Tēnā koutou katoa. Welcome to this Allen and Clarke webinar on robust regulation. My name is Stuart Beresford and it is a pleasure to welcome you to our here today.
We have over 300 people joining us today and we want to give a warm welcome to those who are joining our community for the first time. It's great to have you here with us. For those that are here for the first time you may not be familiar with Allen and Clarke.
We are an Australasian based consultancy dedicated to making a positive impact on communities throughout Aotearoa, Australia and the Pacific. Our areas of speciality include policy, strategy, change management, programme delivery, research and evaluation just to name a few. As an organisation we give a damn about empowering you to overcome society's biggest challenges which is why we regularly run these free webinars.
We also create desktop guides and provide expert advice whenever we can. Just before we get into the content of today's webinar, some quick introductions. As I said my name is Stuart Beresford and I am the Portfolio Lead for Legislation, Regulation and Machinery Government here at Allen and Clarke and I'll just invite my other panel members to introduce themselves.
Kia ora koutou, I'm Jason Tokuingama, I'm ANC's Portfolio Lead for Regulatory Design and Assurance. I've worked on legislative design projects in New Zealand and Australia as well as working on a review of regulatory frameworks and other work reviewing the impact of things. Kia ora koutou, I'm Steph James, I'm one of ANC's senior consultants.
I've worked with agencies in New Zealand and Australia to develop regulatory options and design and implement legislation in a range of areas. Kia ora, my name is Rob Smith, I'm one of ANC's senior consultants. A lot of my work is involving helping clients to develop and also implement legislation.
I'm also quite keen on the role that agencies have as regulatory stewards. So one of the things that we regularly get asked is what is the value of regulation? Regulation significantly shapes the everyday lives of New Zealanders. It recognises and protects their wide-ranging rights and interests and can assist them to interact with others and with the state on clear, fair and efficient terms.
But regulations can also impose costs. They may limit freedoms, stifle innovation and may give rise to other unattended consequences. The well-being of all New Zealanders therefore depends on the quality of our regulatory design and practise.
We've tried to cover off some of the questions that people have asked when they signed up for the webinar. Several people asked how do you define good or robust regulation and I wanted to just turn to my colleagues Rob and Steph around and could you please just summarise some of the features of good regulation? Yeah thanks, Drew. I'll start.
It's pretty common in the media or to hear politicians talk about a regulation as bad or a regulation as good and they're usually pretty subjective viewpoints. The features of good or robust regulation are not new and they've been summarised by a number of commentators in New Zealand and overseas. The Treasury have got a great guidance on this and so have some other commentators including ourselves.
Some of the covers of some of the documents we took the next slide from. We don't want to belabour the point here so these will just be sort of sound bites but what I think some of the key features of good regulation are firstly effectiveness. The thing's got to achieve its purpose.
Does it work? Does it actually do what it's intended to do and how do you know? So factoring and regular review. The concept of efficiency and growth compatibility are pretty important. Is regulation the best way and the most efficient way to achieve a policy goal and if not is there a good reason to forge ahead with it? Does it provide value for money? Does it provide a net benefit to society? What's the ROI expectation? Proportionality, fairness and equity are also something that are pretty important.
Is the response proportionate to the actual risk or problem and noting that implications can be different for different stakeholders and concepts of transparency and accountability I think are also important. So the justification should regulate and should be really really clear as are the impacts and consequences but also if someone's responsible under a regulation to do something there should be an accountability mechanism there to make sure they actually do what they're supposed to do. Yeah I think it's also really important that regulation is certain and predictable so it can be applied and interpreted consistently and people really understand what's expected from them and what the consequences of their actions are going to be.
It's also important for it to be flexible and durable so that where appropriate it gives people flexibility in how to meet the requirements but also minimises compliance costs and facilitates efficiency. And finally I think it needs to be supported by capable regulators and those regulators have to have the right people, resources and systems available to them to actually regulate the regulations. Yeah and one of the things we talk about when we talk about robust regulation is that we're not just talking about the words on the paper being the right ones.
The regulation lasts long after those words have been written down, the context is going to shift and often the regulator will continue to work with that legislation in a completely new operating context. So one of the things that we really look at when we're reviewing regulatory frameworks is the objectives of the legislation, how well they're articulated, making them really really clear because everything else will then flow out of that. And one of the big things with that there's many many choices that you make when you're doing regulatory design that will impact on how that legislation will be implemented so just being really clear on those choices and the implications is something that we will return to a bit later on in this this session.
