On 26 September John Tucker presented these ideas at the GAP Congress on Regulatory Affairs: "Opportunities for Business",  held in Parliament House of Victoria.

An Australian Standard is a published document which sets out specifications and procedures designed to ensure that a material, product, method or service is fit for its purpose and consistently performs in the way it was intended.

The Federal Government recognises Standards Australia as the nation's peak non-government standards development and approval body.

Many Australian Standards are adoptions or adaptations of International Standards. Standards Australia is Australia's member of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

As well as Standards we produce other documents such as handbooks and guidelines.

Our products cover everything from consumer products and services, construction, engineering, business practices, information technology, human services to energy and water utilities, the environment and much more.

Our products are produced by technical committees comprised of volunteers, with support from our Standards Australia staff. Hundreds of organisations - from business, academia, research bodies, and government - nominate volunteer members for our committees.

Our products are available through our publisher, SAI Global.

Standards are consensus-based, voluntary documents (in other words, self-regulation). Compliance with a Standard is not mandatory unless the Standard is incorporated into law (described as quasi-regulation or co-regulation) or called up in contractual arrangements.

Standards these days tend to be performance-based, that is they contain principles or statements about required performance, rather than prescriptions about specifications.

There is plenty of room for producers to look for better ways of achieving the performance levels set out in the Standard.

Two very practical examples of performance-based Standards are the Standard on scaffolding and the Standard on damp-proof courses.

‘Regulation' as a term is not easy to define but it is generally seen as being about changing the behaviour of individuals or businesses through rules or principles which are supported in some way by the authority of government - even if, as is the case with industry self-regulation, the government's role is confined to deciding not to exercise its authority.

That is, it decides to leave the industry to regulate itself.

Standards certainly feature in best practice handbooks as ‘alternative instruments of regulation'. (For example, the ones put out by the Commonwealth Office of Best Practice Regulation and the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance.)

Though Standards are often not well understood by people in government who should be on the lookout for ways of reducing the ‘red tape burden'.

For example, the Commonwealth handbook, when it looks at self-regulation, focuses on industry codes and mostly leaves out voluntary standards such as Australian Standards.

We have found in talking to COAG jurisdictions (Commonwealth, States and Territories) that they are often not aware of the dozens of cases of regulation on their books where Australian Standards have been called up and are working well.

Examples are environmental matters, fair trading, fire safety, food preparation, gas, health, mining safety, pest management, plumbing and many more.

Many of these cases are success stories of light-touch regulation which need to be more widely known.

Nor are governments and their advisers sufficiently aware of the possibilities of self-regulatory approaches in areas that traditionally have been the subject of black-letter regulation.

The current COAG initiative on business deregulation, like many previous reviews, talks about the need to look at alternative regulatory approaches.

We hope this is not just empty rhetoric.

We have been asking governments at all levels, for two years now, to properly consider Standards as an alternative, as part of a risk-based approach to regulation

When they confront a policy issue, Governments have a spectrum of options. These options range from no action at all, through to explicit, detailed regulation (legislation and/or regulations), often referred to as ‘black-letter law'.

What Standards Australia is proposing is that governments should be less inclined to bring in black-letter law and then, once the impacts of over-regulation on business and the public become clear - the ‘red tape burden - have to find ways of making these impacts less burdensome.

Instead, we are asking that Ministers and public servants, when considering a policy problem, consciously and conscientiously assess risks (to the community and the economy) and apply a solution at the point on the spectrum that best matches the risk.

The solution might be ‘no action', or a non-regulatory solution (like a publicity campaign), or self-regulation (by means of a code or standard), or quasi-regulation (such as a standard endorsed by government) or co-regulation (such as a standard cross-referenced in a general or high-level regulation).

We have been pressing governments hard to look at these ‘standards-based alternatives' to detailed, black-letter regulation, and we would welcome your support.

We all know the consequences of the rush to regulate - the Banks review, COAG ‘hot spot' reviews, and other reviews, all looking at ways of reducing the regulatory burden.

All of them seem in some sense to be shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

Meanwhile, ACCI (the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry) estimated in 2005 that regulation is costing the Australian economy around $86 billion a year, at that time about 10 per cent our GDP - and that figure did not include all forms of regulation.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to apply the best regulatory solution from day one, rather than overregulate first and deregulate later?

