The Political Economy of Australian Regulatory Reform

Abstract: The problem of regulatory accumulation has increasingly been recognised as a policy problem in its own right. Governments have then devised and implemented regulatory reform policies that directly seek to ameliorate the burdens of regulatory accumulation (e.g. red tape reduction targets). In this paper we examine regulatory reform approaches in Australia through the lens of policy innovation. Our contributions are twofold. We first examine the evolutionary discovery process of regulatory reform policies in Australia (at the federal, intergovernmental and state levels). This demonstrates a process of policy innovation in regulatory mechanisms and measurements. We then analyse a new measurement of regulatory burden based on text analytics, RegData: Australia . RegData: Australia uses textual analysis to count “restrictiveness clauses” in regulation—such as “must”, “cannot” and “shall”—thereby developing a new database. We place this “restrictiveness clauses” measurement within the context of regulatory policy innovation, and examine the potential for further innovation in regulatory reform mechanisms.

1. Introduction

Understanding the regulatory process – and its complex entangled incentives – is difficult.¹ Many theories have been proposed to explain why regulations emerge. Regulations might serve the public interest by correcting market failures (Pigou,1932), they might be the product of trades between rent seekers and governments (McChensey, 1987; Peltzman, 1976; Stigler, 1971), they might be a ‘regulatory gift’ from the government (Browne, 2018), or they could emerge as an institutional response to competing social costs faced by society (Djankov, Glaeser, La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, & Shleifer, 2003; Shleifer, 2005). Despite the complex origins of regulation, it is now widely understood that regulations accumulate over time – that is, there is a tendency for the regulatory state to expand. Our task in this paper is to examine how Australian governments have responded to that accumulation through innovation in regulatory reform policies and their measurement.

Australian governments, since at least the 1990s, have sought to reduce the regulatory burden. At the 1996 Federal election, Liberal Party leader John Howard declared his intention to ‘reduce the amount of regulation and red tape enveloping small business by 50%, during the first three years of government’ (Howard, 1996), and regulatory reduction has been a promise aired by one or both major parties in every subsequent Commonwealth election (Berg, 2018).

The way that Australian governments have developed regulatory agendas, mechanisms, and measurements has been diverse. For instance, the Australian Productivity Commission (2011) suggests three broad approaches to regulatory reform: management of the stock by regulators (e.g. red tape reduction targets); programmed regulatory reform and analysis (e.g. sunsetting clauses); and more ad hoc reviews (e.g. government inquiries into specific sectoral problems). Indeed, some mechanisms operate on the existing stock of regulation (e.g. sunsetting requirements), others prevent poor regulations from being implemented in the first place (e.g. regulatory impact assessments (RIAs)), and others seek to bind the stock and the flow of regulation together (e.g. through regulatory budgets).

The conception and implementation of regulatory policies has evolved differently across jurisdictions. In general, however, Malyshev (2006, p. 276) argues that OECD regulatory reform policies, for instance, have become ‘permanent, rather than episodic in nature.’ This evolution has also required innovation in the measurement of regulation (Allen, 2018). Regulatory measurements include compliance burdens (both in terms of hours and costs), various measurements of the size of regulatory instruments (e.g. the number of pages, word counts or file sizes) as well as more subjective measures of perceived burden (e.g. business executive surveys). Such regulatory measurement is important both to inform the scope and direction of limited reform efforts, as well as to determine the effectiveness of reforms (such as through baselines).

In this paper we focus on the evolution of regulatory reform mechanisms in Australia. The aim of this paper is to characterise and trace policy innovation (e.g. Mintrom, 1997; Radaelli, 2004) in meta-regulatory policies (see Morgan, 1999) in Australia and provide recommendations for further innovation. This draws on an evolutionary understanding of policy making (Witt, 2003) that emphasises the significance of changing knowledge on policy objectives and methods of implementation over time. We adopt this approach because it enables us to understand and compare different regulatory reform mechanisms as solutions to a problem of identifying and incentivising regulatory change under uncertainty, including explaining why policies differ across jurisdictions.

We proceed as follows. In Section 2 we outline shifts in the Australian government approach to regulatory reform to provide political economy context. In Section 3 we examine regulatory reform mechanisms across various levels of government in Australia. In Section 4 we introduce RegData: Australia. RegData is a method and database measuring the number of ‘restrictiveness clauses’ contained within regulations and legislation – such as ‘must’, ‘cannot’ and ‘shall’ (see AlUbaydli & McLaughlin, 2017; McLaughlin & Sherouse, 2019). We explore some of the benefits and limitations of this method as it relates to the political economy of regulatory reform, and see how this new measurement enables comparative regulatory analytics.

2. Deregulating the regulatory state

Glaeser and Shleifer (2003 )describe a shift in control over the economy in the United States during the 20th century from litigation to regulation, a mode of governance they describe as the ‘regulatory state’. This shift describes an institutional choice to trade-off the risk of private expropriation through market control of the economy against the risk of public expropriation through greater state control (Allen & Berg, 2017; Djankov et al., 2003). Other jurisdictions have come to the same mode of economic control through different paths: the United Kingdom, for example, which replaced nationalisation with regulation (Moran, 2003), and the European Union, which represents a regulatory supra-national structure (Majone, 1994).

The key characteristics of the regulatory state are a reliance on rules making and compliance, specialised regulatory agencies at arm’s length from elected officials, discretionary gradations in sanctions for non-compliance, and a focus on modifying the terms of market exchangerather than eliminating market exchange (Scott, 2004; Baldwin, Cave, & Lodge, 2012; King, 2007; Levi-Faur, 2011). As Jordan and Levi-Faur (2004, p. 161) argue, ‘In an era in which regulation has become synonymous with red tape, and deregulation has become a major electoral platform of the New Right, regulatory authorities have been created in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented autonomy.’

As a developed common law economy deeply integrated into both global markets and trends in political economy, Australia has followed paths similar to its developed economy competitors. Although popular writers such as Kelly (1992) have taken the 1980s and 1990s to be an era of ‘deregulation’, Berg (2008) describes the evolution of the regulatory state in the wake of the 1980s, characterised by a sharp increase in legislative activity (as measured by pages of legislation), a focus on rule making and compliance as governance, and an increased emphasis on independent regulatory agencies (see also Bell & Hindmoor, 2009). In the financial sector, this has taken the slightly paradoxical form of liberalisation accompanied by regulatory growth (Berg, 2016a). Bray and Waring (2005) similarly identify that industrial relations law increased in complexity even while it was simultaneously being liberalised. Some regulatory fields have grown in the wake of ‘deregulation’, such as environmental law (Begg, 2017) and occupational health and safety (Winder, 2009), and in others regulation has been delegated to independent regulatory agencies, such as charities (Rittelmeyer, 2014).