On your screen you'll see a poll that we'd like you to answer if you're keen. There's no right or wrong answers and the options are just a few things that we've picked out. So the poll asks what is the biggest challenge that you face with the implementation of legislation and regulations.
There are five answers and if you can, can you please click you know one that you think is most appropriate. So while we're waiting for the polls results to come through, Jase do you have any other comments that you want to make about implementation? I think if you've come to a few of our sessions it's something we do return to a lot and a lot of our work is in that reviewing and supporting regulator space so it's sort of natural that we do have that perspective. But then when we do the design part I think it just gives you a whole different set of understanding about thinking about how will the judge read this down, how will the implementer do it, how will the business aspects be able to comply with it and just really trying to maximise the outcome that you're trying to achieve or the risk that you're trying to manage by thinking into the future and just really prioritising the implementation piece.
So we're getting some poll results and thank you for those that have taken the opportunity to respond. One of the biggest or the most responded option is around limited funding for implementation. Jase do you have any, Steph do you have any comments that you want to make on this? I think unsurprising would probably be my biggest reaction and I think when we talk about you know the regulation, the regulatory system, people are often talking about the ability of the regulator to implement rather than that specific word being the wrong word and sometimes it is that but I guess not surprised to hear that some people have mentioned that.
And the other thing that's quite interesting is that only a couple of people collect confused responsibilities. Does that surprise you? Potentially a little bit. I think often when you do the sort of maturity assessments for the regulatory systems there is often a little bit of misunderstanding on who's actually supposed to do what and why they're supposed to do it and especially between the regulatory steward and the implementer and how the sector understands the differences between those can be something that comes up quite a lot.
I personally wasn't surprised about the implementation being ticked. That's something we see just over and over again. So Rob you know you talked a little bit before about stewardship so what do you mean by that? Right regulatory stewardship.
A bit of a shout out here for all the work across government in recent years to embed stewardship. It's obviously part of the core principle of the Public Service Act but stewardship also touches on stewardship of legislation. Treasury define it as about the governance monitoring and care of a regulatory system and so it's not just about the piece of law it's about what surrounds that piece of law as well.
So how equipped are the agencies? Are there one or two agencies in the system? Are there more agencies? Do they have different roles? Are they equipped to do what they're supposed to do? Do they have the right systems and policies to make the system work? And what we've found in recent years from say five even five years ago even in the last couple of years is when we're working with clients on a particular regulation that they've got an issue with the discussions also have to involve lifting their sort of all of us lifting our sort of view up a bit. Asking questions like how does this regulation actually fit with my regulatory my agency's regulatory strategy if it has one? How does it sit with government priorities which can change? But also how do government regulatory stewardship expectations impact on what I want to do here? And if you haven't read them they're pretty clear that their stewardship expectations are set out and they talk about things like good regulatory practise, how to appropriately support the design and implementation of regulation, ongoing monitoring and stuff like that. So for a sort of an example that of a recent project we've been involved in of that good stewardship has been a case where an agency there's been some reform and there is a policy agency and a delivery agency trying to work together after a period of reform and one of the things they wanted to do was just to make sure that everyone in those agencies understood who's responsible for what in that regulatory system.
And yeah it's written down in the law but actually getting into the nitty-gritty of who's doing what and sometimes it's real easy to see it might be that responsibility for ongoing policy or legislative design is the policy agency but other issues can get a bit murky. Say for example producing guidance where the guidance has got to cover what's in the law and what you've got to do but also advice for delivery agencies on how they go about doing it, all the techo stuff and so both have to be involved. So this is not reinventing the wheel stuff, it's just an example of two agencies getting together, nutting stuff out and making sure they're being proactive in their stewardship.
So we've actually got a question that I think would be worth just taking time just to address. Do you have any comments around how to implement regulation in complex systems? That's a pretty big question, how to implement it in terms of it being a concern. Yeah and there's a couple of slides coming up where we sort of touch on things we've seen that aren't done well sometimes but not done well other times.
So I might actually just come back to that, might say a few things now but there'll be a slide down the track as well. Preparation key, Steph mentioned that before in terms of the resilience and not underestimating how much work is taken with implementation and it's so easy to sort of pass the ball over and then someone has left there to make it work and so I think that somehow getting managers to buy in and actually come up with realistic budgets for what this will actually do, even if it means you might have to do a bit less and not bite off too many things but implementation is notoriously undercooked. I think the whole thing of what data are you using to track how well you are implementing and checking you've actually got the systems to gather the real-time data about how well it's been implemented, understand your stakeholders, their perspective to it and the more complex it is the more stakeholders you're going to have and as Rob says the harder that is but the better payoff from actually getting everyone on the same page but I think long story short it's complex for a reason.
