Regulation in the Information Age

 VICTOR PERTON, MP

CHAIRMAN, LAW REFORM COMMITTEE
PARLIAMENT OF VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA

PAPER PRESENTED TO THE:

1998 Commonwealth Round Table

Governance Structures and the Democratic Process Managing the Parliament - Executive Interface in the Commonwealth

Cape Town, South Africa
30 November to 4 December, 1988

For up-to-date materials: See “A Regulatory Affair”

Table of Contents

Introduction 

The Global Society
Redesigning Government?

Regulatory Issues of the Information Age

Changing Community Attitudes to Legislation

"Reg-Neg" Australian-style

The Crucial Role of the Parliament in this Process

The Scrutiny Committee and the RIS

The Benefits of Reg-Neg & The RIS
Improving
Public Consultation in Lawmaking and Policy in General

Regulatory Efficiency Legislation
Alternative Compliance Mechanisms

Regulatory Efficiency Legislation - the Victorian proposal

The Committees Deliberations, Recommendations and the Government Response

Electronic Service Delivery

Parlynet

Conclusion

Introduction

There is no doubt that there is community demand for government regulation, particularly to achieve social and environmental goals. At the same time, the public expects government to act more efficiently, to reduce its cost and size to the taxpayers. These contradictory demands amount to calls for both more and less regulation, for both bigger and smaller government. Resolution of this problem is a major challenge facing public administration.

This paper has been prepared for two conferences:

• The Commonwealth Round Table on Governance Structures and the Democratic Process Managing the Parliament - Executive Interface in the Commonwealth, Cape Town, South Africa 30 November to 4 December; and

• The Internet Self-Regulation Conference, Sydney, 9 December 1998.

The issues for both conferences are the same. How can Government cope with the regulatory needs of a global information society? What is the proper relationship between Government, business and the community in the regulatory process?

The Global Society

Ten years ago, I was elected to the Victorian State Parliament in Australia, as the Member for Doncaster. Those ten years have seen an extraordinary period in human history. The collapse of the Soviet Union and communism removed a source of gloom and the threat of worldwide nuclear war while the accelerating pace of technological change is profoundly changing society, government and business.

Two years ago, US Vice President Al Gore said:

We are on the verge of a revolution that is just as profound as the change in the economy that came with the industrial revolution. Soon electronic networks will allow people to transcend the barriers of time and distance and take advantage of global markets and business opportunities not even imaginable today, opening up a new world of economic possibility and progress.

We are now in the midst of this revolution. The information age and fast developing communications and information technologies are driving our lives and careers in unimagined ways. Our economy and society are literally being transformed by the changes wrought by the global information industry. Most of us who are under 50 (and certainly our children and grandchildren) will undertake new jobs, not even in existence yet, using equipment not even imagined. We already see this occurring - in the factories which require fitters and turners to have skills in computer programming. There are countless examples of these changes, which also herald a wave of redundancies, with middle managers losing their jobs, as computer software takes over their analytical work.

Communities of interest will develop in which the best in the world will flower like never before and the average will reach new, undreamed of heights. Let me give you an example of new communities flourishing. My mother is seventy. A couple of years ago she went to India to study integral yoga at an ashram in Pondicherry and the Vivekananda Ashram in Bangalore. On her return, she wrote a terrific humorous piece about her trip for her students. I said "Why dont you put it on the Web"? She did. The first email came from the deputy editor of Time Magazine in New York who asked how to enrole in a similar course. The second email came from a yogi in Bangalore, the third one came from a politician in California and the fourth came from my Mother's neighbouring Melbourne suburb of North Balwyn. So - at the age of seventy - my Mother has created a new collaborative community in which age, geography and politics are irrelevant. If that can happen to my Mother, in the practice of yoga, I think the possibilities for all of us are just amazing.

Redesigning Government?

I believe the Internet (in its broadest definition) will change everything.

In a time when the boundaries between government and private sector activity become increasingly blurred, governments of many countries have been torn between a pressure to reduce public spending, on the one hand, and an increasing pressure to deliver more, on the other. Radical new ways of governing need to be explored through a newfound collaboration between government and business. New information technologies are facilitating and creating change in the way governments operate.

The world is changing rapidly and the growth of the global economy has fundamentally altered the environment in which individual states operate. In effect, this has led to new and different roles for government - no longer as sole provider but as facilitator and regulator.

In Victoria for example, the Government has a pro-active approach in adopting information technology and encouraging and facilitating the increased use of information technology in the business and community sectors. I'll outline some of the initiatives the Government is supporting later in this paper. Other governments, as in New Zealand, have left the utilisation of technologies largely in the hands of market forces.

