Table of Contents
The aim of this chapter is to provide an assessment of the performance of the Commonwealth government’s Regulation Impact Statement (RIS) system, a system first introduced in 1986 but modified and strengthened in 1996 as part of a move to further improve the quality of new and modified regulation and, hopefully, minimise adverse impacts on business and economic performance. It argues that, while its proponents were keen to see its effective implementation in all departments and agencies — proposing that, as part of the broader process of regulatory reform, it would lead to an improved quality of regulation — actual practice showed that the performance of the RIS system was limited. It resulted in some improvements in the processes for making regulation, however, the quality of the resulting regulatory content and the analysis supporting that content improved little, if at all. It is further argued that this limited performance can be explained by a number of factors, especially the varying 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 regulatory analysis, particularly as regards cost/benefit assessments. The chapter is divided into three major sections: the first provides a brief, descriptive outline of the RIS system as modified in the mid-1990s; the second examines the performance of RIS from 1986-1997; the third examines its performance following reforms implemented during the period from 1998-2006 but prior to further modifications to the system introduced in late 2006.