It's going to be hard and so just the more effort you can put into understanding how things are working as often goes. Do you have any examples of regulatory stewardship? What do you mean? So the one I gave before was about how agencies working together to make sure the people within the regulatory system are working together but ongoing stewardship covers a lot of things from development of law to implementing it to reviewing it so almost everything that government does it comes under that stewardship function but I think the word I keep coming back to is proactivity. Being proactive and trying to not just forget.
Regulations being passed in a set and forget approach. One of the things we see in Australia on that set and forget is they do often have sunset clauses and while it's not regulatory stewardship it's that similar principle of enforcing that requirement to check how things are going to make sure that the regulatory system is achieving its purpose and that that thing that you are doing is still the right thing to be in place and so there's some drawbacks to it like it is resource intensive for example but it does sort of help ensure that you are making sure your regulatory system is working and in Australia in particular they do have quite an emphasis on that justification for government intervention. Their impact assessment system is geared more towards justify why the government should be getting involved and so then that review process is similarly is it still a requirement for the government to be involved or have we managed that risk and now we can do it through something else that's less restrictive.
So one of the things that has come through is this issue around regulatory resilience. What do we mean by that? Yeah so governments everywhere have been thinking about this particularly over the last couple of years right and it's about how to build regulatory resilience and make sure that you're responding to risks which seem to be intensifying. We've got the COVID pandemic, we've got climate change, risky artificial intelligence programmes and you know various economic crises.
So the concept of resilience refers to the ability of the system to absorb and adapt to those disruptions that are caused by the major shocks and then transform to a new stable state going forwards where the system is more prepared to deal with similar future events. So we actually conducted some research with MBIE about the COVID pandemic and found that there's kind of a range of dimensions of resilient and adaptive regulatory systems. So pre-planning as Rob mentioned before is really important to help build resilient regulatory systems and that can include pre-preparing legislative instruments that can kind of be rolled out during a shock.
An example of what a pre-prepared legislative instrument might be? Yeah so during the COVID pandemic what we saw a lot of was pre-prepared instruments whereby somebody might get given emergency powers in a situation so that then they can make really quick decisions. So that was something that was used a lot during COVID. We also found that government agencies and actors really need to be collaborative and take an all-of-government approach to responding to a major shock.
So that means that legislation supports collaborative operating approaches like sharing the workload or redeploying staff across agencies. Making use of effective digital technology is really important. Jason mentioned this before and kind of the compatibility of different digital technology and information systems.
And then decision making based on real time data is also really important. So we saw that a lot during the pandemic as well of the government kind of changing their decisions or changing the direction they were taking based on new data available to them. Stu anything else to add? I think that you know and having taken part in that you know NB research project, I think the other things that we found is that the regulatory systems need to be flexible and they need to support adaptation and innovation.
They need to enable the devolution of service delivery. What we mean by that is that you can have national standards but you need to be able to support flexible operating approaches at the front line. The you know resilient regulation systems rely on transparent and effective communication between those that are involved in the system.
There needs to be efficient information sharing between the various actors. There needs to also be robust accountability mechanisms so that decision makers are responsible for and held accountable for the decisions that they make. And then finally there needs to be ongoing review and regular and ongoing review processes so that you can ensure that the regulations remain relevant, that they're fit for purpose and that they're updated with learnings implemented from previous shocks.
And I think that the COVID example is another good one where the COVID response act was changed at various times through the COVID pandemic in light of issues that were coming up. It was being regularly reviewed and that was occurring not just on a two-year or five-year cycle but as the need entailed. And I think that one of the other bits of work which we were involved with was the COVID-19 response requirements for modification and exemptions for entities legislation which enabled companies to for instance operate electronically.
It meant that they could get exemptions from you know the requirements around the issuance of annual reports or financial statements which during the pandemic you know you could understand it was quite difficult for them to have that information available to do that. One of the things that we found though which was interesting as part of the MBIE work was that that piece of legislation was warmly received by companies and businesses that were operating at the time of COVID. But then the legislation lapsed after a couple of years.
