Ministers plan AXE as test-case for trans-Tasman glasnost

Wednesday 26th August 2009

Senior Cabinet Ministers plan to use the NZX's stalled application for a share market trading licence in Australia as a test of the reinvigorated trans-Tasman political relationship.

NZX wrote off $3.6 million in the last financial year, having spent 21 months waiting without word from Canberra on the fate of its trading licence application for the AXE platform, which it has planned to establish with Citigroup, CommSec, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Macquarie Bank and Merrill Lynch.

On the basis of that experience, NZX CEO Mark Weldon described the Australasian Single Economic Market as "an absolute joke", in which Canberra politics would trump due process where it suited Australia.

The application had gone into "a Kafkaesque world called Canberra where not only is there no answer on the market licence application but there's an abject refusal to give any timetable", Weldon said in an interview with BusinessWire earlier this month.

However, Finance Minister Bill English raised the issue informally during the high level talks between the New Zealand and Australian Governments last week, and he and Commerce Minister Simon Power are both signaling that they will be seeking to put the issue back on the table in the near future.

The AXE platform is an electronic communications network that separates listing from trading functions and would provide direct competition to the ASX.

While regulatory approval processes had been handled professionally, the hold-ups since approvals were gained were clearly political, Weldon said.

Businesswire.co.nz

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