Having said this, we have to remember that in many countries the fight for basic human rights and economic growth are still the big issues. In many developing countries, the state has failed to deliver even fundamental services such as health and education. In the former Soviet Union, the long-term failure of communist states to deliver promises that finally led to its overthrow.

In contrast, the major issues in some of the countries of South Asia relate more to problems of 'over-regulation'.

Regulatory Issues of the Information Age

Technology moves faster than legislation. The employment of new technological tools has led to a whole host of regulatory problems, which our legal institutions and Governments may presently be rather ill equipped to address.

At the June 1998 World Congress on Information Technology Baroness Thatcher said:

"The role of government, seeing that [the Internet] can be used for good or bad, is to try to implement a proper legal framework in which the restraints we impose are clearly defined and justified on the grounds of public policy, and they can be put into practice effectively. Now that is easier said than done First, there are uses of the Internet, which although offensive to many people, could not be made illegal because there's not sufficient reason for so doing. There are things which you and I would call immoral. We would like to bound them. There's not sufficient ground for us to make [them] illegal, because that would be a constraint on freedom.

Second, as not all legislators are fully conversant with the Internet, their remedies are sometimes not directed to the specific misuse, but they tend to be of a wider, more general nature, not the specific fault which we wish to cut out. They cut out a whole class of things, and indeed make far too much illegal, which is wrong

And the third difficulty, if you are trying to legislate for information technology, is it is many years some will say light years ahead of the capacity of law makers to comprehend and then address the problems."

Many of these new, and often unprecedented, issues go well beyond the capacity of individual governments to deal with them. We see this in relation to transnational corporations and global monopolies.

Issues arise in relation to privacy law as massive databases can be shifted between jurisdictions at the click of a button. As hundreds of millions of people around the world become interconnected, communication avenues and databases proliferate. Such developments bring with them undreamt of possibilities to exchange ideas and carry out business. The increasing number of interconnections leads to a corresponding numbers of potential weak points and thereby, the possible danger of misuse.

The flip side to the opportunities that arise out of technological innovation, is the potential for misuse. Todays technologies have already led to the storage of vast quantities of data related to us as consumers, taxpayers and web-users. The challenge of the Information Age is that with almost every transaction we leave a data trail which provides a detailed electronic record of our personal history and preferences. The computerisation of our health, education, employment and consumer records, along with fast improving techniques for the merging of data and the application of profiling, means that frighteningly accurate psychological profiles can now be created on most of us. This information may be sent across state and national boundaries where it can be sold, reused or integrated with other databases without our knowledge or consent.

Privacy and human dignity are the values at the foundation of the secret ballot, in doctor-patient confidentiality, solicitor-client privilege, even the concept that "my home is my castle". The Information Revolution is challenging these very concepts that we tend to take for granted.

Other problems such as crime on the Internet and pornography have proven difficult to police and track down. In the end, knowledge about the time and place of offences often remains elusive and what may pose a criminal offence in one jurisdiction, may be perfectly legal in another. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, cases arise where legal publication on the web in Australia can infringe criminal law in India. There are countless examples of such new and problematic developments that stem from the use of borderless technologies and certainly, beg further examination.

In addition to data protection, crime and privacy, there are many more questions that will need to be addressed in the future:

• Whose taxation laws should apply to e-commerce transactions between different States?

• How will compliance be monitored?

These are the sorts of regulatory issues that accompany the Information Age. They are subjects that require analysis, regulatory review and possibly, new legislative measures.

Changing Community Attitudes to Legislation

As the 21st century looms, those in government charged with the responsibility of making regulation are under increasing pressure. This is reflected in the observation that " to some business spokespeople, government interference in the marketplace is regarded as the embodiment of evil. Others adopt a more flexible approach, objecting strenuously to some forms of regulation, but tolerating, indeed, embracing, those forms of government involvement which happen to foster their own business interests."

There is ongoing pressure to improve the business environment by reducing costs and other impediments and there are growing demands for regulations to be "efficient and effective". In response, governments (or, at least, those that wish to be elected and re-elected) increasingly pledge that they will "cut red tape". However, there is general business ignorance about what those in power are doing to make the regulatory process more efficient.

Perhaps the best publicised project is the National Performance Review of the United States of America, chaired by Vice-President Al Gore, with its objective of "re-inventing government". However even this project has received relatively little credit, leading to the title of the Vice-Presidents September 1996 report, `The Best Kept Secrets in Government.

Governments must look at ways of improving their approach to regulation, because it is increasingly believed to be beyond the capacity of governments to manage on their own (and from their own resources). This has been more urgent in governments engaged in downsizing and in economies where skilled public servants are increasingly sought by the private sector where their managament and collaborative skills are highly regarded.