Cyclone Gabriel came along and the same issues that companies with you know that were facing in COVID where there was legislative workarounds that these companies that were in the Hawke's Bay were facing the same problems. And I think that that shows where you know look that some of those things that legislative changes that we adopt as part of a shock to make the regulatory framework resilience need to be carried over and need to be adopted as long-term or you know and working towards the future. Otherwise we won't learn, otherwise the regulatory system won't adapt properly.
I'm sure there's other legislation that still refers to the post and in-person meetings and voting and that sort of stuff around the places. Yeah so there's a lot of commonality between proactive regulatory stewardship and resilience right. They're trying after the same thing.
You want to look after something to make sure it continues to be fit for purpose when it receives shocks. Yeah and I think flexibility is really important. Yeah and I think it's not just about shocks or surprises.
It's also about future innovation and future technology and we're seeing that a lot with artificial intelligence for example or biotech, gene engineering to ensure that the law can respond to innovation. So it needs to be flexible enough to kind of take into account future ideas and future innovation. We've worked with an Australian client on regulatory options for a novel gene technology for example and the laws around GM are much less restrictive in Australia so it's easier to quickly adapt to new technologies.
Yeah and one of the things with the adaption to new technologies shifting organisational frameworks is we often work with regulators who are having to apply that legislative context and incorporate it into their organisational strategy. How they've set themselves up a regulator, what they're trying to do, how to maximise the use of their funding and one of the things that we've talked about a bit today is that legislation can require them to do things, it can require them to do things in certain ways and that can be appropriate when there's specific risks to be managed but it can have the adverse effect when there's things like innovation or changes that they can't react as well as they could if there was a less prescriptive, more enabling kind of environment. So the more prescription you have, the less room to manoeuvre the regulator is going to have and I think most people watching today would have examples where the legislation has caused a few rubs.
So we're not saying don't have prescriptive legislation, there's often really good reasons for it but it's just really understand the implications and if you cast your mind out further, I mean we talk about legislation, regulatory stewardship, we know that that legislation is probably not getting reviewed anytime soon so just really thinking about what might change in this space. I agree with you but also I take your point that sometimes prescription is sort of required and some modern drafting, we've seen it in a couple of contexts, if you want a decision maker to make a decision and there's certain must-considered factors or criteria that you want them to definitely turn their mind to, locking those in legislation has been something that's been done for years. In more recent times, building in principles to legislation to help guide the interpretation and applying of the implementation is a big one as well and you see that in areas where there's competing tensions such as public health versus individual rights and freedoms and so for example in one of the Health Act parts there's provisions that are underpinned by principles which specifically guide the decision maker.
Use the least intrusive one first if you can and things like that, concepts of proportionality while being set in a context of protection of public health being a vital. And we see that in terms of things like judicial review, if they're really prescriptive things that the decision maker has followed it can be a lot easier to sort of defend your point whereas if you've got a really enabling one there's more things that might feature in that discussion. One of the people tuning in today, Alex, has asked the question and it's just can you give any examples of legislation which you think reflects the resilience and flexibility you're referring to other than COVID-19? I think that it's definitely that a lot of the COVID-19 examples that we use it's because it's new, it's recent and it was one where there was quite a bit of attention in order to make regulation resilient.
But I do think that there's quite a bit happening in the company space where the companies are, the officials at MB are trying to make the legislation in that area fit for purpose going forward. So they're identifying that companies are operating in different ways than they used to 10, 20 years ago and they're trying to make that legislation much more fit for purpose and robust and therefore creating that resilience that will enable those who are operating companies those that are in governance positions within the companies to work when faced with a shock or an emergency situation. By and large I think a lot of civil defence and emergency management legislation has been pretty good at that.
Yeah you've had to amend it and to tweak it and to do things but that's in a context of they have to move quick and they have to be prepared and so it's almost built into the legislation. There's always going to be improvements to be made but I think that's reasonably well done in New Zealand. So do you have any other comments around implementation? Yeah I said I'd come back to the question.
The best design regulation can of course fail if implementation is not taken seriously and a couple of the common things we see are insufficient planning and it doesn't have to be a whopping great big project plan, simple regs, even a task list of things that we've got to do. We did one a few years ago that was exactly that. A table on a word document that just walked through things like compliance, enforcement, education, awareness and just put some bullet points about stuff that was going to happen to implement it successfully.
