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When announcing sweeping reforms to Australia's merger control regime in April 2023, ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb reaffirmed the ability in Australia's competition law framework to consider broader public benefits. [21] Similarly, a recent determination stated the ACCC "may give less weight to public benefits that may not to endure in the longer term."[22] The three merger authorizations below illustrate how Australia's Tribunal has evaluated whether the requirements of the "public benefit" concept are met. She noted the valuable flexibility that considering broader public benefits enabled, "where a merger may have the effect of substantially lessening competition but would nonetheless provide real, verifiable and significant public benefits."[5] Australia's broader approach to assessing public benefits in mergers provides the world with a rare example of how merger review can incorporate public interest concerns. Australia's merger process Australia has two processes for approving mergers: a merger clearance process that focuses on whether a merger would be likely to have the effect of substantially lessening competition; and a merger authorization process that focuses on a merger's public benefits. [Extracted from the article]

As media content continues to proliferate, pre-trial publicity's potential to negatively impact jury impartiality and decrease the certainty of a fair trial is an ever-increasing concern. In 1995, Queensland became the first Australian State or Territory to implement pre-trial questioning as a measure to address such publicity. In 2014, the Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC) determined that Victoria did not require such questioning. This article extends the VLRC's analysis to suggest that the Queensland - as opposed to United States - version of pre-trial questioning can, in fact, have an important role in addressing the challenge that prejudicial pre-trial publicity poses to courts. The article reviews the reasons for which the VLRC rejected the measure to conclude that, to address prejudicial pre-trial publicity in trials with much contemporary media coverage, Queensland's pre-trial questioning has a particular effectiveness that the measures which Victoria currently uses do not have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]