One way of addressing this issue is to harness resources outside the public sector, to mobilise non-governmental resources and to enter into "co-productive" arrangements with those to be regulated.

Negotiated rulemaking - "Reg-Neg"

There is increasing international support for the concept of "negotiated rulemaking", also known as `Reg-Neg. This is the notion that before a government agency makes a new rule, it brings together the `affected parties for discussions on the proposal.

The concept of `affected parties incorporates interest groups, as well as those who stand to be regulated by the proposed rule. The object of the exercise is to achieve consensus about the text of the proposed rule. Care must be taken to ensure that the system is not perverted through deal-doing by interest groups at the expense of objective policy formulation and the public interest.

Several countries have long histories of involving business, academic elites and other groups in a highly institutionalised structure with a consensus approach to rule making. France has its Council of State and the Economic and Social Council, the Netherlands its Socio-Economic Council and Labor Foundation, whilst Greece has a Council of State. In East Asia, Korea's monthly export promotion meetings, Thailand's National Joint Public and Private Consultative Committee, and the Malaysian Business Council should have provided mechanisms for feedback, information sharing and co-ordination.

An OECD commentator, Rex Deighton-Smith has observed, "By contrast, the English Speaking countries have not only not had many of these structures but have tended to look upon regulation-making as an activity which was more or less exclusively the concern of government."

There is no doubt that governments are more effective when they listen to business and the wider community and work in partnership when deciding and implementing policy. Where Governments lack mechanisms to listen, they are not responsive to people's interests and even the best intentioned Government is unlikely to meet collective needs efficiently if it does not know what those needs actually are.

For those of us in Commonwealth countries, the ballot box is the primary means for public involvement in a democracy but ongoing mechanisms are also needed to ensure the concerns of civil society are reflected in public policies. Partnership increases public trust and involves bringing a range of voices into the policy making process.

Information technologies are providing a new avenue for the dissemination of information. They can be used to help create a better informed public and to encourage contributions towards the policy making process. However, technology is insufficient, there needs to be an openess in our thinking.

"Reg-Neg" Australian-style

A form of negotiated rule making in the State of Victoria since 1985, probably the earliest Australian and British Commonwealth development in negotiated rule-making. The reforms that Victoria has had in place for 13 years, including mandatory cost-benefit analysis, public consultation, ten year sunsetting and Parliamentary scrutiny, are only now being introduced in the USA.

In Australia, State Governments, rather than the Federal Government, have led the way in regulatory reform. As the OECD has noted in relation to Australia, "combined with the emergence of a national internal market, regulatory reform in the states has resulted from, and contributed to, a competition for reform, in which efficient state regulation is seen to give state producers an edge in the market".

The Victorian scheme requires that government departments consider various matters (including the existence of alternative methods for achieving the desired ends) before introducing regulations. The making of the proposed regulations must be publicised in advance and that interested parties be consulted.

In all substantial cases, a "Regulatory Impact Statement" (RIS) must be prepared by the government department proposing the regulation, in which the costs and benefits of the regulation - both economic and social - have to be evaluated. The availability of an RIS also has to be advertised, and comments sought from those affected by the proposal, before the regulation can be made. A similar system operates in New South Wales under the provisions of the Subordinate Legislation Act 1989 (NSW).

Subsection 10(1) of the Subordinate Legislation Act prescribes that an RIS must include:

• a statement of the objectives of the proposed statutory rule;

• a statement explaining the effect of the proposed statutory rule, including, in the case of a proposed statutory rule which is to amend an existing statutory rule, the effect on the operation of the existing statutory rule;

• statement of other practicable means of achieving those objectives, including other regulatory as well as non-regulatory mechanisms;

• an assessment of the costs and benefits of the proposed statutory rule and of any other practicable means of achieving the same objectives;

• the reasons why the other means are not appropriate;

• any other matters specified by the guidelines;

• a draft copy of the proposed statutory rule.

With respect to "other practicable alternatives", the relevent government guide includes:

• performance-based regulation;

• co-regulation;

• extending the coverage of principal legislation;

• removing other legislative impediments;

• increased enforcement;

• tradable permits/licences;

• voluntary codes/self-regulation

• negative licensing; and

• public education programmes;

• information disclosure;

• economic incentives;

• risk-based insurance or guarantee funds; and

• rewarding good behaviour.

The Crucial Role of the Parliament in this Process

The requirement of producing a document which accurately assesses costs and benefits, has been reinforced by the Supreme Court and more particularly, by the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee (SARC). SARCs role encompasses the scrutinising of regulations, to ensure that the formal requirements of the Subordinate Legislation Act have been complied with.

