Back in September, Fairfax’s Ross Gittins penned an excellent article lamenting the neoliberal obsession with deregulation and privatisation of public services:
A key part of the era of what we used to call “micro-economic reform” has been to take services formerly provided by governments – and sometimes charities – and pay profit-making businesses to provide them…
The reformers were sure these changes would lead to big improvements. As everyone knows, the public sector is lazy and wasteful, whereas competition and the profit motive make the private sector very efficient…
It hasn’t worked out the way the reformers hoped… ABC Learning, which had been allowed to acquire about half the nation’s childcare centres, went belly up… making vocational education and training “contestable” was a costly disaster… turning electricity from government monopolies to a national market has seen the retail cost of power double in a decade…. And now it’s aged care…
Today, Gittins has flipped the script and warned that re-regulation could go too far:
It’s not hard to see we’ve passed the point of “peak deregulation” and governments will now be busy responding to the electorate’s demands for tighter regulation of an ever-growing list of industries found to have abused the trust of economic reformers past.
But having gone for several decades under-regulating many industries and employers, there’s a high risk we’ll now swing to the opposite extreme of over-regulation…
No, what we need a lot more of is regulators doing – and being seen to be doing – their job of enforcing existing regulations with vigour and effectiveness, and governments being unstinting in providing them with resources.
Gittins raises a fair point here. In many cases, it’s not that existing rules and regulations are inadequate, but rather that they haven’t been adhered to or enforced, and our regulators have been asleep at the wheel.
Throwing more red tape at the problems won’t necessarily fix them.
