Regulation and the regulatory burden.(How Good Was Howard?)

IN MANY AREAS of government policy, the fingerprints of the prime minister are clearly visible. When we consider the highest-profile issues of the John Howard years--foreign policy, immigration, federalism and the culture wars, just to name a few--the influence of senior Coalition ministers on the government's policies are obvious.

However, this is not necessarily the case when we look at regulation, changes in the regulatory burden, or developments in the structure of economic management. Certainly, individual regulatory reforms can be identified and attributed to individual policy actors. The Howard government oversaw a vast array of regulatory changes, as well as the extensive inquiries and reports which accompany them.

But it is less interesting to debate who initiated what regulatory inquiry than to step back from the policy minutiae and consider how the federal government interacts with the economy, and how it has changed over the last decade.

This approach allows us to properly attribute blame or credit where it is due. After all, assessing the Howard government's record in the field of regulation poses slightly counter-intuitive challenges. For instance, we have to decide how much influence we are willing to grant the government over the operation of its own bureaucracy. We have to ask how inevitable regulatory increases are and how much the pattern of regulatory growth is a function of the historical circumstances faced by individual governments.

LIBERALISATION and privatisation have been a feature of almost all Western democracies since the early 1980s. Australia's reform movement had been one of the more ambitious projects around the world, joining the United Kingdom and New Zealand as the most extensive. By 1996, the Australian state which John Howard inherited had undergone more than a decade of nearly continuous economic reform.

The contemporary Australian state is a radically different beast from Australia's mid-century welfare state. W.K. Hancock's "vast public utility" is no more, having shed its own vast state enterprises. State and Commonwealth governments have systematically privatised a list of small and large-scale enterprises traditionally operated by government--banks, airports, telecommunications and energy utilities, laboratories, even radio stations. Labour market reform, in a general direction of liberalisation, has been a recurrent feature of the last two decades.

In Australia, to the extent that this ambitious program of liberalisation and privatisation has been carried out, it has been largely successful in reversing the slow economic decline of the second half of the twentieth century'. But contrary to the belief held by many on both the left and right of the political spectrum, this dramatic change in systems of political economy has not been as didactic as a shift from the welfare state to a liberal--or "neo-liberal"--model of the political economy. Leviathan has certainly not faded away--instead, amongst the reforms, liberalisations and privatisations of the last few decades, government has increased its expenditure and taxation.