Can we cut red tape without cutting corners?

Christopher, in a piece you've written for the Australian Economic Review, you identify four types of problems with regulations.

None of these problems are with the goals of regulations.

What are they?

One was where a good project comes along, but it's got a consequence that triggers a regulatory process.

And the regulator who deals with that consequence will have a mandate to say, you must not approve a project which doesn't meet these criteria.

Regardless of whether

or not it's generally good.

Regardless of whether or not it's generally good.

And in that consequence, the whole thing can fall over.

The project can be rejected.

So the problem is that there isn't a mechanism for weighing up all the costs and benefits in that situation.

The second one we looked at was very much like Danielle described earlier, where a number of regulators are involved.

any one of those regulators can be the source of a veto on the project, as good as it might be.

You've also described what you call a boundary problem.

So you've got a bunch of people who are regulated in one way, but then surrounding them are a bunch of new operators who are operating in a different way.

And yet you might say, well, they're in the same market.

They're all providing financial services or they're all providing transport services or they're all providing entertainment services of some sort.

This would

be where you regulate ride-sharing services differently to taxis.

Exactly.

And there was an old example of the credit unions surrounding the banks.

So you end up with a situation where some people are within, some people are without.

And

this would be big business versus small business.

And we want to make things easy for small business, but

Christopher, in a piece you've written for the Australian Economic Review, you identify four types of problems with regulations.

None of these problems are with the goals of regulations.

What are they?

One was where a good project comes along, but it's got a consequence that triggers a regulatory process.

And the regulator who deals with that consequence will have a mandate to say, you must not approve a project which doesn't meet these criteria.

Regardless of whether

or not it's generally good.

Regardless of whether or not it's generally good.

And in that consequence, the whole thing can fall over.

The project can be rejected.

So the problem is that there isn't a mechanism for weighing up all the costs and benefits in that situation.

The second one we looked at was very much like Danielle described earlier, where a number of regulators are involved.

any one of those regulators can be the source of a veto on the project, as good as it might be.

You've also described what you call a boundary problem.

So you've got a bunch of people who are regulated in one way, but then surrounding them are a bunch of new operators who are operating in a different way.

And yet you might say, well, they're in the same market.

They're all providing financial services or they're all providing transport services or they're all providing entertainment services of some sort.

This would

be where you regulate ride-sharing services differently to taxis.

Exactly.

And there was an old example of the credit unions surrounding the banks.

So you end up with a situation where some people are within, some people are without.

And

this would be big business versus small business.

And we want to make things easy for small business, but