Work

The political economy of Australian regulatory reform

Year: 2020

Type: article

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 (RDAU1.0). We place this ‘restrictiveness clauses’ measurement within the context of regulatory policy innovation, and examine the potential for further innovation in regulatory reform mechanisms.

Source: Australian Journal of Public Administration

DOI: 10.1111/1467-8500.12447

Authors: Darcy W. E. Allen, Chris Berg, Aaron M. Lane, Patrick A. McLaughlin

Institutions: RMIT University, George Mason University

Language: English

Topic: Regulation and Compliance Studies

Subfield: Strategy and Management

Field: Business, Management and Accounting

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Peace, justice, and strong institutions, Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: green

Funder: RMIT University