In order to oversee the delegated law-making process, Parliamentary Scrutiny committees operate in all Australian jurisdictions. In Victoria, the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee (SARC), of which I was the foundation Chair, is charged with the task of scrutinising statutory rules. In practice, the Subordinate Legislation Subcommittee does the work, under the Subordinate Legislation Act 1994. Invariably, the Committee ratifies the reports and recommendations of the subcommittee.

The two principal objectives of the subcommittee are to:

1. Safeguard the community against any abuses or inappropriate uses of regulation-making power. This is done in the recognition that regulations, like any legislation, may adversely affect the rights, liberties, duties and liabilities of citizens; and

2. To ensure that the regulations under its supervision do not exceed the powers given to the Executive and to see that they conform with the spirit, intent, purpose and wording of the Acts passed by Parliament.

Under the Subordinate Legislation Act, the Committee's duties and scrutiny commence only after regulations are made and they become operative. From the date regulations are tabled in Parliament, the subcommittee has 18 parliamentary sitting days in which to review the rules. Departments and Agencies must send explanatory documents, Regulatory Impact Statements (RIS), submissions and other relevant documents to the subcommittee.

The subcommittee immediately approves rules that clearly satisfy all grounds for review. If it believes a regulation may contravene any of the scrutiny criteria, the Chairperson writes to the responsible Minister, detailing the subcommittee's concerns. In most cases, problems with regulations are resolved as a direct result of negotiations between Ministers and the subcommittee, alleviating the need for the Committee to exercise its power to recommend disallowance. I should note that with only a handful of exceptions in the last decade, Parliament has accepted the recommendations of the committee.

Sometimes, the subcommittee invites departmental officers to appear before it, in order to provide information about complex statutory rules. On other occasions, the subcommittee asks for an explanation as to the best way to rectify flawed regulations.

An amusing example of this type of consultation involved representatives from the Department of Conservation and Environment and the Parks Regulations 1992.

The original provision provided that:

A person must not in a park -

(a) roll or throw a stone, missile or other substance; or

(b) play a game or take part in any activity which is likely to cause inconvenience, danger, disturbance or annoyance to other persons.

Penalty: 5 penalty units.

Conceivably, a child throwing a beach ball at a beach in a National Park or lovers skipping stones on a river could have been guilty of an offence. The Committee invited the relevant officers to appear before it. After discussions and a ministerial undertaking, a new regulation was made to provide that:

A person must not in a park throw a stone or missile, play a game or take part in any activity which is likely to cause danger, disturbance or annoyance to other persons.

The Scrutiny Committee and the RIS

As I said earlier, the cost-benefit analysis in an RIS can be quite substantial and may be particularly difficult in cases where the benefits are social rather than economic. Over recent years the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee has rejected Regulatory Impact Statements relating to pollution controls over ports and over prescribed premises. In both cases, the assumption of the agencies was that an assertion of benefit was sufficient. In the first case, following consultation between SARC and the relevant Ministers, the Regulations remained in place for an agreed period while a new RIS was prepared and a new process of consultation took place. In the second case, a new protocol for EPA/Industry consultation was the extremely desirable result of a successful intervention by the scrutiny committee.

The Parliamentary Committee is assisted by the work of the Office of Regulation Reform. This office has a formal role in the RIS process because of the requirement in subsection 10(3) of the Subordinate Legislation Act that "independent advice" be available as to the adequacy of an RIS. It is also important to note that, despite operating under the Government umbrella, ORR really does provide independent advice, and does not merely rubber-stamp Regulatory Impact Statements provided by Government departments and agencies. ORR is not prescribed as the only source of such advice, however it is the principal source. As a result of Australian national competition policy, ORRs role is open to competition. Although there is the danger that rule-making departments could seek to buy compliant advice.

The Benefits of Reg-Neg & The RIS

While it is difficult to give precise quantitative evidence on the operation of reg-neg procedures, the estimates available support the view that the process is a useful one. ORR estimates about 20 per cent of regulatory proposals coming to their attention via RIS drafts are either modified substantially or withdrawn, resulting in cost savings running into tens of millions of dollars. This 20% figure does not include the many poor proposals that do not proceed beyond a rough draft. Similarly, a United States EPA critique of their experience with Cost Benefit analysis estimates that it has saved the economy $1000 for every $1 spent on the program.

My personal view is that reg-neg and in particular the RIS process strengthens our democracy. Whilst there are many avenues for the citizen and organisations to lobby in respect of Bills in the Parliament, RIS offers the only genuine public input into the regulatory process. This is more important today than ever before because many more substantive issues are being left by Acts to be realised in subordinate legislation. This makes the need for public justification of regulatory proposals much greater, as they are not debated in the public arena, that is, the Parliament.

