 It's very much for coming along today. I know that you've faced inclement weather and the difficulties of the visit of the US president. It's indeed very pleasing to see that you've all chosen to come and listen to Anna and I speak when President Obama is also asking for your attention. And where it's a tremendously active agenda you have in Dublin with foreign visitors at the moment. I understand that you had Queen Elizabeth, the Queen of Australia and a number of other countries I understand here last week. And so we're very aware of the highly esteemed company and it's indeed a privilege to be invited to speak here. I really wanted to give you a very brief outline of competition law enforcement in Australia before talking about the importance of global cooperation in our effort. We have perhaps the... We could flick to the first slide which... Oh, okay. So there are the six topics that I want to deal with quickly. A quick overview, then some discussions about the importance of global cooperation. Okay, so firstly, a quick overview if I can make the clicker work. The first point that I wanted to make is that Australia in the field of competition law and in many other areas of law and endeavor in Australia were strongly influenced by international thinking. Traditionally it's been thinking amongst Commonwealth countries, English-speaking countries, but more and more we're looking further afield. Indeed, our first competition law was a law called the Australian Industries Preservation Act. Someone obviously had a sense of humour when they were drafting that. But it was basically a replica of the Sherman Act, the US Sherman Act and the Canadian legislation that our Canadian friends always remind me preceded the US legislation by a number of years. Our law was enacted in 1906 and was a very good law until our High Court got to it and declared some of the key provisions to be unconstitutional. And it lay on the statute books for another 60 years before being replaced by something that was actively enforced. And for me, that's a very powerful lesson. You can have fantastic laws, but if there isn't a capacity to enforce them through your legal system, if you don't have the courts on side in your endeavor, then you might as well have no law at all. And indeed, that was our problem for, as I say, about, well, it was nearly 70 years. Until the mid-60s, when the process was re-energised, influenced very strongly by changing thinking in the UK where they moved to stronger competition law protections. It still wasn't very vigorously enforced in the early 70s, in fact, 1974, when we enacted a new Trade Practices Act, once again in response to a much more active global movement in competition. So essentially our history has been one of looking to the rest of the world for ideas and inspiration, taking from the rest of the world the things that we thought fit at best within the Australian context, and then applying them within our particular system and within our particular framework. The content of our law now is recognisable to many of the, well, would be recognisable to just about all of the 117, I think, jurisdictions that were represented last week at the International Competition Network Annual Conference in The Hague. We've got price fixing, bid rigging, market sharing and output restriction prohibitions. Those prohibitions, and this is actually surprisingly common as well, are enforceable by parallel criminal and civil prohibitions. I think there are a number of countries that just have criminal prohibitions and there are a number that just have civil, but increasingly there are jurisdictions that seem to have both. We also have various prohibitions which are enforced civilly relating to non-cartel horizontal agreements that substantially lessen competition, vertical price fixing arrangements, per se, vertical, we call vertical price fixing, resale price maintenance, and that's subject to a prohibition as well. We've also got general prohibitions against the intellectual conduct and specific predatory pricing provisions as well as a pre-merge of process that is largely informal, although has a formal element. For mergers that substantially lessen competition. So our cartel provisions mirror very closely the OECD's recommendations on hardcore cartel conduct and they're enforced with the support of immunity and cooperation policies which are drawn very closely upon policies both within leading competition law jurisdictions, but also which reflect international competition network best practice. So really the message is look around the world, from our perspective, look around the world, find what we think looks like best practice, seek to apply it in Australia. Sometimes it takes quite a long time for the policy process to be converted into legislation. That seems to be a story that is quite common around the world as well. But really seek to adapt it to our particular circumstances. The long and the short of it is... I've got to make this thing work. There it is. There is a delay. That competition enforcement is a very strong priority for the ACCC and I should say my agency is an agency that seems to attract new responsibilities and over the years the government decides it has a problem and that we are the agency that somehow will fix the problem. So not only do we have a responsibility for competition law enforcement, we're also a consumer protection agency. We've also got regulatory responsibilities in electricity, gas, ports, water, communications and a number of other areas that I've forgotten. And we also deal with product safety. So a little bit like the FTC in the United States that keeps getting additional responsibilities as well. I think they're the privacy regulator in the US as well as having responsibility for consumer protection on the competition side. Although not cartels, they keep reminding me. We do have an increasingly higher percentage of unilateral conduct and cartel investigations than anything else in the competition area. We're out two big priority areas and we are getting a greater range of powers and also a greater range of ways to resolve competition problems and by that I mean we've got a capacity to engage in very tough enforcement action but also take a much softer approach if we think that that's appropriate. Finding the right resolution, the right punishment to fit the particular crime or maybe it's not a crime at all but it might need some sort of response from us. Cartels dominate our litigation profile in the area of competition and we've got a very active immunity program which is perhaps half influenced by or drawn from international immunity applications. Declan asked me to particularly mention the sanctions that apply. In Australia we have the same sanctions for corporations, for civil and criminal conduct for breaches of cartel provisions in fact also in the civil context for breaches of unilateral conduct provisions and that's $10 million or three times the economic gain involved in the contravention or 10% of the turnover that relates to the contravention and whichever one of those three is the highest and that isn't an automatic penalty of that amount it's the maximum. So the maximum is set and then there's a process for the courts to exercise judicial discretion in applying exactly where in the range from zero to whatever the maximum is should be imposed. We do have this concept of a civil-pochinery penalty which is not criminal and very clearly regarded in our system as not being criminal but it's not quite totally civil either so it does have some characteristics that are seen as closer to criminal than civil. So for example it is seen very much as punitive rather than as some sort of administrative sanction and can only be because we've adopted the doctrine of separation of powers it can only be applied by a court it can't be applied by an administrative agency such as the ACCC. Imprisonment is available to individuals for up to 10 years