(Is the Corporations Law Still Too Complex?
Because of constitutional constraints on the powers of the Commonwealth, companies legislation was regard as a state matter. Each state had its own Companies Act in the early times. With the market development, Australia tried to uniform the companies legislation through different methods including the Co-operative Scheme in 1980s and the Corporation Act 1989. But the latter was held unconstitutional by the High Court.(1) However, a special solution was finally introduced, after a special agreement was made between the Attorneys-General of Commonwealth and six states, the Corporations Law became operative on 1 January 1991. In order to make it more logic, many of the older laws were restructured into it, so it "is unique in the world in that it contains in a single statute the&nb免费论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.net】sp;laws relating to companies, accounts, securities markets, takeovers and insolvency".(2) It became incredibly complex with 22 chapters, two schedules and 1,362 sections. In 1991, there were 892,749 companies, of which 10,402 were public companies and the number of the listed companies was only 1,096,(3) but the Corporations Law applied to all these 892,749 companies despite of Titanics or tiny sampans. It was absurd, as the former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Anthony Mason, said in 1992 that:
"Oscar Wilde?would have regarded our modern Corporations Law not only as uneatable, but also indigestible and incomprehensible".(4)
It was really in need of reform. As the reaction, the Labor Attorney-General established in 1993 a Corporations Law Simplification Task Force to introduce the Corporate Law Simplification Progr
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