OZschwitz: Suffocating Under Oppressive Regulation

Just across the park from the Herald's offices in Pyrmont, the new premises for Google Australia are being built. It looks like it will be a pretty big building, although I understand the Googlemeisters won't be taking every floor. Not yet, anyway.

As Google and other internet giants remind us, the past decade has seen the rise of some large new industries.

I want to celebrate, if that's the right word, one that's rarely written about, despite its impressive growth. I refer to the unsexy but rampant regulation industry. It might not be as glamorous as biomedicine or as exciting as creating computer games, but regulation is a big, job-creating Australian success story.

Like most people, I'm not used to thinking about regulation on the scale of an industry, albeit a government-funded one. But a new publication makes the case with some pretty impressive estimates. Number of regulatory agencies across the country: 600. Budget: at least several billion dollars. Staff numbers: 34,000 at the federal level alone.

Now that's an industry. And yet you hear much less about it than you do about many much smaller industries. This is a shame, as regulation is in a sense the most important industry of all, because it can tell the others what to do.

And it does, as the statistics show. At the time of Federation, it took 358 pages of federal legislation to unify the country. In 2006 it took 6786 pages just to keep the place ticking over.

Link

OZschwitz: Suffocating Under Oppressive Regulation

OZschwitz: Suffocating Under Oppressive Regulation

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