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Lindsay Tanner's blog

Better Regulation - There's always room for improvement

Lindsay Tanner's picture

A bottom up approach - the start of which is simply listening to those who are affected by regulation on a day to day basis - can help limit the costs and improve the effectiveness of regulation.

Thank you for joining me here to discuss better regulation. 

Earlier this year I visited the UK, Netherlands and the OECD to talk to regulators, business leaders and politicians about how they have been tackling regulatory reform. 

I came back to Australia enthused and full of ideas and insights.  But I also came back with the view that these countries are not so far ahead of us that Australia could not also become a pace‑setter in regulatory reform.

To do this will require new ideas and innovations, including better use of information technology and a commitment to continuous improvement of our regulatory systems. 

Continuous improvement means building better regulation from the bottom up. History provides numerous examples of top down regulation imposed with good intentions but little awareness of unintended consequences and costs. A bottom up approach - the start of which is simply listening to those who are affected by regulation on a day to day basis - can help limit the costs and improve the effectiveness of regulation.

The path to prosperity through deregulation

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A ‘one-in', ‘one-out' approach to new Federal legislation requires that a Minister seeking to impose new regulation must try and find offsetting reductions in regulatory burden.

There can be no doubt we're facing turbulent economic times. Our inaugural budget was designed to put downward pressure on inflation as well as delivering on our election commitments and setting the Australian economy up for the longer term. 

We're addressing Australia's future challenges by funding our election commitments to improve productivity through an education revolution and by tackling the infrastructure bottlenecks which are holding our economy back.

As I pointed out last week at the Australian Trucking Convention we're also prepared to tackle the deeper structural issues effecting our capacity to compete on a world stage, and we especially see deregulation as an important a tool for improving Australia's productivity.

Bringing government to the people through the web

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How do we adapt the static and process driven world of the bureaucracy to the more dynamic and innovative world of the collaborative web?

Earlier in the week I was lucky enough to give the keynote address to the e-Government forum at CeBIT Australia. I say lucky because I come to this debate with a longstanding personal interest in the connection between new technologies and democratic renewal.

I was among the first Australian politicians to use YouTube and Facebook to interact with my constituents, especially my 673 Facebook friends.

I must have been amongst the trend setters as now a significant number of Australian politicians are interacting with electors online. What's clear is that the relatively basic types of engagement we are currently seeing in Australia are just the tip of a very large Web 2.0 iceberg.

And the government is keen to work with Web 2.0 technologies and integrate them into our approach.