School of Commerce
Centre for Regulation and Market Analysis
Centre for Regulation and Market Analysis
Australian
Cartel History Project
 |
| The CRMA’s Australian cartel history
project is expanding fast. In the last few
months we have appointed Dr Manish Agarwal
as a Research Fellow and Dr Zdravka Brunkova
and Mr Bernie O’Neil as Research Assistants
to work with Professors David Round and
Martin Shanahan and Research Fellow Dr
Kerrie Round. The first major task for the
researchers is to record the information
contained in the Australian Register of
Restrictive Agreements that was kept between
1967 and 1974, following the introduction of
the Trade Practices Act 1965. Commonly
referred to as the Secret Register, this
comprises 14,480 inter-firm agreements of
restrictive practices made by Australian
firms and organisations. Because of the
strict confidentiality provisions that
applied to entities that registered their
cartel agreements, access to it has never
before been granted. We are fortunate to
have been allowed sole access to the
Register for research purposes. Because the files have to be returned to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, data from them will be entered into an Access database to provide an ongoing source of material for research. This will take about a year to complete. Unfortunately, all the supporting material, including correspondence, industry and firm evaluations, and records of meetings between firms and the Commissioner and his staff, was destroyed under the regular disposal schedule of the Australian Archives. While this has made the task harder, sufficient information remains in the files to allow the team to develop a detailed picture of the collusive and anti-competitive arrangements common, and generally accepted, in business practice until, and beyond, the introduction of the Trade Practices Act 1965. As a preliminary step the researchers did a quick run-through of all agreements and recorded basic information. Using this, plus details contained in the annual reports produced by the Commissioner of Trade Practices, Zdravka Brunkova and David Round have written a paper to be presented at the European Business History Association conference in Athens in August. Martin Shanahan and Kerrie Round have written a background paper on the development of the trade practices legislation and the Register that they will present at the same conference. Bernie O’Neil has scoured the parliamentary record, newspapers and other contemporary sources finding further voluminous evidence of the presence of anti-competitive behaviour and of the attitudes to it of various stakeholders. He is currently writing a paper on this. In June the cartel team welcomed Jacqui Donegan, a lecturer in public relations at James Cook University and holder of a Vice-Chancellor’s Scholarship for Doctoral Study at the Australian National University. She has also been awarded the Alfred D. Chandler Jnr Travel Fellowship at Harvard Business School, which she will take up later this year. Jacqui’s thesis focuses on cartels in the confectionery industry in Australia between 1890 and 1930, and so she has a great compatibility in research interests with the members of the cartel project. |
