ABSTRACT
National Competition Policy was initially forged in the enclosed domain of a micro-economic policy community whose shared norms and mode of discourse were relatively technocratic. While the prescriptions of expert discourse crucially shape the interstitial bureaucratic politics of meta regulation in ways that are central to its incipient legality, this chapter aims to establish a broader context before delving into those technical bureaucratic politics in Chapters Four and Five. It is in this chapter that the broader cultural absorption of the possible meanings of this new legality is explored. Here, in legislative debates and parliamentary inquiries, is where individuals and groups who do not share the closed circuits of expert discourse attempt to make sense of its prescriptions in the ‘everyday’ terms of pragmatic political discourse. These sites provide a window onto the expressive dimensions of meta-regulation.
