Is the Commerce Act 1986 fit for purpose?: A blueprint for a new Commerce Act

Abstract

As New Zealand’s experiment with deregulation limps unsteadily into its fourth decade, documented cases of regulatory failure accumulate. A common theme running through these failures is that the weakening of regulatory legal requirements in the 1980s and 1990s, under the rubric “light-handed regulation”, was accompanied by a hollowing-out of the public sector’s regulatory capability. That was never a necessary combination.