Nevertheless, some major critics remain unconvinced. Certain business and industry groups have stated that the Victorian RIS process is not working as Parliament had intended. They believe bureaucrats have hijacked the process and that there should be greater consultation in the earlier stages, before a decision to regulate has been made. In other words, their view is that the RIS has become a mere justification for a political imperative to regulate. As Martin Soutter from the Business Council of Australia has said:

I think the problem with the process is that those who go through the RIS already know the outcome they want and they tailor their approach to achieve that outcome.

The evidence and submissions suggest that at the very least, government needs to do further work in investigating the validity of some of the criticisms of the current RIS process. A new far-reaching inquiry is being instituted to ensure that the process works better.

Improving Public Consultation in Lawmaking and Policy in General

There is no doubt that the general level of public participation in Australia and most other countries is quite low. This may be due to a number of factors including the "They wont listen factor."

To counteract this, governments need to alter their methods of consultation. Today, most governments produce discussion papers that they advertise and ask for "submissions." In todays busy world most of us dont have the time to finish the newspapers much less read and respond to difficult technical concepts in a discussion paper.

We need to ask people questions in their own language and we should permit greater informality in their response. I have suggested that as far as possible options papers and discussion papers should be accompanied by a video. I recently received an excellent submission to a parliamentary inquiry from an illiterate man who sent me a video in his case showing graphic evidence of the truth of his testimony.

In the case of consultation documents, they should all be published on the web. Even in countries where telephones and computer modems are few and far between, the web offers a relatively cheap and reliable means of ensuring accurate information can get through to remote communities.

We should reduce the waste of ideas of people of good will in our community. Many ideas are wasted because:

• People don't feel that anyone will listen to their idea and therefore, they don't contribute them to the system.

• The people who receive them have no adequate means to process them - this includes the executive arm of government.

• The information is sent to the wrong people or is not communicated in the right way.

• There are inadequate systems in place to bring people together, to better formulate or implement their ideas.

Government is being reshaped by technological change but to borrow an observation from Don Tapscott, author of 'The Digital Economy' and chairman of the Alliance for Converging Technologies, despite significant progress and innovation, the basic model of government remains firmly entrenched in the industrial era. (Tapscott D, 'Governance in the Digital Economy', draft paper made available by the author, 1998).

Regulatory Efficiency Legislation

This experience with innovation places us in the ideal position to carry regulatory reform further. The Law Reform Committee was given a reference to look into Regulatory Efficiency Legislation that gives effect to alternative compliance mechanisms to meet regulatory objectives. The reference was rigorous because it required the Committee to be innovative in developing solutions to the problem of reducing the burden of government regulation. The solution was a multi-disciplinary study, involving constitutional law, administrative law and practice, legislative drafting, environmental and planning laws, business law and economics.

We discovered that the term 'regulatory efficiency' is not widely understood and does not evoke a clear link to specific concerns facing businesses. We sought to render the language of reform intelligible to ordinary citizens and when faced with a subdued initial response to calls for contributions, decided to look beyond conventional methods of consultation. This entailed the extensive use of new technologies, including the Internet and email facilities, for research, publication and collaboration. Invaluable comments and a wealth of information were gathered from around the world. While literature searches revealed relatively few journal articles on the subject of regulatory reform, there was considerable information available on the Internet, often with opportunities for direct dialogue with the publishers.

Alternative Compliance Mechanisms

An Alternative Compliance Mechanism (ACM) is an instrument, which provides for compliance with regulatory objectives, by means other than those prescribed in the subordinate legislative instrument. The concept was first embodied in the (Canadian) Regulatory Efficiency Bill (C-62). Under this 1994 Bill, Ministers would be able to approve alternative methods of complying with regulations pertaining to a particular business or industry.

However, the Canadian proposal was defeated. The Bill was the subject of a scathing report by the Canadian Standing Joint Committee for the Scrutiny of Regulations on the basis that the proposal would give the executive undue control and that it was inconsistent with the constitutional values of the rule of law, equality and government accountability.

The Victorian Law Reform Committee received a Submission from one of the original designers of the Bill who suggested that the Canadian Committee did not understand the purpose and operation of C-62. The Submission pointed out that the Canadian Committee ignored recent Canadian case law in relation to its concerns regarding constitutional values; and that it placed undue emphasis on the inequality in resources (and thus ability to obtain ACMs). It also failed to note that small business in Canada was in favour of the Bill. The Submission pointed out that the Canadian Committee has since passed several Bills that give bureaucrats a much wider, unfettered discretion to exempt the private sector from regulations than C-62 had ever envisaged.