Regulations have both benefits and costs. Regulation can be introduced to resolve cases of market failure, where problems of externalities, goods with public good characteristics, and asymmetric information result in suboptimal outcomes. Thus regulation can be seen as a necessary characteristic of state capacity (see Johnson & Koyama, 2017) – the provision of a stable institutional environment that supports the protection of property rights and the enforcement of contracts that incentivises mutually beneficial trade, entrepreneurship, and investment. Regulation can also be used to induce socially desirable outcomes that do not meet the strict definition of market failure, such as environmental and cultural protection. Nonetheless, whether economically or socially desirable, all regulations come at a ‘cost’ of preventing activity that would be otherwise permitted. Those costs include imposing a burden on firm performance (OECD, 2010), deterrence of innovation through preventing experimentation (Thierer, 2014), facilitating rentseeking behaviour (Stigler, 1971; Tullock, 1967), and distorting the allocation of resources with consequences for productivity and economic growth (Coffey, McLaughlin, & Peretto, 2020; Hsieh & Klenow, 2009).

As we show next, much regulatory reform is motivated by, and measured against, empirical measurementsof the regulatory burden.Yet regulatory measurement is difficult, not least because of the contested foundations of the economics of regulation (e.g. whether regulation is introduced in the public interest rather than in the pursuit of private rent-seeking, and how to balance the benefits of regulation against the cost). Other measurement issues arise because of the potentially wide range of sources (e.g. legislation, subordinate legislation, levels of government), that some regulations have deregulatory effects, that not all regulations are equally enforced (for some of these challenges see Simkovic & Zhang, 2019), that the burden of regulation is subjective (Allen & Berg, 2017), and that because regulations impact behaviour in unpredictable ways their unintended consequences can be difficult to define (i.e. the costs and benefits of regulation might only be revealed ex post through review).

There have been several empirical estimates of the regulatory burden that focus on compliance or paper burden costs in Australia. The Commonwealth government estimates that compliance with Commonwealth regulation imposes a burden of $65 billion a year on the Australian economy (Australian Government, 2015b). This analysis was derived through a variation of the standard cost model (SCM) developed initially in the Netherlands and adopted widely in the European Union, which surveys regulated entities to identify the administrative burden of regulatory compliance (see Standard Cost Model Network, 2005). Deloitte (2014) estimates a joint cost of Commonwealth, state and local government regulation at $94 billion a year. Adopting the comparative estimation approach developed by Crain and Crain (2014), Novak (2016) finds that regulation in excess of the World Bank’s regulatory quality index costs Australia $176 billion in lost economic output per year. Each of these measure different aspects of the regulatory burden, and each have weaknesses. Nor do they clearly account for the possible benefits of regulation (see for instance Carey, 2016).

2.1 Evolution and innovation in regulatory reform

There are many ways to understand how governments have approached regulatory reform. For instance, Carroll and Head (2010), in their study of the role of intergovernmental coordination on regulatory reform, divide regulatory reform in Australia into three stages. The first stage occurred in the first few years of the Hawke government (including the floating of the Australian dollar and tariff reductions; see Berg, 2016a; Kelly, 1992). The second stage occurred in the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s, focussing on the process of regulatory creation and amendment (including the intergovernmental creation of the National Competition Policy framework). This was a move from a sectoral focus to a generalised concern with the institutional, intergovernmental, procedural, and philosophical basis for regulatory control. The third stage, from approximately 2005 to 2011, included a further focus on changes to regulatory procedure from a renewed interest in regulatory reform by the Howard government (including the development of a Council of Australian Government (COAG) National Reform Agenda).

An alternative conception is to emphasise how the primary focus of regulatory reform has evolved – from sectoral reforms aimed at competitiveness, to a focus on reducing compliance burdens without changing objectives, to a focus on the accumulation of rules and their effect on innovation and the economy. This analysis provides a more effective way to understand specific regulatory reduction measurements and mechanisms over time.

From the 1980s to today, governments have shifted their reform focus in response to the demands of external actors (such as business groups) and the possibilities opened up by regulatory policy innovation. The classical ‘reform era’(Kelly,1992) of the 1980s and 1990s was structured around sectoral reform. Large scale liberalisations were designed and implemented in response to sector-wide reform agendas. The prototypical example here is the reforms of the financial sector under the Hawke government. Low productivity, competitiveness, and innovation in the banking sector combined with external monetary shocks and a domestic crisis in the building society sector brought the Fraser government to investigate large scale reform options for the financial sector (Committee of Inquiry into the Australian Financial System, 1981, known as the ‘Campbell committee’), which the Hawke government then adapted (Australian Financial System Review, 1984, known as ‘Martin Review Group’) and implemented (Martin, 1999). These sector-specific reforms were accompanied by regulatory growth partly in response to the need to coordinate with parallel reform movements among Australian trading partners, particularly around prudential standards as they applied to foreign bank entrants, and to partly deliver rents to protected constituencies (Berg, 2016a).

This pattern of regulatory liberalisation and privatisation was accompanied by and followed with regulatory growth (Berg, 2008), was driven by a belief that Australia’s economic productivity and economic dynamism was flagging because of an outdated regulatory framework (Bongiorno, 2015; Harper, 1985; Kelly, 1992). The idea that the aim of policy reform should be to increase the competitiveness and efficiency of Australian industry both was a goal of this generation of reformer and also provided the empirical validation of these reforms: both reform necessity and reform success were measured on competitiveness and efficiency grounds. The capstone of this approach to regulatory reduction was the Hilmer competition review (National Competition Policy Review Committee, 1993), which both sought to identify economy-wide regulatory restrictions on competition and systematise how the Australian governments regulate industry for procompetitive purposes (such as through antitrust laws).