The other angle is undercooking the actual resource. That was the big issue on the poll. It's really hard to implement stuff and sometimes people just don't budget into how much work this is going to take but also the people that are involved.
So it's not just money, particularly when something is going to be transferred from a designer to an implementer, whether there's two different teams in the same agencies or the work gets handed over to a delivery agency and so that's something we see quite a bit. Yeah and I think when you're on the receiving end of that handover, one of the things we do talk about a little bit is the objectives of that team designing and building the legislation. Their goal was to get it designed and built and to that handover stage and in that process of handing over you do introduce a whole new set of objectives and outcomes that you just have to be aware of and it's not that anyone's trying to throw anyone under the bus.
There is just different drivers for those two pieces of work and that as the recipient you now are the owner of that going forward and it's now your throat to choke. You're the one that's actually responsible, you're the one the media will go to and so just really taking what they've done and interpreting it into your context and your organisational strategy and then making sure that you're not just sort of receiving it as written but really sort of thinking about what it means for you, your identity, your organisation. And sometimes it's just talking to people and just it's not hard but it's just having the time and the ability to do stuff.
One example back in the day, probably 10 years ago now, was controls around import of laser pointers. It might sound sort of a pretty minor thing but these were introduced and we wanted customs to be able to intercept things at the border. So not only talking with the customs Wellington staff but actually going on site at the mail centre and things like that and talking to people who actually have a face with these objects coming through and one of the questions was, well how do I tell the difference between a laser pointer and a torch? And so talking through with the actual people who have actually have to make it work is really really important but it takes time and effort.
We have another question that's come in which is relevant to this conversation and that is, do you have any insights of how organisations can prioritise its focus to meet legislative requirements i.e. to implement the legislation when faced with financial constraints? I think one of the things we talk about when we do talk to regulators is that there's a natural inclination to sort of put the legislation at the top of your strategic hierarchy because that's what we have to do and what we often see is that you do need to position it within your organisation and your actual, why do you exist, what are you trying to do and the legislation is absolutely fundamental and you have to follow it but it's not a basis to organise an organisation and if you try and follow it to the letter you'll find that there will always be trade-offs, there will always be prioritisation questions, exactly what you say. So it will become your decisions as the regulator around how you're going to justify your decisions, so being really clear that this is my regulatory identity, this is how I set myself up, this is my monetary enforcement strategy, this is so you can sort of have that paper trail to explain your justifications for what you're prioritising to maximise the value that you've got rather than trying to do all the 15 things that I've said that you must do. It's not to say you can't, you just can ignore them but it's just been really explicit about what you are doing and why you're doing it and building that paper trail.
Agencies with regulatory strategies, this work can be an advantage to policy analysts trying to make sure that they link in their work to that regulatory strategy. If it doesn't have one it's going to be tough but making sure the organisation as a collective agrees. And what happens if the regulatory system is not fit for purpose? Yeah I think regulatory failure can mean a number of things right, it can either be really small things where people just don't know the difference between a laser pointer or a torch and start taking people's torches off them at the airport or it can be quite a major disaster.
One of my earlier pieces of work was looking at the Coolstone fire at Tamahiri in 2008 and while we made some changes to the regulatory system around storage of chemicals and clarified that your chemicals inside your cooling system count that has been on site, some of those sorts of things, but one of the other things that surfaced was something that had been in the system for a long time as a sort of a little bit of a bugbear but had never actually manifested and so with that there was an urban fire service, rural fire service, because the fire was in a rural area technically the rural fire officer was supposed to be in charge, has no experience doing Coolstone fires, it's all expected, the practise was set up that the urban firefighters would come and do it and so while it didn't contribute to the death and the sort of horrific injuries it really surfaced that there was this incredible tension between what the legislation assumed was the operating system and the reality of the operating system when it actually happened. And another example of that will be the recent regulatory system around warranted fitnesses which was found to be problematic after you know like there were multiple cases of people you know ticking off warranted fitnesses without doing proper checks, without ensuring that the safety features of the car were still adequate and unfortunately that did result in people being injured and you know because for instance the seat belts were frayed and were not fit for purpose. And that led to the full reset and full change of how they deliver their whole regulatory system and so we supported some of the work around their cost recovery side of that and the whole basis of that was you're going to have a different way of interacting with all your agents, all your things, it's going to cost money and so we looked at how you can reshape your fees and charges to really make sure you've got enough money to then actually do that because it is a more expensive way of doing things.
