Australia: Corporate and Company Law

APRA and ASIC have released their 2026–27 Corporate Plans, signalling more intensive supervision and enforcement, alongside targeted measures intended to reduce unnecessary regulatory burden. Their priorities span operational resilience, cyber security, artificial intelligence, consumer protection, insurance, superannuation, market integrity and digital assets. For regulated entities, the plans provide a practical roadmap of the areas most likely to attract supervisory attention, information requests and, where deficiencies are identified, enforcement action.

Australia's Parliament has passed significant amendments to the country's merger regime, less than a year after its introduction. The changes address practical concerns around mandatory merger notifications, providing greater flexibility for minority investments, reducing risks from inadvertent notification failures, and allowing extensions for delayed transactions. How will these refinements impact dealmakers navigating Australia's interventionist competition framework?

In this episode, we are joined by Catherine Brenner and John Mullen, two of our most distinguished Chairs. We talk about good governance, what it takes to be a good chair during a crisis, whether we need deep cyber expertise on the board and first-hand experience in cyber incident response.