Although sectoral approaches continued throughout and after the 1990s (and have themselves been systematised through the Productivity Commission’s sectoral inquiries), the reform period can be seen as the era in which they were at their most significant and influential, as successive governments sought to reshape the Australian Settlement (Kelly, 1992; see for discussion Stokes, 2004).Sectoral approaches moved away from the reform era’s approach to competitiveness through deregulation towards less explicitly goal-oriented surveys of the structure of regulatory systems. For example, there is a sharp difference in focus between the Campbell committee and later reviews such as the Howard government’s Wallis Inquiry (Financial System Inquiry, 1997) and the Abbott government’s Financial System Inquiry (2014). Where the Campbell committee was directed to make recommendations in light of the government’s ‘free enterprise objectives and broad goals for national economic prosperity’, the later inquiries were not given such clear philosophical directions about regulation. Nor did they ultimately recommend the sort of wide-reaching reform of their predecessors.

Although regulatory reform approaches shifted, a parallel concern arose among Australian governments about the quantity and consequences of ‘red tape’ imposed on Australian industry. For some commentators red tape is a nebulous and political concept rather than a useful description of some types of government intervention: as Kaufman (1977) writes, ‘One person’s red tape might be another’s treasured safeguard’. Rules with high compliance burdens can be desirable or undesirable. Bozeman and Scott (1996) consequently conceptualise red tape as rules or procedures which serve no significant organisational purpose. Allen and Berg (2018, p. 2) define red tape as ‘regulation which exceeds the minimum amount of intervention necessary to tackle an identified social or economic problem’. The Commonwealth government has adopted a similar framework, including regulation that is ‘redundant or not justified by policy intent’ (p. III, see also Senate Select Committee on Red Tape, 2018).

The idea of keeping the goal of a regulatory intervention fixed while investigating how the intervention could be made more efficient or less costly is not novel. Indeed, the Campbell committee itself identified its task as to recommend ‘methods of intervention which enable ultimate objectives to be achieved effectively whilst imposing minimum efficiency costs’ without ‘expressing judgements on the desirability or otherwise of the Government’s various social and economic objectives’ (Committee of Inquiry into the Australian Financial System, 1980).

Identifying what constitutes an ‘excessive’ regulation or what constitutes a regulatory burden in excess of the necessary to achieve its goal is at best highly uncertain and at worst subjective (Allen & Berg, 2017). In practice, this generation of regulatory reform pinpointed compliance burdens as the relevant target. Sometimes described as the ‘paper burden’ of regulation, these costs seek to measure the burden of regulation in terms of the labour expended on compliance with them – for example, form filling, installing new compliant equipment to replace non-compliant equipment, and so forth. The measurement of paperburden costs in Australia dates back to the 1970s (see Douglas, 2014), and remains the predominant method of regulatory cost estimation. This can be understood similarly to Keyworth (2006) as an increase in the weighting to administrative burdens.

Paper burden costs, however, only represent part of the economic costs of regulation (Berg, 2008). As Banks (2003) pointed out, the relevance of this focus on lost economic output, rather than compliance costs is relevant because ‘regulations not only create paperwork, they can distort decisions about inputs, stifle entrepreneurship and innovation, divert managers from their core business, prolong decisionmaking and reduce flexibility’ (Banks, 2003). In the US context, Hopkins (1996) influentially argued that paper burden costs are around one-third of the total regulatory burden. Although this can be disputed (for a detailed analysis, see Office of Management and Budget, 1997), it is widely accepted that paper burdens represent only a fraction of the total economic cost of regulation.

A more comprehensive assessment of the total regulatory burden would also consider dynamic costs, such as the degree to which distortions in inputs and production optimisation diminish innovation and economic growth. A recent study estimated that the effect of such regulatory distortions within the United States slowed annual economic growth by nearly one percentage point (Coffey et al., 2020). The relationship between innovation and regulatory structures, however, is complex.

Although compliance measures have exerted significant influence over the red tape reduction process (the Abbott government’s regulatory cost reductions being the most prominent example of their use) weaknesses in paper burden as a representation of red tape or over-regulation have led to alternative measures of regulatory quantity focussing on the number of rules. Early instances of this focus on the quantification of rules rather than compliance costs focussed on counting the pages of legislation and subordinate legislation (Berg, 2008; Kirchner, 2011; Novak, 2013; Warby, 1993, 2000).

Governments and government authorities have been more comfortable quantifying how many rules industries or individual firms are subject to. The Rethinking Regulation Taskforce (2006, p. 6) noted that in 2003 Australian governments administered 24,000 business and occupational licenses between them. We describe a more granular measurement in Section 4, a version of which was recently adopted by the Queensland government (adopted from work done in British Columbia, Canada), that quantifies the number of ‘regulatory restrictiveness clauses’ in legislation as a measure of the degree of regulatory control over economic activity.

A focus on rules as a constraint on innovation (particularly in the digital technology sector and financial sector) in the 2010s has driven innovations in regulatory reform. Although it might be argued that regulatory stability facilitates innovation, the Turnbull government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda (Australian Government, 2015c) directed attention towards specific regulatory barriers to innovation – such as crowd-sourced equity funding and employee share ownership (see also Australian Government, 2016; Morrison, 2016). Regulatory sandboxes enable firms to be exempted from certain rules to allow experimentation that might not be possible under the prevailing regulatory framework (Marjosola, 2019; Zetzsche, Buckley, Barberis, & Arner, 2017). The Australian Securities and Investment Commission released a regulatory sandbox in 2016 allowing financial technology (fintech) companies to test financial services and products without a financial services license or credit licence (see Australian Securities Investment Commission, 2017). Regulatory sandboxes are a recognition that rules inhibit innovation, and that the precise burden of those rules is not clear without experimentation around them.

Finally, we note that regulations can not only act as a constraint on innovators in the private sector, but also on the public sector itself (see Lane, 2018). For example, the United States and United Kingdom recent and ongoing experience in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted several ways in which federal regulations hindered the development and deployment of telemedicine, medical innovation, and testing (see, e.g. Wallach & Weissmann, 2020).

3. Regulatory reduction programs in Australia

In this section we turn more specifically to the implementation of regulatory reduction mechanisms in Australia. Just as Radaelli (2004, p. 724) describes how the ‘diffusion process’ of RIAs ‘provides a formidable example of crossnational learning’, we focus here on innovation and evolution of regulatory reform mechanisms in various Australian jurisdictions. Our approach is to draw on secondary publicly accessible data through a desktop search (e.g. press releases, official department documents, Hansard). We are focussed on the nature of regulatory reduction programs in Australia (including the office it is held in, the potential incentive effects of the mechanism and the length and success of the mechanism). Our aim is not to create an exhaustive list or mapping of all regulatory reform mechanisms or examine specific the mechanisms of policy diffusion and learning (we leave those analyses for future research), but rather to analyse some selected prominent mechanisms at various levels and scopes in the context of an evolution in the approach to regulatory reform.

