Writing in today’s AFR, corporate and M&A partner Gavin Hammerschlag argues that commentary around proposed changes stemming from ASIC’s so-called “landmark review” of Australia’s evolving capital markets skirts around the edges of what really needs to be said.
While some of the measures announced last week by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission represent a step in the right direction, Gavin writes that rather than pointing our market in the direction of the ASX’s stated ambition of becoming “the most attractive and competitive place to list globally”, they represent the bare minimum we need to do to catch up with our global peers and competitors.
“Our chief concern with the proposals contained in the review is that they are less ‘world-leading’ and more ‘world-following’, neither radical nor new. They’ve been on the table (and advocated by many of us at Arnold Bloch Leibler and other industry participants) for decades without progress. And many are already standard practice in major global markets including the US, the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. Australia’s regulatory framework has been trailing for some time.”
In addition to the new IPO rules proposed by ASIC, Gavin nominates two reforms as being “obvious and sensible”: the introduction of insider share-trading plans, and dual-class share structures.
“Before we contemplate revolutionary changes to Australia’s public markets in a bid to retain and attract IPOs, we have to take care of the basics by implementing simple, overdue reforms to bring our regulatory framework in line with global competitors.”
The article was prepared with the assistance of Tiffany Zwanink.
To read the full article, click here: https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/what-asic-s-review-into-public-and-private-markets-misses-20250615-p5m7il