Regulatory Efficiency Legislation - the Victorian proposal

Despite the Canadian failure, as part of its platform for the 1996 election, the Victorian State Government pledged that it would:

Introduce Regulatory Efficiency Legislation which allows business to propose alternative means of compliance with regulatory objectives. This will lower compliance costs across a range of regulations, by allowing business to tailor its method of compliance to suit its specific business circumstances and will build on flexibilities which are already being implemented in relation to specific legislation.

This commitment was, in turn, taken up by the Executive Council, which (on 28 June 1996) referred the issue of Regulatory Efficiency Legislation to the Law Reform Committee of the Victorian Parliament for inquiry, consideration and report.

The Office of Regulation Reform (ORR) and the Victorian Department of State Development prepared a proposal, which was made available to the Law Reform Committee. The proposal shared several key similarities to the Canadian Bill. This raises my suspicion those OECD meetings which Australian and Canadian regulatory reformers attendand the use of the Internet, result in a process whereby a reform proposal stalled in one jurisdiction will spring up in another.

However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. An OECD Committee, the Public Management Committee, has a Regulatory Management and Reform Group, which endeavours to ensure that regulation and regulatory systems are increasingly internationalised. Best practices are identified and information is shared throughout the member countries. An important theme is that as economies globalise, so regulation must be harmonised if it is not to replace tariffs and quotas as the most significant barrier to trade.

The ORR proposal took into account the reasons for the defeat of the Canadian Bill. There was a requirement that the proposal not involve any lowering of regulatory standards. In addition, there needed to be an assurance that proponents of Alternative Compliance Mechanisms (ACMs) would, in all cases, be required to demonstrate that their proposals would meet the identified regulatory objectives and performance standards at least as effectively as the specific regulations that they seek to replace.

In particular, an ACM would not be approved if it would compromise any safety, health or environmental objectives of the relevant regulations. The proposal included a requirement that the relevant Minister publish details of the statutory rule affected, the statutory objectives and all the relevant criteria that were used in approving the ACM. There was also a commitment to the principles of equality, fairness, competitive neutrality and government accountability and an understanding that government budgetary policy would not be compromised.

The Committees Deliberations, Recommendations and the Government Response

Victoria has already had some positive experiences with ACMs in action, in the form of our accredited licensees system under the Environmental Protection Act 1970. The accredited licensee system enables a business that can demonstrate a high level of environmental performance and an ongoing ability to maintain and improve that performance, to be exempt from prescriptive works approval and licensing requirements. Our wide consultations and discussions gave us a sense for the scope of ACMs in Victoria. Our own Department of Premier and Cabinet heavily criticised the proposals contained in our Discussion Paper. However, they have accepted the fact that the final report answered all their criticisms.

In its final report, the Committee recognised that if the proposal were ultimately to be adopted in Victoria, it would only succeed if it ensured maximum transparency and accessibility to the general public. The Committee believed that it is imperative to ensure that the ACM is a public document.

We also recommended that ACMs should be tabled in Parliament and subject to disallowance, in a similar manner to subordinate legislation. In my opinion, ACMs will only be politically acceptable if they are subject to the same level of parliamentary scrutiny as the regulation they replace. They must be subject to disallowance by either House of Parliament, with appropriate examination by the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee (SARC).

In formulating a model for Regulatory Efficiency Legislation, one of the first issues we faced was how to start such a scheme. One great benefit that Victoria has, is that all our regulations have sunsetted and regulatory objectives have been identified for all regulations. The Committee's recommendation was to use this process, backcapturing the regulatory objectives specified in the relevent RIS, for the operation of Regulatory Efficiency Legislation. The Government accepted that ACMs should apply to all regulations that impose regulatory compliance obligations upon business.

Our final conclusion was that there should be no intellectual property attached to an ACM. It would be a public document that, upon ministerial approval, could be utilised by other businesses. The Government agreed with this approach and recognised, as we did, that business would have to make a commercial decision in certain circumstances, regarding whether to disclose commercially confidential material.

The Committee grappled with some of the mechanics of the scheme, such as the best way to penalise non-compliance of ACMs, establish procedures for sunsetting of ACMs, along with the regulations they replace and determine circumstances where revocation, termination or suspension of ACMs would be appropriate. Most of these recommendations were accepted in totality.

My current thinking is that ACMs will have a fairly narrow operation in the short term although I envisage they will provide the ideal mechanism for businesses involved with rapidly developing technology where prescriptive, command and control type regulation becomes obsolete. I also believe that ACMs can provide the impetus and acceleration required to achieve the ultimate aim of performance-based regulations. The Committee recommended that Regulatory Efficiency Legislation, if introduced, be reviewed within the first five years of operation and the Government has supported this threshold review in its response.

