Australia: Corporate and Company Law

When a target board tells shareholders that a takeover offer materially undervalues the company, it must do more than state an opinion. Australian takeover law requires boards to explain their reasoning...

Every in-house team hears the same instruction: do more with less. The usual responses are to pull work back in-house and to push external firms on rates, and both run out of road quickly. The teams that escape the squeeze change the question. Instead of defending a budget, they show the executive how a small number of legal activities move the objectives the business already measures.

APRA and ASIC have released their 2026–27 Corporate Plans, signalling more intensive supervision and enforcement, alongside targeted measures intended to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden. Their priorities span operational resilience, cyber security, artificial intelligence, consumer protection, insurance, superannuation, market integrity and digital assets. For regulated entities, the plans provide a practical roadmap of the areas most likely to attract supervisory attention, information requests and, where deficiencies are identified, enforcement action.

Australia's Parliament has passed critical amendments to the country's new merger regime, replacing automatic voiding of non-notified acquisitions with a court-supervised model and clarifying control exemptions for minority investments. The changes also introduce greater flexibility for stale clearances, though questions remain about whether further reforms are needed to address the regime's underlying complexity and conservative thresholds.

The Australian Government has released an exposure draft of the Autonomous Sanctions Bill 2026 (AS Bill), the centrepiece of the Australian Sanctions Legislation Amendment reforms (ASLA reforms).

Australia's Parliament has passed significant amendments to the country's merger regime, less than a year after its introduction. The changes address practical concerns around mandatory merger notifications, providing greater flexibility for minority investments, reducing risks from inadvertent notification failures, and allowing extensions for delayed transactions. How will these refinements impact dealmakers navigating Australia's interventionist competition framework?

The Federal Court of Australia has clarified the powers of liquidators appointed to registered foreign companies operating in Australia, determining that directors' powers are suspended upon liquidator...

ASIC has intensified its enforcement campaign against companies failing to lodge financial reports on time, issuing over $5 million in infringement notices and prosecuting repeat offenders in court. Foreign-owned subsidiaries and large proprietary companies face heightened scrutiny as ASIC deploys data-driven surveillance to identify non-compliant entities at scale.

In this episode, we are joined by Catherine Brenner and John Mullen, two of our most distinguished Chairs. We talk about good governance, what it takes to be a good chair during a crisis, whether we need deep cyber expertise on the board and first-hand experience in cyber incident response.