A kangaroo with no tail could finally be leaving the thoughts of New Zealand's competition regulator as it nears its new May 2 deadline to decide on the proposed NZME-Fairfax NZ merger.

The New Zealand Commerce Commission has already declared the adjudication to be outside its comfort zone, and a further delay - announced last week - underlines that. Along with the routines of competition for advertisers and readers is the issue of plurality of voice if newsmedia owned by the two companies belonged to one entity; imagine - as we are sure they have - if that entity were Rupert Murdoch, for example.

An earlier preliminary statement outlined the NZCC's predisposition to knock the merger back, but its willingness to hear more of the opposing view suggests that the opposite may be the outcome.

It's a difficult debate to follow, both with the mass of submitted documents, and the fact that most are "redacted" (or censored). With more holes than a Swiss cheese, much of the fundamental business and financial information has been kept from the general public.

And then there's that hobbled roo, the example quoted by Oxford Dictionaries of a "counterfactual" (noun) - that if kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over - offered to explain the conditional statement qualified by the adjective meaning "relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case".

You'll read a lot about the counterfactual on the NZCC website, and in the papers which support opposite views, but in this case, it's not about "what has not happened", but about the double-negative of what would happen if the merger were not to be allowed.

A letter from Sarah Keene and Troy Pilkington, partners in Auckland/Wellington legal firm Russell McVeigh makes the Fairfax NZ/NZME case that the two - publishers of the New Zealand Herald, the Dominion Post, and The Press, "effectively the last remaining survivors in their respective geographic areas" - don't compete in metro daily newspaper markets and that even if they did, the realities of digital publishing make that less and less relevant.

And in the more fragile regional market, Wellington economic consultants NERA agree that financing regional journalism is likely to be harder if the merger doesn't go ahead. In a dynamic industry, Fairfax's announcement that it will shut some daily editions of the Marlborough Express - effectively to four editions a week instead of six - makes a statement, though some might consider it a threat of worse to come. Forced to stay in the New Zealand market for already longer than it wanted, Fairfax may be making its views and future commitment to print publishing plain.

One paper the NZCC has been considering is the Canadian Public Policy Forum's research report on news media in the digital age, The Shattered Mirror, which highlights the importance of local news to communities.

NERA appears to be providing the Commission with reasons to allow the merger: That there would be one less major news organisation, but the merged Fairfax/NZME would be "more sustainable" and able to fund quality journalism, print, and "more journalists, including in communities outside major metropolitan areas". They also says it is "difficult to state that plurality would be materially higher" if the merger was barred.

Outside the metro areas, independent publishers have differing views of the proposed merger, one supporting it, while another cites the impact of Fairfax's market power on its current business.

The Russell McVeigh letter of February 27 seeks to "take stock" of the issues and resolve outstanding stopping points, and there's hope for the two publishers in the fact that the NZCC is giving itself more time to consider submissions, and has said the new date is "conditional on the applicants providing no further substantive submissions".

Arguably, however, the decision is line-ball - with hindsight, would it have been better if the NZCC had kept out of it? - and the sooner it is made, the sooner staff and other affected parties - including the country's independent publishers - can get on with the main game, which is surely competing for a role in publishing against revenue competition from Google and Facebook.

Peter Coleman