Yeah we've actually had quite a few questions coming in and I think it would be quite good just now to focus on some of those questions. So a few people have asked about look the new Ministry of Regulation, you know does anyone have any thoughts on this that they're prepared to share? I'll start. I think one of the things not about the structure of the potential structure of the organisation but what's going to be up in lights is making sure you have rock solid problem definitions and justify why there is government intervention in the first place whether it be regulatory or otherwise and I think things like RISs and stuff like that they have to be a bit more sort of filled with quantitative data so you're really trying to quantify impacts and including monetising that data so you can start to build those ROI cases, show value for money for ministers so I think that's going to be really really important.
And the CBA is never going to tell the full story there's always going to be things you can't quantify or monetise but just I think trying to have a more robust basis for that conversation and list your assumptions etc. And then I think one of the things we saw with the loopy laws task force if anyone remembers that from 2014, you know it's not just new regulation it's potentially going to be existing regulation and just I think being prepared to justify and explain the rationale for continuing to have that regulation, what is the purpose, what is it doing, why is government intervention still the best way to manage that risk. In Australia we did see the, so Victoria for example has a regulatory with a red tape task force and you can literally go on the portal and send a submission any time and they'll look at it you know suggestions for the things that are too overbearing and they have quite a separate system of analysing any impact assessment that goes up through the Commonwealth and goes to the Office of Impact Analysis who gives a very you know robust assessment that then goes on their website, doesn't matter what they think, it's like here's our mark and so very objectively marked and each of the states has a similar kind of practise as well.
I think just moving on that there we've got another question from Marie, do you have any insights into from a workload prioritisation perspective how the case for maintaining existing systems can be given primacy or at least equal footing with generating new requirements which are often more palatable? I think that's a really good question, I think there's always going to be a challenge. I think as Rob said the more information that you have and the better you can quantify the impacts of maintaining that system, so whether you're missing an opportunity from not making sure it's up to date or you are actually causing something to be a cost because it's no longer working as intended, the more you can try and understand the impacts of continuing the status quo versus changing to something else and maintaining that ongoing system because I think that's exactly what you're saying, most of our legislation is already in place and being maintained and you have to make sure it's resourced properly. And it's not something you can always do yourself, it's the whole organisation and the suite of laws that they administer, there's got to be some collective decision making amongst that organisation to say okay this is actually our number five, four, three, two, one priorities because that's the resources we've got, so not the magical silver bullet.
And I think that process of what is evidence, and so if there is a way you can have a more innovative approach to get information from the regulated parties to understand what's working, what's not and to build that into your case for why you might need to commit resources to updating things or implementing something better or doing better enforcement, the more information and evidence you can gather the better. And I think that that leads to one of the other questions that we received previously and that was how do you convince decision makers that for instance regulatory stewardship, that the need to have robust resilient regulations is actually important because those decision makers will have their own agenda which they want to progress and house time and decision making time is actually at a premium. So how do you convince them that they need to spend time doing this stuff? Again, probably a too big a question to sort of come up with a soundbite sort of thing, I can only just recap some of the stuff we said before.
What are the organisational priorities, but also how do they fit in with the government's priorities? And then building a case if you think someone else, something else should be included, but a real, it's the guts of public sector life isn't it? And having that monitoring and evaluation framework where you're trying to, and if you're sharing responsibility for an outcome with another agency, but just investing in that process of actually tracking how well you're doing is contributing to those outcomes that we will hopefully agree to. So you can then show the value in investing more or changing track or reconfirming something that's already in place. And normalising it, normalising the reviews, normalising the, ensuring that the regulations are resilient and then it just becomes something that you do.
It's just, it's not then nice to have, it's just something you do automatically. Hey, we've got time for a couple more questions. The one that we've got here from Andy, the concept of handling regulation over to someone to implement feels like it flies counter to the principles of complexity where there is a need to take into account and respond, evolve as to the extent to which implementation is succeeding.
Hey, does anyone have any views around that? Why do we hand over policy to be implemented? Well, partly it's just the design of the organisations. Some agencies tout them as a polity shop and we are responsible for this. Anything to do with implementation or delivery is pushed off to somewhere else.
In the health sector, we've seen things devolve over the years. In other sectors, things are held much more closer. Say for example, I don't know, MPI, the core policy people, in my experience, seem to have a pretty good relationship with the field staff.