for breaches of the cartel provisions but not any other provisions but there is also a possibility of disqualifying individual directors from managing a corporation. Now this is a hopeless slide because you can't read anything in it but really you don't need to read a lot the very top of the pyramid and this is our sort of concept of giving ourselves exactly the range of tools that we need to deal with whatever competition problem we have and what that tries to depict is that for the most serious matters we have court based action which can include criminal proceedings civil penalty proceedings injunctions, declarations, disqualification orders things we call adverse publicity orders where companies can be ordered to take out full page advertisements saying what bad people I've been that's a particular favourite of some of our commissioners and I can't read my own I think that's about it in broad terms for the court based stuff with declarations and injunctions great thanks for that we've got some non court based action and key amongst them would be the capacity that we have as an agency to accept what we call enforceable undertakings so people can essentially make a whole series of promises to us which we can then enforce in court and we use them for example dealing with problems that we've had with supermarket proprietors who entered into restrictive covenants with shopping centre owners which we felt had the capacity to have a strong anti competitive effect essentially the covenant would say you shall not allow one of my competitors to enter this shopping centre for the term of the lease and we said well that's you know there's no there's unlikely to be any particular public interest associated with that sort of provision and we negotiated with supermarket operators to get rid of all those restrictive covenants in their supermarket leases we probably would agree that we didn't have enough capacity to take the supermarkets on in litigation so it wasn't quite the sort of thing that we would want to run in court there were also around 800 different leases that we were looking at so if we'd taken litigation it probably would have dominated our workload for the next 20 or 30 years so it was a particularly unattractive proposition from our point of view so it works as a very good tool for us in getting a good competition outcome for consumers and for the market and getting it relatively quickly and finally the bottom of the pyramid of what we call compliance activities education, outreach in Australia we have quite a lot of industries that are involved in what are called self-regulatory codes or co-regulatory codes self-regulatory is where it's the industry making an arrangement usually about technical issues between themselves sometimes it involves some anti-competitive element and they'll need to get a sanction or get permission from us basically to make the agreement if they don't want us to prosecute them and we've got the capacity to give permission for people to engage in in that sort of anti-competitive conduct if we're satisfied that there's an overwhelming public interest associated with them doing so and outreach is also a very important part of it thank you global cooperation in an increasingly globalised world is very, very important it's very important for us to respond in a global way there's clearly more and more commerce across borders the internet these days dominates a lot of our retail trade at the margins in Australia I think about 15% of sales now in Australia are over the internet interestingly about 90% of sales over the internet are for clothing many, many sales are imports from China and other places at very, very much lower prices than you can buy clothes for in bricks and mortar shops so we recognise that you know commerce is going global we also understand that there are jurisdictional limitations and we work around our jurisdictional limitations I won't go into them in a lot of detail at the moment perhaps the next slide actually the one after I want to talk a little bit about our methods of cooperating with our counterparts informal cooperation that is one-on-one bilateral engagement with other agencies engagement through confidential waivers that are given to us by immunity applicants and informal agency to agency cooperation agreements are probably the most important areas of international engagement that we have and they are really productive in our experience and I'm very happy to sort of expand on that but we have many cases that we've pursued that where we've relied on informal exchanges, informal discussions to pursue our case we also have lots of secondments and staff exchanges so there's lots of sort of people-to-people stuff that happens recently for example in the last few years we've had exchanges with people from Ireland Taiwan, Canada, Vietnam, Japan, Mauritius the United States, the UK, Papua New Guinea and a whole lot of others so it's very, very widespread on the formal side next slide, thanks Cheryl we have mutual legal assistance treaties we have a we in fact have some treaties government-to-government treaties as well that's okay, leave it there and we also have a provision in our legislation which enables us to exchange information and evidence with agencies if we're satisfied that it's appropriate to do so it's a very broad discretion but essentially we need to trust the agency because we'll generally impose a condition on exchange of the information that will require the agency to keep it confidential some sort of practical on the ground cooperation that's really generated some solid returns for our for our treasury include the air cargo cartel which is an ongoing matter we've instituted proceedings against 15 airlines including Qantas our domestic airline there's been a very extensive investigation internationally there are a number of jurisdictions that have basically the same investigation we've extracted over 46 million dollars in Australian dollars in penalties to date that's roughly a little bit more than US dollars at the moment on the current exchange rates sorry, next slide the other case that I wanted to mention that's very notable is the Marine Hoes case I won't go into the detail of it the only thing I want to say about that is that it was our first case where we'd actually obtained evidence from the UK OFT and it was evidence, actual affidavits and witness statements from people who would have given evidence in our proceedings in Australia if they hadn't been resolved by consent that was evidence that we had no way of getting using our powers in Australia the witnesses were all overseas they were all in the UK actually or in America and we just didn't have any way of getting that except through cooperation so it was very, very important for us to actually have formal arrangements in place which enabled us to to get the evidence and that was I think the first formal request that the UK had dealt with under its provisions as well so it was a first for them and a first for us it was a really good development and I think a sign that increasingly the arrangements are becoming more and more mature and sophisticated very, very briefly there are challenges number five now I think, next one there are some challenges associated with all this cooperation which I'll expand on perhaps in question time timing of evidence gathering activities getting access to witnesses Anna and I were talking about a case earlier this morning where there have been issues around that it's a common case between our jurisdictions witness credibility can be a problem where different jurisdictions get statements from the same person and inevitably they're going to be in slightly different terms and there are of course legal limitations on exchanges of information and evidence and finally my last slide really speaks for itself I'm not going to go through it but basically it lists the three main multilateral forums for cooperation thank you very much