Regulation often gets a mixed reputation. Some see it as unnecessary red tape, slowing things down and making life harder for businesses and communities. Others worry that it’s too weak and fails to properly protect people and the environment. What both views have in common is frustration with regulation that seems disconnected from the real…

Regulation is like plumbing. When it works, you don’t notice it. When it doesn’t, everything gets clogged, leaks, and starts to smell. The UK has decided to grab a wrench and fix the mess, while Aotearoa New Zealand is still standing around debating whether to call a plumber. The UK government has admitted its regulatory…

During the January break, whilst others were sensibly occupied with finding the sun and avoiding the rain, I found myself pondering legitimacy and trust in regulatory systems. This wasn’t merely academic wool-gathering: ACT’s proposals for regulatory reform have made these issues pressingly relevant. Reading Giandomenico Majone’s classic work on regulatory legitimacy from 1999, I was…

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the regulatory standards bill.  As someone involved in regulatory systems and policy, I want to talk about their design and likely impact. Let me be direct: these proposals lack any supporting evidence that they would improve our regulatory environment. Instead, they demonstrate a troubling pattern of overreach….

Let me be frank about the new regulation ministry’s thinking—it falls well short of what we need. Their narrow focus on cost-benefit analysis and risk mitigation feels like regulatory management 101. We should be way beyond this by now. Their ambition to be a central agency mainly concerns me. Having spent years studying public sector…

Here’s my analysis of regulatory reform and administrative burden, speaking from my public policy expertise: The conversation about cutting “red tape” often misses the crucial distinction between necessary oversight and genuine administrative burden. Let’s look at what meaningful regulatory reform looks like, using the COVID-19 vaccination rollout as a telling case study. The Te Puni…

Some people out and about demonstrating a little knowledge of regulatory systems is a dangerous thing. I am not a regulator, but I have prepared policy advice that had to be turned into regulatory policy and, eventually, rules. I also help design regulatory funding models; clients ask me to review them for fairness and equity….

Administrative burden, as developed by Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan (2018), is one of the clearest tools we have for understanding how regulation is experienced: not by policymakers, but by the people and organisations subject to it. It draws attention to the indirect but substantial costs of interacting with the state: what people need to…