Six months into Australia's mandatory merger regime, the Government has quietly conceded the point everyone advising on deals has been making since January.
On 2 July, it introduced amendments converting automatic voiding of an unnotified acquisition into a court-supervised "voidable" model. If you get the notifiability call wrong, your transaction is no longer invalid from the outset. Instead, it is exposed to penalties and to a Federal Court process.
That is a real improvement. A risk you can price and allocate is a different thing from a transaction that never legally existed.
But read the fine print. Automatic voiding survives where you notify and then either complete early, complete on appeal, or complete on a clearance that has gone stale past 12 months. Allens made the sharp observation: inadvertent gun-jumping now carries a worse consequence than never notifying at all.
The practical takeaway for boards and deal teams: the reform helps you on the way in, not on the way out. Check your completion mechanics against your ACCC clearance and appeal periods before you integrate anything.
The Bill still needs the Senate.