Electronic Service Delivery

In the Victorian government we are entranced with the possibilities that new technologies bring, and are actively working with Victorian business to seize the opportunities and make Victoria a centre for electronic commerce. Government must lead by example. In terms of getting information over the Internet, Government departments are already good providers: all State and Federal departments have good websites, as do many individual politicians, including myself. One criticism has been that the government has been great at sending out the information, but the twoway communication is not yet up to potential. Victorias worldclass Electronic Service Delivery (ESD) project that is rolling out across Victoria will address this issue.

I believe a genuine revolution took place in government in Australia (indeed, the world) last December with the launch of ESD. It is delivering 7 day a week, 24 hour a day Government services. The citizen is able to conduct all sorts of services via the Internet, which will save travelling time for those needing to pay car registration, lodge tax returns or apply for social security.

ESD will provide a customer-centric focus, through which people are able to negotiate a particular life event that requires contact with numerous government departments. For example, when a family moves house. The goal of the Government is to create the simple appearance of one face for all public transactions. This would put an end to the existing, often prolonged and frustrating task of finding one's way through a myriad of organisations and their internal structures before being able to complete what are really, relatively simple transactions.

ESD will be delivered via: 24-hour multimedia kiosks, similar to bank automatic teller machines, and situated in public places such as shopping centres, libraries and council offices; the Internet at home, work and public libraries and via interactive voice response telephone services. The Government, in partnership with NEC, has introduced 'Maxi' the multimedia information kiosk, into shopping centres and public places to allow the public to access Government information and pay bills.

Victorias ESD has aroused great interest overseas, particularly from the Malaysian and Singapore governments, and while most governments around the world are interested in moving their government services online, only Victoria has turned it into reality.

The G8 Government-On-Line project group has also ranked it as a world leader. Earlier this year, at an international conference in Seattle, CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, praised the Victorian Government's ESD efforts. He said:

"The State of Victoria in Australia has been a real pioneer in driving this by looking at when people interact with the government, and sitting down and talking to them about their experiences -- was it easy for you to find what you needed to do? How many offices did you have to call? Where were you confused?

So, instead of forcing this citizen to think in terms of the various departments, they have defined an interface where you just talk about what's the life event that's brought you in that you want to do something. For example, turning voting age -- and it has all the different things you do at that point. Changing address, getting married, starting a company, so it can start with your needs and navigate you through all of the different government organizations."

SkillsNet

Another initiative is the Victorian Government's commitment to training its citizens and providing access to the Internet, in public places, including all local libraries in Victoria. Victoria was the first jurisidction to provide universal library access to the internet.

State-wide Internet training and access centres are also provided through Multimedia Victoria's SkillsNet program. Residents, regardless of their age, education or income, can develop the skills to understand and enjoy the Internet and to make it work for them. In effect, they are given passports to the Information Age. The program aims to break down the barriers many people face when presented with new technology and the unemployed, elderly and disabled are particularly welcome. It is all part of the State Government's Vic 21 strategy to build a network and knowledge based society for the new millenium. Over the past three years, more than 60,000 Victorians have taken part in SkillsNet programs.

Parlynet

The application of new technology within my own political life, has been amazing. Collaboration on issues such as the parliamentary protection of human rights and regulatory reform brings together colleagues from Paris and Ottawa to Washington DC. While face-to-face contact remains crucial, the use of collaborative communications software has enabled us to find common solutions to domestic legal issues.

In Victoria, we have made a deliberate decision to have the Parliamentarians lead the community into the information age. The Premier has his own website with access to the full range of Victorian government services including legislation on line and his e-mail address is well advertised so that voters can correspond directly with him. Not only does he occasionally sit at his desktop terminal and write e-mail responses but on occasion uses telephone technology to ring the writer. You can imagine the comic situations as in the film, "The American President" when people believe their friends are playing a practical joke on them.

On a broader scale, a networked system called Parlynet was recently installed to provide members of Parliament with worlds best practice for communication between MPs, MPs and the executive, and MPs and their constituency. The system links all Members of the Parliament, their staff and other senior government executives, providing common business (software) applications including electronic mail and building a broader access to Cabinet, Legislation and Parliamentary Business Systems.

Our Parlynet system is based on a telecommunications network or Intranet that links every government institution from Parliament and the Courts to the smallest primary school, all on one broadband link called VICONE.

All MPs and their staff have a Pentium 300 computer on their desktop. Each MP also has a Pentium 233 laptop, enabling them to have the same access to information and colleagues, regardless of whether they are working remotely, at home, the office or Parliament.

The easily identifiable benefits are:

• Email to other government areas.

• Electronic access to Members

• Electronic access to Hansard

• Electronic access to up-to-date Statutes and Regulations.

