Annotated Bankruptcy Act 10th ed, 2024, LexisNexis

Annotated Bankruptcy Act 1966, 10th edition

I am pleased to have had published the 10th edition of the Australian Annotated Bankruptcy Act 1966 by LexisNexis.  This work follows on from the considerable input to the book made by the late Paul Nichols whose contribution is readily acknowledged. 

The book is extracted from Practice and Procedure – High Court and Federal Court of Australia (available on Lexis Advance, Lexis Red and as a four-volume loose-leaf service) and provides comprehensive analysis and explanation of key bankruptcy provisions, with authoritative annotations and relevant case law. The book contains the Act, Schedule 2, the Rules, the Regulations the relevant courts’ bankruptcy rules, the estate charges legislation, forms and costs and fees, along with a comprehensive case list, and index.

Legislation pending at the time of publication, concerning the Administrative Review Tribunal, is also included.

Our first federal Bankruptcy Act was that of 1924, which was then replaced by the Bankruptcy Act 1966.  That 1966 Act has been extensively amended since.  As to the Bankruptcy Act in 2024, it calls for a ‘good and bad’ assessment.

As to the bad, none of the ancient concepts like act of bankruptcy and relation back, recommended for removal by the 1988 Harmer Report, has ever been modernised, and there has been glacial consideration of removing or shortening the 3 year period of bankruptcy, Parliament’s 2024 law reform agenda merely identifying it as a “long-term” reform priority.

On the other hand bankruptcy law has adopted more flexible processes for examinations (s 77C) and litigation demands (s 139ZQ), and it avoids the excessive court involvement of corporate insolvency. The various roles of the Inspector-General in Bankruptcy and the Official Receiver avoid reliance on the private sector for public interest tasks.

Current reforms

As for the current proposed reforms, I enclose my recent Insolvency Law Bulletin article. uninspiringly titled – Reforms to Australian personal insolvency law (2024) 23(3&4) INSLB 20 – and maybe misleadingly titled as ‘reforms’ given what I say is the very limited changes to insolvency law being proposed. Reforms to Australian personal insolvency law — (2024) 23(3&4) INSLB 20 It may be that the reforms’ tentative content is the result of constraint imposed by the 2023 Parliamentary Joint Committee’s recommendation for a comprehensive review of insolvency in Australia, personal insolvency law perhaps biding its time pending a government decision on that review.

These reforms include an increase in the monetary threshold for the issue of a bankruptcy notice to $20,000, from $10,000; an increase the days for a debtor’s compliance with a bankruptcy notice to 28 days, from 21; removal of a little used act of bankruptcy; a limited response to a one-year bankruptcy period; and reducing the period that a person’s name remains on the public record as a “bankrupt” down to 7 years.

Other relatively minor bankruptcy changes that are pending or made include those made by the Aged Care Bill, the AML and CTF Bill, the Family Law Amendment Bill and the Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Market Infrastructure and Other Measures) Act 2024.

Other publications

Apart from this Annotated Bankruptcy Act, I write for these other Lexis Nexis publications

• Ford’s Corporations Law (with Professor Ian Ramsay AO), LexisNexis online
• Australian Business Law (with the Hon Kevin Lindgren KC), LexisNexis online
• Insolvency Law Bulletin, (ed Dr C Robinson), as former editor, co-editor and contributor, 2000-2024, LexisNexis
• Bankruptcy Law and Practice, LexisNexis on-line.