3.1 Commonwealth

Commonwealth RIAs were introduced in 1986 (Moran, 1986). For their first decade they were assessed by the Business Regulation Review Unit in the Department of Industry, Technology, and Commerce, then after 1990 the Office of Regulation Review (ORR) in the independent Industries Commission. In this period the Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) system had low levels of compliance (Carroll, 2008b; Forster, Head, & Wanna, 1991). The RIS system was reformed on the election of the Howard government in keeping with its focus on the interests of small business. The Office of Small Business was given a dual supervisory role over RISs, and was required to report annually against nine regulation performance indicators. In 2006 responsibility was handed to a reformed ORR, now named the Office of Best Practice Regulation (OBPR, 2007), alongside with a concerted effort to increase RIS quality and compliance. The Rudd government moved the OBPR into the Department of Finance in 2008 (Tanner, 2008) and the Abbott government moved it to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (Frydenberg, 2013).

These structural shifts were the result of the growing ministerial profile of regulatory reform. The Howard government’s initial interest in regulatory reform was focussed on the regulatory burden on small business. Howard (1996) promised in the election campaign to halve the regulatory burden on small business and in government established a Small Business Deregulation Task Force (1996). That task force recommended the government direct its attention to broader regulatory instruments, leading to revisions of the RIS system and an inquiry into quasi-regulatory codes and standards (Commonwealth Interdepartmental Committee on Quasi-regulation, 1997). Increasing pressure from business groups (see Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 2005; Business Council of Australia, 2005a, 2005b) led to the creation of a more general and wider reaching inquiry into regulation which reported in 2006, the Banks inquiry, after its chair the Gary Banks, head of the Productivity Commission (Taskforce on Regulation Taskforce, 2006; Carroll, 2008c). The bank inquiries recommended that a regulatory oversight and reform ministerial portfolio be created at the cabinet level.

After Rudd government’s 2007 election win, Lindsay Tanner was appointed Commonwealth Minister for Deregulation alongside his Finance portfolio enacting that recommendation. During the election Kevin Rudd had sought to differentiate himself from the Howard government by claiming that ‘the quantity and complexity of business regulation today is eating away at the entrepreneurial spirit of Australian business’ (Rudd, 2007). Rudd promised a ‘one-in, one-out’ approach for new regulation (see States section below for further discussion of such stock-flow linkage rules). To that end, in mid-2008 Finance conducted a stocktake of legislation and regulation, asking Commonwealth departments to report on redundant and potentially redundant requirements (Department of Finance and Deregulation, 2011). However, after a minor legislative repeal bill passed in 2009 (Statute Stocktake (Regulatory and Other Laws) Bill 2009), the regulatory reduction process stalled, and the ‘one-in, one-out’ approach was abandoned (Sonti, 2010).

More than any government before them, the Abbott government placed regulatory and red tape reduction at the front of their economic program (Coalition, 2013). The Coalition focussed on quantification. They promise to reduce the regulatory burden on business by $1 billion each year in government. To do so they first conducted a further stocktake that estimated the cost to business of complying with regulation each year – a figure that was found in 2014 to be $65 billion a year (Australian Government, 2015a). Likewise, following an independent review in 2012 that exposed significant dissatisfaction and inadequacies with the RIS system (Borthwick & Milliner, 2012), the Coalition sought to make an RIS mandatory for all cabinet submissions. The intention was that each RIS had to provide an offset measure that would correspondingly reduce the regulatory burden, so each regulatory change was neutral on business.

As well as quantification, the Abbott government sought to align political incentives towards regulatory repeal. Following a Western Australian example, the government held a series of biannual legislative repeal days in March and October 2014 and March and November 2015, where the parliament was supposed to consider and pass only legislation that repealed regulation. However, the omnibus bills presented in these sessions stalled – the October 2014 bill, for instance, lapsed at the prorogation of parliament in April 2016 – and in February 2016 the repeal day initiative was scrapped (Maher, 2016). Likewise, the deregulation portfolio was scrapped, first handed over to the Assistant Minister for Productivity, and then removed entirely. Nevertheless, the Coalition government claims to have reduced the regulatory burden on business by $4.8 billion a year (Cutting Red Tape, 2017).

In July 2019 the Morrison government established a new Deregulation Taskforce, initially focussed on food manufacturing, sole retailers and microbusinesses, and major project regulation. During the COVID-19 pandemic this was reoriented towards removing impediments to business adoption of new technologies such as blockchain and improving occupational mobility (Morton, 2020) – a through-line from Turnbull government’s emphasis on the interaction between innovation and regulation.

3.2 Intergovernmental reform

The third stage of Commonwealth reform was characterised by a focus on intergovernmental reform, particularly through the COAG. Intergovernmental initiatives during the Hawke and Keating government focussed on sectoral reform (Weller, 1996) and National Competition Policy. Intergovernmental reform was revived around 2006, driven in part by a reaction from the states to the Howard government’s centralising tendencies and the creation of an alternative to COAG, the Council for the Australia Federation (Carroll & Head, 2010). At the February 2006 COAG meeting the governments agreed to a new National Reform Agenda that placed ‘reducing the regulatory burden’ at the forefront, with a focus on regulatory process and quality (COAG, 2006).

Kevin Rudd’s new ‘cooperative federalism’ placed COAG central to the new government’s reform program, and expanded its remit outside microeconomic and regulatory reform(Anderson & Parkin, 2010; Carroll & Head, 2010). Nevertheless, COAG quickly focussed on setting standards across different jurisdictions for best practice in the regulatory process. At its April 2007 meeting COAG agreed to a Regulatory Reform Plan for improving the mechanisms of regulatory creation in each jurisdiction (‘gate keeping mechanisms’). It directed the Productivity Commission to investigate benchmarking approaches by which regulatory burdens could be compared across jurisdictions, as well as look at the impact of those burdens on business registration – a standard metric by which the regulatory burden is measured internationally (see the World Bank’s Doing Business project, which launched in 2002) – across the states and territories (Productivity Commission, 2008a, 2008b).

