payment as being late even though technically it is. So my office has been in discussion with the industry, with the Australian Retail Credit Association, and we're very confident that they will agree now to extend that period of grace, that is the period within which a late payment is not treated as late from five days to 14 days. Now that is in fact what at the time these rules had been developed last year the consumer association themselves asked for. So this is a win and I'm grateful to you, Alan, for drawing it to my attention and raising it because as a result of that interview we did the week before last that we've had this change".

Attorney General George Brandis