Governments have been able to do make these sensible regulatory decisions in the past. The evidence is on the statute books, as I said, dozens of pieces of general regulation, which cross-reference Australian Standards, which is more detailed documentation developed by industry consensus.

One example: electrical installations in Australia - the work of electrical contractors large and small - are largely regulated by Australian and New Zealand Standard 3000, known as the Wiring Rules.

This is a book of more than 400 pages, containing detailed material about electrical installations, much of it quite prescriptive, because we are talking about the safety of workers and consumers and about ensuring a continuous supply of electricity.

This important documentation is put together by consensus between industry regulators, business, manufacturers, unions and other stakeholders.

Because it is put together in this way, it is far less likely to lead to complaints about the ‘red tape burden' from people in the industry.

Yet the black-letter regulation across nine jurisdictions that calls up the Wiring Rules runs to a grand total of ten pages.

In Tasmania, for example, the Electricity Industry Safety and Administration Regulations 1999 simply incorporate the Wiring Rules into the Regulations.

In Queensland, the wording is ‘a licensed electrical worker who performs electrical work on an electrical installation must ensure that the electrical installation, to the extent it is affected by the electrical work, is in accordance with the wiring rules'.

This model of ‘general regulation/detailed standard' is one that government and regulatory bodies need to look at far more closely in other fields.

We are pressing COAG jurisdictions to follow this model as they develop the proposed National Construction Code, which is expected to apply eventually to building, electrical installations, gas installations, plumbing and communications cabling.

We recognise that governments will not always be able to resist political and public pressure to go all the way across the spectrum to detailed black-letter regulation.

Sometimes ‘political risk' will be the over-riding consideration.

Sometimes there will be real risks to the community that justify detailed regulation.

We are just suggesting that governments need to try somewhat harder to fit the degree of regulation to the risk that is present.

What are the advantages of this sort of approach to regulation?

The Commonwealth Office of Best Practice Regulation says there are a number of potential benefits associated with self-regulation, quasi-regulation and co-regulation compared with explicit government regulation. These include:

• lower government administration costs, because such arrangements are developed and often administered by business;
• lower compliance costs for business;
• innovative inducements for compliance and sanctions for non-compliance;
• rules that are tailored to specific needs and thus better targeted;
• improved credibility because rules are developed by business, not imposed by governments;
• enhanced flexibility, responsiveness and speed of implementation and modification; and
• greater responsiveness to consumer demands based on additional information gained from, for example, the complaints mechanism.

We believe there are also advantages in connection with innovation.

Restrictive regulation can often prevent the diffusion and take up of new technologies and innovative processes.

As I said earlier, performance-based Standards, used as an alternative to regulation, can encourage business to seek new ways of achieving performance that meet the required Standard but do not prevent the business from following - and setting - industry trends.

Standards diffuse knowledge through businesses - which is the key to innovation.

Management Standards, like those on knowledge management and risk management, stress alternative pathways and case studies, offering guides for businesses to develop new solutions tailored to their own needs.

Standards can also complement research and development.

We expend an amazing amount of energy on calibrating and recalibrating the tax concession for R&D.

Yet a Productivity Commission paper in 2006 could not find a consistent robust measure of the impact of R&D on productivity.

Consultancy work done for Standards Australia, however, suggests that, by including a measure for standards in the calculation, you increase the contribution of R&D-based knowledge to productivity by around five percentage points

One final point.

Standards Australia knows that, if we are offering Standards-based alternatives to black-letter regulation, we have an obligation to ensure that the Standards-making process is at least as efficient as the regulation-making process.

We are bringing in rigorous arrangements for assessing new Standards proposals for their net benefit to the community.

We have introduced accreditation processes for alternate pathways to making Australian Standards - some of which will not involve the traditional Standards-making apparatus at all.

I would welcome the opportunity outside the session to give people more details on these new developments.

In June 2004, John Tucker joined Standards Australia as Chief Executive Officer. John has had a diverse career path traversing public and private sectors, political advising and has held CEO positions in the fields of injury management, OHS risk management and industry association management. John has a background in health surveillance, occupational hygiene and industrial relations.

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John Tucker was a keynote speaker at the GAP Congress on Regulatory Affairs, held in Parliament House of Victoria on 26 September 2008 in Melbourne.

To read keynote presentations by other speakers, go to our 'Regulation as a Business Opportunity' discussion forum.