In October 2007, COAG published a Best Practice Regulation guide for its ministerial councils that sought to impose a consistent RIS system across the intergovernmental reform process (COAG, 2007a), and established a Business Regulation and Competition Working Group that was to both identify sectors and issues of concern and examine ‘Strategies and implementation plans for reducing the regulatory burden, including alternative regulatory regimes and processes for offsetting new regulations’ (COAG, 2007b, p. 9). The National Partnership Agreement to Deliver a Seamless National Economy in 2008, while largely sectoral, also relied heavily on the principles of regulatory reform detailed in earlier COAG work (COAG, 2008).

Although the Abbott government declared an early interest in reform of the federation, this made little reference to regulatory standards. Intergovernmental regulatory reform in this period was directed towards eliminating duplication in environmental approval and international harmonisation. Since the early years of the Rudd government, COAG has no longer taken the lead role in the management of regulatory process, and although it remains a regular agenda item at COAG – and benchmarking reviews have been conducted (Productivity Commission, 2012) – regulatory reform became largely the responsibility of individual governments. During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, COAG was replaced by a National Federation Reform Council built around the National Cabinet instituted for the crisis.

3.3 Australian states

Australian states have undertaken regulatory reform policy innovation by implementing mechanisms including RIS, sunsetting clauses, regulatory reduction agendas, and stock-flow linkage rules. We can see that these mechanisms have diffused between different jurisdictions, and have also involved innovations in where reform responsibility is situated.

At a state level, RIS (alternatively known as RIAs) were introduced prior to the Commonwealth. For example, in Victoria, RIS requirements were introduced in 1984 for all subordinate legislation (e.g. regulations, rules, standards enacted by the executive). According to a Victorian parliamentary committee, this change was to address a bipartisan ‘general concern… about the nature and effect of regulation’(Victoria,1984, p.141).Craven (1989,p. 96) contends that the idea for these provisions were ‘largely inspired’ by the actions of the Reagan Administration to tackle the problem of overregulation in the United States.

RISs, and policy assessments more broadly, are ‘a systematic and mandatory appraisal of how proposed primary and or secondary legislation will affect certain categories of stakeholders, economic sectors, and the environment’ (Radaelli & De Fransesco, 2015, p. 2). The way that policy assessments are implemented across jurisdictions raises complex questions around political accountability and control (see Radaelli & De Fransesco, 2015). The RIS process is an attempt to undertake regulatory reform through delegation (Martin, 1994). As the Productivity Commission (2012 p. 3) notes, although all levels of government have implemented RIS processes, they ‘vary considerably (in requirements and practice)’, including in how they measure costs and benefits of regulatory intervention.

The concept of policy assessments has diffused across states. A report from a Victorian parliamentary committee explicitly considers measures being undertaken in the United States and Canada (Victoria, 1984). A number of state jurisdictions followed Victoria’s lead with similar legislation requiring RIS processes being passed in New South Wales (in 1990), Queensland (in 1992), and Tasmania (in 1992). More recently, Western Australia (in 2009) and South Australia (in 2011) have introduced an approach similar to the Commonwealth, where an RIS was generally required by government policy and for cabinet processes but not as a statutory prerequisite. Some states, such as New South Wales and Victoria, have extended RIS processes to legislation – referred to as ‘Legislative Impact Assessments’.

Another approach to regulatory reform that is pervasive at the state level is sunsetting clauses. Sunsetting clauses – an inbuilt expiry mechanism so that regulation will lapse after a certain period of time – have complex origins and antecedents (see Kouroutakis, 2014) but find their modern development in the United States (see Curry, 1990). In Australia they were first adoptedby state parliaments and exist to a greater or lesser degree in all state and territory jurisdictions (Productivity Commission, 2011). Sunset clauses have been variously praised and criticised (see Ranchordás, 2015). On one hand they provide the opportunity to review regulation after a set period, where regulators can both take into account societal and technological change and the revealed information about the costs and benefits of the regulation in practice. On the other hand, sunset clauses can be used as a mechanism to reduce the apparent costs of implementing regulation today and can affect legal certainty and stability.

States have also increasingly focussed on quantifiable targets. For example, in 2006, the Victorian Treasurer announced a target to ‘cut red tape for businesses and non-government organisations by 15% over the next three years’ (Brumby, 2006, p. 7) increasing to 25% over 5 years. The 25% target has been maintained by successive Victorian governments. In Queensland, the regulatory reform process was reinvigorated with the election of the Newman government in 2012 which saw the establishment of the OBPR. Sitting within the Queensland Competition Authority the OBPR was tasked with implementing ‘the government target of a 20 percent reduction in the burden of regulation in Queensland over six years’ (OBPR, 2012).

Targets have also been expressed in monetary terms based on a SCM approach (Productivity Commission, 2011). For instance, in response to a 2009 Jobs Summit, the New South Wales government announced a red tape reduction target of $500 million in two years (New South Wales Government, 2009). The government also announced that agency heads would have red tape reduction in their performance contracts. The election of the O’Farrell government in 2011 came with further political attention on red tape. Following an election promise, the government adopted a target of reducing the regulatory burden on business by 20% by 2015, which it estimated consisted of $750 million in regulatory burden cost. There is also evidence of monetary targets being adopted in Victoria and South Australia (Productivity Commission, 2011).

Western Australia, however, explicitly rejected calls for quantifiable targets (Mischin, 2016). Instead, the state government had focussed its efforts on introducing a parliamentary red tape repeal day in 2012, which later became a dedicated parliamentary repeal week (where parliament is restricted to cutting red tape one week per year, modelled on the ‘Corrections Calendar’ in the US Congress). Like the Commonwealth’s, the WA initiative was short lived and the state government was criticised for focussing on repealing obsolete legislation rather than more substantive regulatory constraints (Heath and Barrett, 2014). In 2015, the WA government announced their Plan to Reinvigorate Regulatory Reform with a range of measures including an annual ‘Red Tape Report Card’ (similar to a policy that had been operated in Queensland between 2012 and 2015 and in Tasmania in 2015). The Western Australia reinvigoration did not survive following a change in government in 2017.

To help achieve their red tape target, the NSW government adopted a ‘one-in two-out’ policy at the portfolio level (Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2012). That is, for each new policy implemented one must be repealed. These stock-flow linkage rules were first proposed in the United Kingdom in 2008 (Productivity Commission, 2011) and seek to constrain ‘the flow of new regulation through rules and procedures linking it to the existing stock’ (Productivity Commission, 2011, p. XV). They are a systematic limitation on regulatory accumulation, based on some form of measurement – whether pages, costs, regulatory rules, or regulatory restrictions. Such measurements have been considered comparatively crude (see Helm, 2006) because they take over-regulation in the aggregate as given.

