I have a piece in this month’s Quadrant: “Regulation and the Regulatory Burden”, as part of their ‘How Good Was Howard’ series. (It is not, unfortunately, online yet.)

At the editor’s request, the piece is for the most part drawn from my monograph published earlier this year, The Growth of Australia’s Regulatory State: Ideology, Accountability, and the Mega-Regulators, but also tries to tackle the question at stake - to what degree should we consider the government, or the prime minister, responsible for the growth in regulation? My argument in the book and the Quadrant article is that there are a number of engines of regulatory growth within the structure of government (not least regulatory agencies themselves) that exert underappreciated power over the total corpus of regulation. Therefore the degree to which we can blame governments and individuals for regulatory growth is limited, although not negligible.

I’m no fan of the Howard government, but I’m not convinced they deserve all the blame for the dramatic growth in regulation over the last decade.