THE CASE

The case for study is  AUSTRALIAN COMPETITION AND CONSUMER COMMISSION [APPELLANT] v TPG INTERNET PTY LTD [RESPONDENT] (decided in December 2013)

• A copy of the High Court’s judgment is loaded separately.
• The first step is for students to read the judgment carefully.
• The questions for response will be placed on Moodle in week 9.

Extra guidance for students

To avoid any confusion among some students who are reading the High Court judgment about the roles played by the various courts which heard this dispute I provide the following short summary

The sequence of court hearings

• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) brought proceedings against internet provider TPG because of an advertising campaign TPG had been conducting for internet services.
• Initially, the proceedings were heard by a single judge, who is referred to in the High Court judgment as the “primary judge”. ACCC was largely successful against TPG in those proceedings.
• TPG, having lost the case before the primary judge, appealed to three judges, referred to in the judgment as the “Full Court”. That court largely disagreed with the conclusions of the primary judge and set aside his decision. In effect, TPG won its appeal to the Full Court.
• This left ACCC as the loser. It appealed to the High Court, which disagreed with the conclusions of the Full Court in favour of TPG and essentially reinstated the decision made by the primary charge in favour of ACCC.

The judgment you are reading, and to which the assignment questions relate, is the judgment of the High Court only. However, to enable the “ratio” of its decision to be understood, the High Court includes in its judgment summaries of the reasons which the primary judge and the Full Court gave in coming to their respective (and contradictory) decisions.

The questions in this assignment

The questions you will be required to answer are designed to enable you to express your own understanding of what the three courts separately determined. However, this is not a cut and paste exercise. It is not possible to answer the questions simply by locating the relevant paragraphs in the judgment and copying them into your answer.  Doing so will result in a high similarity index in Turnitin and a low mark for the group. One group in a previous trimester resorted to the cut and paste technique and was awarded 2/20;  as a result, all but one member of the group failed BUS101.

You must express your answer in your own words and to enable the tutors marking the assignments to be sure that you have done this you should state, in brackets at the end of your answers to each question, the paragraph numbers from the judgment you have referred to in preparing your answer.

I encourage you to express answers in either numbered or bullet point form rather than long paragraphs.