The location of responsibility for regulatory reform efforts (e.g. within which agency) has shifted over time. Any regulatory reduction mechanism requires some level of governance and accountability, and that must lie somewhere. Governance structures have existed in various forms: whether standing or ad hoc, and whether led by a parliamentary committee, government ministers, an office within the bureaucracy, or an independent statutory office holder. Victoria and New South Wales provide instructive examples about the constant pace of change over time (see also Martin, 1994, for an early Queensland review).

In Victoria, the ‘Office of Regulation Review’ (housed within the Department of Industry, Technology and Resources) was formed in 1985. Assisted by an ‘expert advisory committee’ the office was charged with ‘overhauling and weeding out superfluous regulations that impose unnecessary costs on business and affect the efficiency of Government’ (Victoria, 1985). In 1992, the Victorian Small Business Minister established an additional task force known as the ‘Regulation Review Unit’ within the minister’s department ‘to sharpen the outcomes of regulation reform to ensure the success of specific programs of paperwork reduction and removal of red tape, which will benefit the small business sector’. (Victoria, 1991). In 2004, the Victorian government established the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission (VCEC) – a public entity operating independent of the government. After being initially tasked with state competition policy, the VCEC’s mandate was expanded to include red tape following the 2006 COAG agreement discussed above. Among other things, the commission had responsibility for independently assessing RIS for proposed regulations (Abusah and Pingiaro, 2011). The VCEC was abolished in 2015 and its functions were largely taken up by a new ‘Better Regulation Commissioner’ supported by a unit that sits within the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance. This model was similar to the prior establishment of a ‘Red Tape Commissioner’ in 2013 (Victoria, 2013). In practice, as of 2018, both commissions are held by the same person (Department of Treasury and Finance, 2020). These more recent measures continue to be supplemented with parliamentary committee reports (see, e.g. 2013 Environment and Planning Legislation Committee’s Inquiry into the RIS process) and departmental reviews (see, e.g. 2016 Small Business Regulation Review). Victoria’s idea of a commissioner has caught on, with the Tasmanian government appointing a ‘Red Tape Reduction Coordinator’ in 2015 (Tasmania, 2020).

In New South Wales, the parliament initially established a joint parliamentary Regulation Review Committee (Regulation Review Committee, 2000) in response to business complaints about the regulatory burden. The committee examined disallowable statutory rules which imposed adverse costs on business, personal rights and liberties, and exceeded or violated the spirit of the legislation under which they were made. Later, the New South Wales government responded to the national pressure for regulatory reform that had affected the Commonwealth. Drafts of the Iemma government’s 2006 State Plan had originally conceived of its economic strategy as ‘A higher productivity economy’ but in response to feedback reconceived this as ‘Cutting red tape … reducing complexity and increasing predictability and speed across its regulatory regime’ (New South Wales Government, 2006a, 2006b, p. 19). Although the government also initiated a series of reviews into regulatory process and sectoral issues (see for instance Better Regulation Office, 2010; Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, 2006; Small Business Regulation Review Taskforce, 2006a, 2006b, 2007), the most significant outcome of the State Plan was the establishment of the Better Regulation Office in the Department of Premier and Cabinet as a permanent body managing regulatory reform. However, that office was abolished in 2013 and its functions were absorbed into the Department of Finance, Services, and Innovation.

Overall, it is not clear whether the targets have been successfully achieved (despite any progress the government of the day may claim). For instance, two recent reports into the effectiveness of the New South Wales efforts separately found that its processes were ineffective, the claimed financial benefits were inaccurate and hard to quantify, and, despite some early achievements, the measures taken had failed to spark sustained regulatory reform over the medium term (Audit Office of New South Wales, 2016; Regulatory Policy Framework Review Panel, 2017). Furthermore, both reports drew attention to weaknesses in the NSW RIS system, a lack of dedicated oversight, and the need for an enhanced governing framework around regulatory reform. On a base political level, the constant changes around regulatory reform at a state level may be explained through newly elected governments seeking to make their mark on this policy area, or governments responding to political pressure from the Commonwealth or other states. On another level, governments may also be experiencing ‘reform fatigue’ where ‘there is an unwillingness of governments to continue to implement reform projects’ (Solomon, 2009, p. 631). In this respect, changing frameworks and introducing new processes can be considered a way to disguise a lack of appetite for further reforms.

The adoption and modification of a new regulatory measurement in Queensland is another instance of regulatory innovation diffusion (Radaelli, 2004; Radaelli & De Francesco, 2015). In 2009 the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland (CCIQ) recommended the adoption of ‘one of the most innovative and successful approaches to regulatory reform internationally’, a regulatory requirements baseline count in British Columbia (Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland, 2009). This counting method was also noted by the Commonwealth Productivity Commission (2008a, p. 5). In 2013, the newly elected Queensland government established the Queensland Competition Authority OBPR and directed it ‘to report to Government on a framework for reducing the burden of regulation’ (OBPR, 2012, p. 1). The report, Measuring and Reducing the Burden of Regulation, made several recommendations to help achieve the target set by the Queensland government of a ‘20% reduction in the burden of regulation over 6 years’, including the recommendation to develop a modified version of the ‘British Columbia’ style of measuring regulation. The new regulatory restrictions count was modified from the British Columbia style by incorporating both requirements and prohibitions – that is, the count incorporated: ‘Acts, regulations, codes of practice and any other instrument imposing an obligation or prohibition’ (OBPR, 2012, p. 18).

The baseline count of the new measure as at 23 March 2012 was 265,189 regulatory requirements and was listed across various departments (OBPR, 2013). By 30 June 2013 there was ‘a reduction of 9,404 requirements, equivalent to 4% of the baseline count’ (OBPR, 2013, p. v). There are no further public records of the baseline count being updated. The halting of the baseline count aligns with a change in government in Queensland in 2015 and the movement of the OBPR into the newly established Queensland Productivity Commission. Although the precise reasons why the baseline count was not continued are not clear, there are some public records suggesting a change in focus by the government. The Queensland Minister for Education, Minister for Tourism, Major Events and Small Business at the time noted in Estimates that ‘no one’ had indicated to her to keep the previous government’s red tape reduction target, preferring a change in focus in regulatory reduction efforts towards the need for ‘real-life examples of how business interacts with government, what that looks like for individual sectors of the community…’. This generated some controversy at the time around the minister’s awareness of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s advocacy for a regulatory reduction target.² Interestingly the minister noted that it was ‘comical’ to have people in the department manually counting the words (see Queensland Parliament Estimates, 2015, p. 28). Indeed, there were some challenges with OBPR measurements, including the manual, slow, and labour-intensive nature of the process. This process foreshadowed new computer-assisted tools in quantifying the regulatory burden discussed in the next section.

