The ongoing drama in Australia over the impending (or mayby now not so impending) Tabcorp/Tatts merger is nothing but a show of juridical pretentiousness. It’s hard to tell who even to root for because everyone is clothing their actual wishes and intentions in legalistic nonsense. All sides say they are concerned for consumer safety and fair competition, yet nobody is at all. All sides are concerned with how much money they will come out with on the other side. Nothing else.

There’s nothing wrong with that by itself. That’s everyone’s goal always. What’s wrong is that everyone is pretending otherwise and all sides are using the pro-competition argument to actually stamp out competition.

Now one state competition body, the ACCC, is challenging another state competition body, the ACT, for approving the merger. The challenge is coming on the grounds that the ACT calculations about competition were wrong, and this supposedly imperils consumers. Why there should even be two of them, let alone one, is a big question.

The elephant in the room here, one of many, is that if either of these Australian acronyms were actually concerned about fair competition, they would break up the monopolistic relationship between Tatts and the Australian government. Tatts’s biggest business is operating state lotteries. Who else can operate lotteries in Australia? Nobody. Only the state. Anyone else who tries gets arrested. Is that fair competition? Is that consumer protection? No. But the Australian government is the boss of both of these acronyms, so neither can fight the actual source of real monopoly.