Law Council of Australia

Business Law Section

Regulating digital asset platforms—exposure draft legislation

Submission Date: 3 November 2025

The Business Law Section of the Law Council of Australia welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback in response to the above consultation, focusing on the exposure draft legislation as explained in the draft Explanatory Memorandum and Fact Sheet. This submission has been prepared by members of the Business Law Section’s Digital Commerce and Financial Services Committees.

The Committee's response is relatively high-level, and broadly welcomes the fact that the draft legislation has been issued. Had there been a longer period of consultation, the Committee would have been better placed to respond to the specific questions posed by Treasury (many of which are considered to be sensible).

While the Committee recognises that the proposed reforms are important and need to progress, the Committee also makes the observation that the amendments to Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) contained in the exposure draft legislation will only serve to add to what has become an unmanageably complex legislative regime.1 The introduction of this further complexity makes the case for commencing measures to meaningfully address the complexity even more compelling.

The Committee encourages Treasury to prioritise simplification and reduction in the complexity of Australia’s financial services laws, which would complement ASIC’s focus on regulatory simplification, which ASIC has comprehensively articulated in ASIC Report 813 Regulatory simplification (published 3 September 2025).

Key Points

The key points the Committee wishes to make are as follows:

  1. the concepts of “digital assets platform” and “tokenised customer platform” may warrant some refinement to ensure that their scope is consistent with the policy intention;
  2. the definition of “digital object” appears to be very broad and this could have some unintended consequences;
  3. the concept of “control” may be more appropriate than “possession” when it comes to some uses of digital assets;
  4. the timing of the introduction of the legislation and the transition period should take into consideration other events and other related legislative reforms; and
  5. as with any new legislation, there are likely to be some unforeseen unintended consequences, and it is important to have suitable arrangements in place to have those issues dealt with promptly, informed by appropriate technical and industry expertise.

1 We refer to the observations of the Australian Law Reform Commission in Report 141 Confronting complexity: Reforming corporations and financial services legislation, dated November 2023 and published on 18 January 2024.

Related Documents

Last Updated on 28/11/2025

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