As described above, this chapter has provided a brief introduction to the origins and development of the waves of regulatory reform that have characterised the work of Australian Commonwealth governments over the last 25 years. Chapter Two examines the development and performance of the Commonwealth government’s Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) system, designed to improve regulation-making processes in the somewhat ambitious hope that its output — regulation — would be of better quality and impose less cost in achieving the desired impacts on business. It argues that, in practice, the performance of RIS has been variable and less than was hoped — a performance explained by a number of factors, especially the fluctuating levels of ministerial and head of department/agency commitment to the system, a sometimes less than adequate integration of RIS with existing policy development processes and varying standards of analysis, particularly as regards the costing of regulatory proposals.
Chapter Three examines in more detail a neglected aspect of the Commonwealth’s system for ensuring regulatory quality, the development and use of a system of regulatory performance indicators (RPIs) in the period 1998-2006. It provides a case study of the government’s attempts to improve regulatory quality and performance, in line with the urgings of the OECD. Its conclusion is that the value and use of the RPIs was limited, although the experience gained should prove valuable in current attempts to improve existing systems of performance indicators (see Productivity Commission 2007).
Chapter Four, by ex-public servant turned academic, Chris Walker, argues that the processes of regulatory reform that have occurred since the early 1990s, with their emphasis on the need for regulatory uniformity and simplicity, have neglected the need to improve our capacity to manage complex regulatory and operational systems. Indeed, he suggests that one of the results of the reforms of the 1990s was the creation of more complex regulatory systems, which he illustrates with reference to railway systems and the role of the National Transport Commission. Rather than setting targeted programs of reform that strive for the holy grail of regulatory simplicity, he suggests that COAG should be seeking to transform arrangements within policy sectors so that agencies and stakeholders can better manage and respond to inevitable regulatory complexity.
Chapter Five is the first of three chapters that look forward, rather than back, in introducing the National Reform Agenda as proposed by the Victorian Government and endorsed by COAG. Its author, Helen Silver, played an important role in its development and promulgation. She argues the need for a further wave of reform at both state and federal level if Australia is to meet the major social and economic challenges it is facing, emphasising the need for cooperative reform within the COAG structure.
Chapter Six, by Peter Carroll, provides a critical assessment of the Commonwealth’s Rethinking Regulation Program, based on the recommendations of the Banks taskforce and the government’s response to its principal recommendations — a major plank in the third period of regulatory reform. Carroll’s overall assessment is that while there is much in the report to be commended, the need is for greater commitment and support for existing systems for making and implementing business regulation rather than a fundamental rethinking of the system for making business regulation.
Chapter Seven, by consultant and ex-public servant Rex Deighton-Smith, notes that recent decades have seen a substantial move by regulators in Australia, as in many other OECD countries, to adopt performance-based and process-based regulation, in preference to traditional prescriptive regulation. This is a shift actively encouraged by regulatory reformers and the author argues that recent experience increasingly reveals a range of regulatory quality and regulatory governance concerns arising as a result of this trend. They include problems relating to transparency, public accountability and regulatory complexity and a set of recommendations are developed suggesting what might be done to improve performance.