Submission on future regulatory reform, with a focus on the rural sector

Abstract

The Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law is a specialist law and institutions research centre with a focus upon issues affecting rural communities and industries. One of the core components of our work has been evaluation of the effectiveness, efficiency and fairness of natural resources rules frameworks. This submission is intended to bring to the attention of the group this body of work, and to propose some specific future regulatory reform directions based upon this work. We welcome and support the decision by COAG to address the issue of environmental law reform, and to identify the particular need for reform in the rules governing primary production. We believe that there is a number of pathways to potentially add impetus and innovation into this mix, and the purpose of this submission is to point to some of these directions. We will not attempt to reiterate here the detailed research we have conducted, to which we will refer you later in this submission. The Deregulation Group can evaluate this information without our assistance, and we are always happy to respond to questions. There is a number of aspects of the Stakeholder consultation paper where we think the discussion can be criticised, but it does not seem to be useful to focus on these issues as they will probably come into focus at the implementation stage. However if the Deregulation Group wishes to have comments on these matters, that would be possible.