As I have described, it is not the role of competition policy, the Trade Practices Act or the ACCC to favour one sector over another. Our role is to promote the welfare of Australian consumers through a fair and competitive marketplace; we’re not here to protect competitors, we protect competition.

The benchmark test for competition regulators is whether a course of conduct is likely to lead to a substantial lessening of competition in a specific market for goods or services.

One of the difficulties is that there is not a wide understanding of the difference between protecting competitors and promotion of competition.

And while small business will seek the focus of competition policy to tend towards greater protection of competitors, ostensibly in the interests of competition, the voice of the consumer will be constant in urging that the focus remain on the promotion of competition for the benefit of consumers.

The interests of consumers rest with consumer groups, governments and regulators such as the ACCC to ensure that competition is muscular and lawful, even if this implies that it be aggressive and potentially damaging to some players in the market. For this is the way consumers derive the advantages of choice, quality and price to which they are entitled and we ensure that our economy is best able to adapt to maximise productivity and growth, especially in challenging economic times.

The commission cannot interpret its responsibility to promote competition to mean the protection of individual companies and the outlawing of vigorous, legitimate competition—even where that competition causes difficulties for individual firms.

As I stated earlier, an open competitive economy is the best environment within which small business can flourish.

Vigorous competition is not market failure and it is not the job of the ACCC to preserve competitors or protect any sectors of the economy from competition.

The role of the ACCC and the Trade Practices Act is fundamentally to enhance the interests of Australian consumers by promoting fair, vigorous and lawful competition, whether it is between businesses big, medium and/or small.