As we can see, there has been innovation and evolution in regulatory reduction processes and measurements at the federal, intergovernmental, and state level in Australia. Over the course of decades, governments have advocated and implemented mechanisms of regulatory reform including sunset clauses, regulatory budgets and dedicated red tape repeal days. These policies have been designed and implemented through various bodies and leaders within government and the bureaucracy, with varying focus and effectiveness. Implementing those mechanisms, articulating regulatory reform targets, and assessing reform efforts have relied on innovations in regulatory measurement (e.g. estimates of paper burdens). In the following section we turn to the frontiers of regulatory measurement and analyse RegData as a new input into regulatory analytics.

4. RegData: Australia and the new regulatory analytics

RegData is a recent project aimed at quantifying regulation using textual analytics (Al-Ubaydli & McLaughlin, 2017; McLaughlin, Potts, & Sherouse, 2019; McLaughlin & Sherhouse, 2019). RegData ‘is both a methodology and a database that quantifies regulations by industry, by regulatory agency, and over time’ (McLaughlin & Sherouse, 2019, p. 43). RegData has become more sophisticated over time, progressing from its initial release in 2012, using human-assisted algorithms to its current version relying on machine learning (McLaughlin & Sherouse, 2019).

RegData counts ‘restrictions’ founded on the observation that ‘regulatory texts typically use a relatively standard suite of verbs and adjectives to indicate a binding constraint’ (Al-Ubaydli & McLaughlin, 2017, p. 112). Accordingly, the RegData method takes the entire United States Code of Federal Regulations and runs a computer program to count the number of restrictive clauses – conducting a search of the legislative text for keywords ‘shall’, ‘must’, ‘may not’, and ‘prohibited’. The total number of the restrictions is counted, along with the location of the restrictions in terms of their occurrence in the title, chapter, part, or paragraph of the legislative text. This level of granularity is not possible for other methods such as page counts (Al-Ubaydli & McLaughlin, 2017). The Code of Federal Regulations is an annual compilation of all regulations that are in effect in a given year, so restriction counts based on that body of text offer a comprehensive assessment of the total restrictiveness of federal regulations each year.

RegData also uses machine-learning algorithms to estimate the applicability of sections of the Code of Federal Regulations to US industries using the North American Industry Classification System. This allows researchers to conduct ‘within-industry and between-industry econometric analyses of the causes and effects of federal regulations’ that previously was not possible (AlUbaydli & McLaughlin, 2017, p. 110).

The RegData methodology, originally developed for the United States, has been recently applied to Australia–RDAU1.0 (McLaughlin et al., 2019; Wild & Hussey, 2019). Modification was required, however, to reflect differences between US and Australian data. RegData2.2 draws on the US government’s Federal Register (a daily record of updates) and the Code of Federal Regulations (an annual compilation). In Australia, each specific Act and Regulation is separately recorded and RDAU1.0 draws on the Australian government’s Federal Register of Legislation – previously known as ‘ComLaw’. There are two consequences from this difference in how legislation and regulation is recorded in Australia. First, RDAU1.0 needed to take into account start and end dates to avoid double-counting when a specific Act or Regulation was amended, replaced, or changed name. Second, RDAU1.0 needed to manually combine large Acts that the official repository had broken up in volumes, so that separate volumes were recorded as a single piece of legislation.

Figure 1

Ultimately, RDAU1.0 enables Australian regulation to be analysed in terms of ‘restrictiveness clauses’. Figure 1 shows an extract of the results – confirming increasing regulatory burden over the last three decades (see McLaughlin et al., 2019).

The RegData method enables cross-country comparisons. The comparison between the United States and Australia offers some preliminary evidence to support the proposition that ‘states with larger populations have more regulations than states with smaller populations’(McLaughlinetal., 2019, p. 21; see also Demsetz, 1967; Shleifer, 2005). To be sure, there are limitations with RDAU1.0 as it currently stands. One example is that, even though the United States and Australia are both federations, and both datasets are based on federal regulations, the legislative areas governed by the US Congress do not neatly map onto the legislative domain of the Australian Commonwealth parliament (McLaughlin et al., 2019). To improve accuracy in these comparisons, datasets will need to be harmonised based on specific industries (discussed further below) or state-level data will need to be captured. Nevertheless, as further jurisdictions including Australia develop RegData datasets, the scope for new comparative regulatory analytics expands. There are also differences between the North American Industry Classification System and the Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classifications. But as the methodology continues to develop outside the United States, the RegData tool promises to ‘[make] possible a new field of comparative institutional and regulatory economics’ (McLaughlin et al., 2019, p. 5).

We can compare the RegData measurement against other regulatory measurements. Different measures of regulation proxy regulatory burden in different ways. For instance, application of the SCM, or similar attempts to create cost-denominated measurements, is limited by the knowledge problems (e.g. the first- and second-order effects of an intervention, such as their impacts on future innovation). Although nuanced, these are highly subjective measurements that are difficult to scale and to compare. Page counts of regulations are objective verifiable measures (e.g. Coffey, McLaughlin, & Tollison, 2012; Coglianese, 2002; Dawson & Seater, 2013), but they also suffer from the challenge that ‘not all pages are equal’. Given inconsistency in page formatting, other scholars have sought to document file sizes (see Shleifer, 2005). These measurements face similar criticisms, as Al-Ubaydli and McLaughlin (2017, p. 112) note:

Page-count data are subject to the criticism that not all pages are equal. A page could be of enormous or trivial consequence to the economy… Thus, the complexity and impact of the associated regulations are potentially not well captured or comparable across titles … A similar critique is applicable to counting the number of final rules published on an annual basis.

