Australia

Abstract

The dominant influences on the Australian accounting environment arise from legal and professional sources. Australian company law was originally modelled very closely on UK company law (Standish, 1981). However, the underlying political economy developed in such a way as to resemble the US system more than the UK system. An important example of this is the federal nature of the constitution, resulting in the various state parliaments each enacting their own Companies Acts. In practice this distinction was of little relevance, as the principal Act (until recently) was the Companies Act 1961, whose form and content was agreed by all the states before enactment in their individual jurisdictions. However, some subsequent amendments to this Act were passed in some states but not in others. An important change to the legislative procedure has occurred over the last few years with the introduction of a more standardised approach to company law. This new approach is based on a formal agreement beween the national government and the state governments (Parker, 1982), and has resulted in the National Companies Act 1981.