Danielle Wood on resisting the red tape impulse

Your essay in Inflections Point opened on a case study of a regulatory process that hindered good environmental outcomes.

Do you think you could just run through what that case study is and what you think the lessons are from that?

Absolutely.

So it's just quite a sad case study, really.

It's around an endangered frog, gorgeous, beautiful green and gold bell frog that is a native to the kind of kind of northeast coast of Australia.

There was a local farmer that worked together with an environmental charity called got some funding from the New South Wales government.

And the idea was to do some restoration works that would try and restore the frogs habitat because this thing was endangered.

Of course, if you're interfering with waterways, you need to get approvals to do that.

And then they entered into this almost kind of Kafkaist process.

So initially they were going to be able to go to the council to approve the project, but the law had changed, which meant they had to go to the state government.

They put in their application.

After waiting a period of seven months or so, they were told, actually, it's the wrong application to the wrong body.

You have to redo it elsewhere.

It then took another more than a year to approve that new application.

They then went and did the works, which only took a couple of months.

And by the time that it all happened, the frog was locally extinct.

So it's, I think, a cautionary tale that regulation can be self-defeating.

You know, this is regulation designed to protect the environment, as you say, actually harming the environment.

We weren't able to save an endangered species.

But I also think it's a story of the challenges of fragmentation and people not knowing what door to walk through.

So I increasingly hear this in all sorts of areas that we work in because we have so many regulations, so many regulators, not even knowing where to start in the process.

And I think we're seeing this starting to come up a lot in the policy conversation about people starting front doors or coordination bodies, institutions whose really core purpose is just to help people navigate regulatory complexity in that regulatory maze.

Apart from saving endangered frogs, why does it matter that we get our regulatory system to support productivity broadly?

I mean, it is incredibly important.

I think it has, you know, the regulation in the broad and regulatory complexity has impacts on, you know, businesses' capacity to run efficiently, to invest, to innovate.