In this context, RegData provides a new measurement of regulatory burden that emphasises the effect of regulations – that is, by prohibiting or requiring some actions – while also remaining an objective measurement. RegData does have some similar limitations to existing measurements. Indeed, just as not all pages of legislation impose an equal regulatory burden, not all restrictive clauses are equal either. Although this is certainly a limitation, RegData provides a more finegrained analysis compared to existing measures. Furthermore, restrictiveness clauses do not indicate the target of a restrictive clause – a clause could impose an obligation or prohibition on a business or organisation, alternatively the clause could impose an obligation or prohibition on a regulator or another public decision maker. This is a caveat regarding the interpretation of results rather than a limitation given that there is a significant amount of regulation inside government (see Hood et al. 1999; Lane, 2018). Rather than page counts or file sizes – that seek to measure the ‘container of regulation’ – restrictiveness clauses focus on the ‘actual restrictive content of legislation and regulations’ (McLaughlin et al., 2019, p. 4).

RegData restrictiveness clauses open new avenues for regulatory analytics. In the United States they have been used to compare regulatory burdens across industries, by using the data set together with machine learning based estimates of industry relevance of regulations. Although this has not yet been developed in Australia, this potential analysis aligns well with the Australian Productivity Commission (2011, p. 18) that ‘the full range of regulations impacting on an industry may need to be examined’. Many programs have recently emerged using the RegData methodology from the United States. For instance, restrictiveness clauses can be used to identify regulatory burdens within particular industries and value chains, such as wine (Pakharel, 2017) and beer (Malone & Chambers, 2017). Other studies have focussed not on identifying burdens but on identifying the complex relationship between regulation and other metrics. For instance, RegData can be used to study particular deregulatory events (see Ellig & McLaughlin, 2016) or as a measure of political risk (Hassan, Hollander, van Lent, & Tahoun, 2019). Other studies have examined the relationship between RegData restrictiveness clauses and wages (Adamis-Császár et al., 2019), business investment in the manufacturing sector (Pizzola, 2018), output in the energy sector (Hall & Shakya, 2019), poverty (Chambers, McLaughlin, & Stanley, 2019a), consumer prices (Chambers, Collins, & Krause, 2019b), entrepreneurship (e.g. Goldschlag & Tabarrok, 2018), employment (Bailey & Thomas, 2017), lobbying and regulatory capture (Clarke & Nesbit, 2018; Lowrance, 2019), inequality (Mulholland, 2019), and productivity (Davies, 2014). This emerging literature evidences that new measurement tools induce policy learning (Radaelli, 2004; Witt, 2003).

Transparency in measurement, as well as the continuity of measurement across governments, has been an impediment to regulatory reform policies. Regulatory benchmarking often requires ongoing government commitments because those benchmarks are undertaken manually through audits. This auditing process not only drains substantial resources but the application of different methodologies (both through time and across jurisdictions) can limit the comparative potential of regulatory burden data, impeding regulatory reform policies. The RegData approach, by contrast, is not reliant on the veracity of government-generated regulatory measurements – that is, trusting the accuracy of analyses – nor is it reliant on governments maintaining measurement over time (including through election cycles). As Allen (2018, p. 220) notes, one of the important aspects of RegData is to ‘introduce a level of accountability and measurement that is cost effective and can be calculated when political will for targeted economic reform is lacking’.

Although there are various efforts to create transparency around public finance – for instance, through calls for open data on public spending and budgets – RegData is an open source protocol and dataset that imparts similar transparency into the regulatory state. By facilitating transparency and regulatory comparisons, the RegData approach has the potential not only to increase government accountability, but also to empower non-state actors to identify and analyse regulations. Comparatively open systems of regulatory analytics increases the accountability of governments to their regulatory reform claims. Given that the process of identifying and prioritising regulatory reform efforts is a discovery problem, RegData also has the potential to ‘permit maximum experimentation and minimize subjectivity’ (Al-Ubaydli & McLaughlin, 2017, p. 120), empowering and encouraging non-state actors to use RegData restrictiveness clauses to analyse policy. Further, the spawning literature around RegData (discussed above) demonstrates this potential for further interaction of non-state actors into regulatory analysis.

Regulatory measurements are inputs into regulatory policy innovation. Regulatory measurements can identify possible reforms, act as mechanisms in the reform process, and to assess regulatory reduction efforts ex post. Implementing regulatory budgets, for instance, requires some form of measurement (e.g. SCM dollar estimates). As new regulatory measurement tools will induce learning, RegData is a potential input into innovation into new regulatory policies. One possible innovation in the near term is to tie restrictiveness clauses into existing stock-flow linkage rules. For instance, when the Queensland OBPR recommended a ‘regulatory obligations’ baseline count (discussed above), they also recommended that red tape reduction targets be set using that new measurement (e.g. 20% reduction in ‘regulatory obligations’). Similarly, governments could use the RegData methodology in committing to a ‘1-in-n-out’ restrictiveness clauses rule (rather than, for instance, pages or some other regulatory count). A more radical long-term possibility is to apply other technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, blockchain, and smart contracts) to the RegData measurements, using technologies to identify and automate parts of the regulatory reform process.

5. Conclusion

Inthispaperwehaveexploredthepoliticaleconomyregulatoryreformmechanismsandmeasurements in Australia. Our approach has been to analyse how Australian governments have sought to undertake regulatory reform through time (e.g. stock-flow linkage rules) and the changing nature of measurements necessary to implement those approaches and to evaluate their success (e.g. page counts). Through time Australian Commonwealth and state governments have developed and applied new approaches to regulatory reduction, with varying degrees of continuity and effectiveness. This analysis of policy innovation in regulatory reform mechanisms and measurements opens avenues for future research, such as investigation into the specific mechanisms of policy transfer and learning across jurisdictions. We also analysed RegData: Australia as a new database and methodology for measuring regulation. RegData provides a more granulated and wide ranging dataset through the measurement of ‘restrictiveness clauses’. Our main finding is that regulatory reduction mechanisms and measurements can be understood as an evolutionary process of policy innovation and learning (Witt, 2003). On this basis, new measurement tools such as RegData facilitates new knowledgefrom comparative regulatory analytics and will provide new inputs into future regulatory reform.

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Footnotes

1. By regulation we mean all enforceable rules by governments (i.e. including legislation, regulations and other enforceable rules). ↩︎
2. See, for instance Tabled Papers in the Queensland Parliament: https://www.parliament.qld.gov.au/Documents/ TableOffice/TabledPapers/2015/5515T1505.pdf. See also Tin (2015). ↩︎