Where in, say, the health sector a while ago, there was, with the exception of a couple of bits of the structure, there were DHBs and there were public health units and the ministry was sort of over here. And yes, there were relationships, but it just seemed to be devolved a bit more. And I think a lot of it comes down to what are you actually prioritising in your decision making.
And so if you have set up a system where you're going to judge the policy person on getting that legislation passed, etc., then they'll make decisions that justify that. If you're going to bring in things like, we're going to really prioritise the use of data, we're going to really prioritise the input of operational staff, and you make that really explicit in your decision making criteria, you can see systems where the processes for feeding in the frontline staff perspectives or the business perspectives or the regulator party perspectives becomes part of that decision making, as opposed to sort of the ivory tower, I'm going to do my policy the best, purest way, and then just, as someone said, hand it over. And I think the best example of that is customs, to be honest.
They just always seem to be so connected. Whenever they get a crisis, they've got to come up with their central staff and their people out in localities always seem to be on the same page. Yeah, and having coordinated tabletop exercise between health and customs, I know exactly that, you know, I agree with you, they are very coordinated and they have a very good understanding of what their policy people or what their operational branches require.
A lot of it's just that organisational design and capability and what you're prioritising in your decision making, which then flows through to where you put your money and your time. And so if you prioritise making sure that you're feeding in frontline information, you have a really strong monitoring implementation sort of way of assessing progress, then you will be able to feed that back in and see a really clear view of what is success, what does it look like, how are we tracking it. So there's just one other question that we've got and that is around what do we mean by, you know, the importance of defining what your objective are and defining what the problem is.
So core policy 101, when you want to do something, making sure you've got a very clear description of what the actual problem is that you want to, you're trying to address, what are the objectives you are trying to achieve and looking through the various options of how best to achieve them and regulation is just one of those options. And if you don't define your objective well, what's the consequences? Generally you get pinged by the quality assurance processes that New Zealand have, maybe by Treasury, maybe your internal quality assurance thing or other agencies will say, Hank guys this is not good enough. And I think that whole, it's in all the advice etc, it's like it's only a problem once it starts impacting on someone or something.
So just being able to explain, you know, the legislation is outdated, which means, like, you know, so what, which means, what's the impact and it's just like working through that process and you can open questions, so keep saying which means, which means until you, you'll find there'll be all these assumptions wrapped up in what you are saying and you actually finally get to this point where it's like, oh it's not, you know, this thing isn't working as well as it could be, which is costing people money because they're having to do duplicate whatever. So say, ah, so you know, you then end up with a problem definition that actually relates to something that the legislation can fix rather than an amorphous, you know. Yeah, we've only got a couple more minutes left, so look, do you have any key takeaways that you want to just sort of like pass on? Rob? Just what I talked about just then, I think, so problem definition going forward and the need for, explaining the need for intervention is going to be critical and I think a bit more quantification.
It's been getting better and better and better over the years. I've seen some fantastic rises, which really sort of tries to monetise and quantify the impacts, but making sure that stuff's up and light to persuade a minister that there is a need to intervene. Yeah, I think we talked about a bit about planning and planning for implementation and then I think one of the things we see is that when you're in that design phase and you're worried about the capability and the funding of the regulator, which is something that's come through in the comments, it can lead you to make decisions that I will be prescriptive and require there to be a review or require this thing to be done and you have to have an X because I'm worried and I don't trust the regulator and so that's kind of solving a different problem around funding capability and competency of regulator or whoever's going to be handling it and trying to fix that through primary legislation, which is where you can get these weird sort of mixes of enabling and prescription.
So just being really careful about why you're actually prescribing and just not to say don't do it, but just be really clear about what the trade-offs are. Yeah, I think for me it's that innovation and technology piece, so making sure that legislation can keep up with future innovation and the really quickly moving tech industry to ensure that we kind of, yes, remain world leading in those spaces. And for me that it is just making sure that you plan for adverse events and for example having regulatory tools or other interventions that can be trotted out in crisis.
Hey look, unfortunately we've run out of time to answer any remaining questions, but we're happy, as I've said before, to catch up to address any points that you have and to discuss potential ideas that might support you and your work in the future. As I've said at the start, we regularly run webinars. Our next one is Plain Language, Harnessing the Value of Clear Communication, which we're running in partnership with the firm Wright.
We do have a button that you can click to register for this webinar. We do look forward for you attending. We know that we value your time, we know that it's a scarce commodity.
Well, that's it from us. Mihi, thanks for joining us and we'll see you at the next webinar.
