AUSTRALIA Law and Practice Contributed by: Mark Grime and George Lukic, Thomsons
While the ACCC and FIRB regimes operate under separate statutory frameworks, their practical interac - tion was restructured on 1 January 2026 to streamline the “competition limb” of FIRB’s national interest test. While the Treasury delegates the substantive compe - tition assessment to the ACCC, the Foreign Invest - ment Portal was concurrently upgraded (in late 2025) to include an increased scope of mandatory competi - tion questions in the initial FIRB application to serve a specific triage function. The FIRB application now mandates that foreign investors declare whether the transaction will be formally notified to the ACCC (or if a waiver is being sought). If so, FIRB relies on the ACCC’s assess - ment, and the newly expanded FIRB questions act merely to establish the parallel processing timeline. If a foreign investor indicates the deal falls below the ACCC’s mandatory thresholds and will not be notified, the expanded FIRB application requires the investor to disclose specific data on horizontal overlaps, target market operations, and major Australian customers. The Treasury uses these new data points to determine if a sub-threshold transaction raises sufficient com - petition concerns (such as creeping acquisitions or local market entrenchment) to warrant a discretionary referral to the ACCC.
FIRB will generally issue a statutory “Suspension Notice”, pausing its own clock until the ACCC has issued its final administrative clearance. FIRB will not issue a final “no objection” notification until the ACCC process is fully resolved. To avoid unexpected inter-agency referrals late in the deal timetable, foreign investors increasingly utilise the ACCC’s “Notification Waiver” process to proactively secure ACCC sign-off and clear the competition limb for FIRB. Deal teams must align their regulatory conditionality provisions, suspensory timelines, and information disclosures across both agencies from day one.
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