In a famous act of studied neutrality the framers of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS)1 left nations adhering to the Agreement completely free, in Article 6 of that document, to determine the extent to which they would allow the parallel importation of products affected by intellectual property rights which had been lawfully placed on the market outside the jurisdiction.2 The hands off approach embodied in Article 6 came as no surprise to commentators and TRIPS watchers. What to do about parallel importing has always been an issue which has deeply divided the world's trading nations and continues to be the subject of vigorous debate within them.3 Intellectual property owners and their licensees are uniting across national borders not just to defend historically entrenched advantages but also to portray these advantages as so much a part of the post TRIPS order that their extension (at home as well as abroad) seems both natural and inevitable. Importers and would-be importers outside existing distribution networks not unnaturally remain sceptical of arguments which threaten to replace tariffs and import restrictions with private law barriers to entry, barriers backed by both civil and criminal sanctions. In Australia and New Zealand these self-interested opponents of parallel importing have, in recent years, been joined in their scepticism by competition regulators and policy makers eager to bring to bear on the debate economic insights derived from detailed analyses of the impact of such restrictions both on particular product markets and the national economy as a whole. Increasingly too, the wider consuming public has begun to see that grey markets have charms hitherto invisible behind now removed protectionist walls.