Skip to main content

Five-yearly Reviews of Regulation

The Office of Best Practice Regulation (OBPR) has undertaken a screening process to identify regulation due to be reviewed in 2012 as a result of Recommendation 7.28 of Rethinking Regulation - Report of the Taskforce on Reducing Regulatory Burdens on Business (the Banks Review). The screening process revealed that most regulation was subject to the sunsetting under the Legislative Instruments Act 2003 (LIA).  The majority of the remaining regulation either contained an internal review mechanism or had already been reviewed by some other mechanism, such as broad ranging reviews, statutory reviews or inquiries.  This left only a handful of regulations introduced in 2007 and 2008 that would be subject to a five-yearly review and none of these could be considered priority areas for review by the administering agencies.  The note on the screening process is provided below. The OBPR’s review of regulation introduced in 2007 and 2008 has met the Australian Government’s commitment to the five-yearly review of regulation and demonstrated that the process is of little value in identifying regulatory reform targets.  The OBPR concluded that the widespread use of internal review provisions in existing regulation,  the commencement of sunsetting arrangements under the LIA from 2015 and the range of other reviews that the government regularly undertakes mean that five-yearly default reviews are unnecessary and are an ineffective mechanism to identify inefficient regulation.  Consequently, the Government decided to discontinue five-yearly reviews of regulation.