• Internet access

• Ability to publish on the Internet quickly

• The public can electronically access their local Member.

The system security includes:

• secure file servers for each party

• Data "locked" from author to recipient using encryption, providing a GUARANTEE that it will only be viewed by the recipient

• Authentication and acknowledgement of user identification

• Secure internet sites using Lotus Domino

The software is based on a Lotus Notes collaborative system, using Microsoft software on the standard desktop. MPs are permitted to utilise other software as a matter of choice whether for desktop publishing or maintaining accessible 24 hours a day dial up. With the biggest radio modem anywhere in the world, members can take their laptops into Parliament House without the need for any extra cabling.

At this stage, the system is providing a terrific improvement in the exchange of information between members. It also makes it much easier to find materials for speeches or establish a data base for assisting constituents.

As with the introduction of all new systems, one can strike institutional impediments. The bureaucrats who designed the system thought that it would operate as a mere electronic mail system. However, the MPs as a group, seem to understand that these new technologies dont just automate existing processes, they can also lead to whole new ways of doing things. For instance, MPs no longer bother to file new Acts and legislation in large binders, knowing that they can click on line and obtain the Act up to date or as of a previous date.

The Victorian award winning Legislative Document System (Law Today) delivers online:

• Acts & rules fully consolidated

• Point-in-time access

• Text searching features

• WWW access

MPs can also personalise the news services they receive, to obtain up to the minute international and domestic news.

This leads to some amusing ideas. One of my less technologically adept colleagues recently asked: Does this mean an MP can sit in Parliament and use the internet? I said yes. Does this mean that while I am speaking in the Parliament the opposition can electronically search Hansard and newspaper services and find that I have contradicted myself? I said yes. Does this mean that our staff can send us e-mail in the chamber for use in our speeches? I said yes. He was horrified!

In my view, this should lead to simple advances such as the use of PowerPoint software or competitor products in the chamber. We all know that apart from question time, and the odd bit of sparkle, that Parliaments can be very dull places. The use of photographic images, film and highlighted text would in my opinion make Parliament work a lot better. Indeed, our Hansard has gone some way down the track in that it accepts colour photographs when they have been tabled by the leader of the Parliament during a speech.

This actually leads me to the point that the electronic publication of Hansard on the Internet is revolutionary. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people who approach me at functions and say "good speech last week on X or Y". In the old days when we all had 100 gift subscriptions to give away I could honestly say that I would not have had a comment on a Parliamentary speech more than once a month. Since Hansard has gone on line I would have at least a couple of people a week who would make a comment on having read one of my speeches on-line you know how reticent Australians are!

And of course one of the really nice things about this new technology is the increasing amount of published humour. The informal nature of the Internet means that humorous cartoons, film clips and written jokes pass between members on a daily basis, brightening their lives and those of their staff.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the new millenium and the emerging information economy bring with them new regulatory issues, along with different ways of communicating and governing. It is time to re-examine the wider issues of governance, to improve the business of government. Most legislation is regulatory in nature. The challenge lies in developing alternative ways to regulate. We need to find a range of instruments to improve the regulatory process, such as wider community and business consultation.

There is no unique model for change and reforms often come slowly because they involve a fundamental rethinking of the roles of institutions and the interactions between citizens and government. But the issues raised in this paper are certainly starting to appear on the international agenda. I have outlined some of Victoria's approaches in the hope that it will be both of interest and of use, to those of you who are also involved in this area.

Meetings like this Round Table serve to bring member States together, to examine different approaches and look for common solutions, new possibilities or best practice examples. It provides a wonderful opportunity to work together and I am particularly interested to hear how other countries are managing this period of change.

One of the benefits of the global age is that new technologies can be used to build an ongoing forum, helping to foster further collaboration and information sharing. This comes at a time when digital transactions can effortlessly cross individual jurisdictions, where they may be subject to differing laws and regulations.

As I mentioned in my introduction, the questions of privacy, crime on the Internet and data protection require more unified approaches across states and between countries. Regulation issues in the home environment are increasingly being influenced by international changes. As we become more interconnected, competition will continue to play a role but communication and co-operation will be more important than ever. Collaboration will be the key when it comes to finding better ways to govern, or to developing universal solutions to common problems.

I acknowledge that some of the countries represented here at this conference, have only rudimentary telecommunications systems and for them, the concept of the Information Age must not appear to be a truly 'global' phenomenon. Yet these countries do not remain untouched by the proliferation of information technologies. They still need to regulate within this changing environment and plan their own path for the future. When it comes to deciding what will best suit their own needs and circumstances, knowledge about the experiences of other countries will prove invaluable.