The fragrant Flint leaps to the defence of the rich and powerful caught ripping off those with no recourse or protection.

No surprises here, then.

Nothing to see, move along.

Of course Flint would jump on the tall poppy syndrome band wagon...

He likes to think of himself as a poppy... Just not sure how tall he ever got...lmao

Flint are you aware of your own irrelevance to Australian society?

Are you the Flint in Flintstones... still putting forward your stoneage ideas?...lmao

Mr Flint, as far as cutting down tall poppies (or the nicely phrased Selective Weeding)goes, you are safe now and forever. Crikey, mate, you spruik s**t.

“a crime was never so well perfumed” FrankGol
“No matter how you look at it, Pratt effectively stole money” Wobbles
“the rich and powerful caught ripping off those with no recourse or protection” Pericles

To the above and also Yindin, Ho Hum and sneekeepete.

Err…..Dare I ask a very inconvenient question. Just how has Richard Pratt in effect stolen or otherwise engaged in any immorality?

Pratt has broken the law (dumb as it is) and thus due process must follow. But apart from being punished for violating article 246 D part vii[b] (or whatever it is) of the Trade Practices Act, can someone tell me what harm he has actually caused to society? To me, all he seems to have done is to put a price on his cardboard boxes, to accept an offer to sell his boxes for that price, and then to sell them. Price collusion or not, where is the harm?

There is no force, fraud, theft, bribery or coercion. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, if you are negotiating the price of your house with an intending buyer, and you settle on a price $10,000 above your bottom figure, you have NOT stolen $10,000 from the buyer.

By the way, conspiracy, collusion or whatever you want to call it, is still no more than two people having a private conversation of over their flat whites. Pease don't tell me that in itself is immoral.

Edward Carson asks: "what harm has [Pratt] actually caused to society?" Or "Just how has Richard Pratt in effect stolen or otherwise engaged in any immorality?" Or "...all he seems to have done is to put a price on his cardboard boxes, to accept an offer to sell his boxes for that price, and then to sell them. Price collusion or not, where is the harm?"

The harm is that virtually everyone in Australia has been defrauded into paying a higher price for boxes than the legal working of the market should have required. The further effect is unnecessarily to increase the prices of the goods in those boxes.

No fraud, says Edward. If their business strategy was moral, honest and lawful, why did the cartel members meet secretly, using special mobile phones and deploying subterfuge and extreme concealment?

Edward's analogy to selling houses is ludicrous: "if you are negotiating the price of your house with an intending buyer, and you settle on a price $10,000 above your bottom figure, you have NOT stolen $10,000 from the buyer." That may be fair dealing if the housebuyer had access to other houses and other vendors genuinely competing for the buyer's reasonable offer at fair prices. But to extend the analogy, if there are only two people selling houses in Australia and they put their heads together in secret to make sure price are fixed, then buyers are being ripped off. That is not only illegal but also immoral.

Edward, it's not immoral if it is "no more than two people having a private conversation of over their flat whites". But the flat whites were lubricating the conversation about a plot to raise prices and guarantee profits beyond what is reasonable in a fair market.

For a man deemed by Flint and Carson to have done no wrong, Richard Pratt himself seems pretty contrite and anxious quickly to pay the proposed fine (guessed to be in the $30-40m range but yet to be announced). If he's done nothing wrong, you'd expect him to be fighting the charges.

Step aside for a moment from the love or hatred of David.

A major point he raises is the wafer thin distinction between conscious parallelism and price fixing.

Qantas and United Airlines are not into price fixing, but they virtually own the cross Pacific airline travel market and they have similar very comfortable and highly profitable prices.

The really big puzzle for me is why Amcor and Visy needed to have a price fixing arrangement. If Amcor had simply thought "let us follow Visy pricing" everything would be legit!

I think the important thing, if we value competition, would be to somehow make it possible for new competitors to enter the supply market.

Fencepost