The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission today finalised the broad approach that it intends to take in developing procedural rules for matters under the telecommunications access regime.
The Trade Practices Act 1974 was recently changed to allow the ACCC to make written rules that set out procedures to apply in connection with matters arising under Part XIC of the Act. These rules can modify or displace certain procedures currently set out in the Act.
The legislative amendments require the ACCC to publish a development plan outlining a general approach for making these procedural rules and an indicative time for making them. A draft version of the development plan was published on 1 February 2006, with the ACCC receiving submissions from AAPT, Optus and Telstra.
ACCC Commissioner, Mr Ed Willett, said the procedural rule-making power allows the ACCC to determine some of its own procedures and therefore enables it to remove some of the sources of delay in the process.
"By removing some of the potential sources of delay in the system, the ACCC can help provide industry with more timely decisions and therefore greater certainty", he said.
The development plan states that the ACCC proposes to determine whether a matter will be addressed by the procedural rule-making power based on the extent to which addressing the matter would promote the efficient operation of Part XIC of the Act.
The plan also states that the ACCC will undertake a public consultation process prior to making any procedural rules. The ACCC is aiming for a draft of the first procedural rules will be available for public comment in May 2006, subject to operational constraints.
The development plan is available on the ACCC's website.