Government to overhaul decision-making framework in effort to cut red tape

Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister Ben Morton, who is leading the Morrison government's red-tape slashing expedition, has revealed changes to the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) framework.

The framework - the benchmark against which every policy decision made by government is measured - will be tightened to ensure more evidence-based decisions are made.

The Office of Best Practice Regulation - a unit within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet that reviews the regulatory impact of every policy decision - will also be beefed up.

Under the current framework, departments can get out of doing a regulatory impact statement for a proposal if there has been an independent review done on the topic.

However, there are few checks and balances in the current system to ensure that review is actually relevant to the matter at hand.

For example, if a government department put forward a proposal to regulate what colour cars Australians could buy, bureaucrats could put forward a consultancy report on fuel standards, instead of doing their own analysis on the impact of the idea.

Under the new standards, the department would have to supply the Office of Best Practice Regulation with additional supporting analysis, or risk having the proposal ruled as non-compliant.

The idea is to give the public confidence that the government is making good decisions, Mr Morton said.

"What we want to do is to lift the quality of impact analysis that we're seeing within government," Mr Morton said.

"What it's about is to make sure the regulatory impact statement process is not something that's done as a compliance measure, as something you've got to do when you're putting a proposal through for decision, but it's something that actually guides you to think very clearly about the impact of the proposal you're considering, to make sure the analysis you're doing is as good as it can be."

The new framework would also require departments not to put an undue emphasis on the regulatory costs of a proposal, compared to the wider economic benefits.

Before, the broader costs and benefits of a proposal were often conflated with regulatory burden by departments.

"When we look at the regulatory costs of proposals, sometimes they can be assessed in a very narrow way," Mr Morton said.

"We want to make sure when we're assessing particular proposals we're looking the broader cost and benefit of the proposed options and reinforce that."

It would also introduce a four-tiered assessment for proposals - "insufficient", "fit for purpose", "good practice", and "exemplary practice".

Before, proposals were deemed "non-compliant", "compliant", and "best practice". However, 80 per cent of proposals were deemed "best practice", none were considered "non-compliant" and there was little incentive to strive for a higher quality of analysis.

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Mr Morton said business had been crying for changes to the framework.

"It will give stakeholders importantly greater confidence in the analysis behind the decisions that government is making and that will flow through to the community as well," Mr Morton said.

"This is a very dry topic but it's an important topic, to lift the quality of our regulatory impact analysis, the quality of the advice that government is receiving on the impact of what it's proposing to do."

The overhaul of the Office of Best Practice Regulation is one-half of the equation in the Morrison government's plans to slash red tape.

The other half is the deregulation taskforce, which has been busting bureaucracy in three key areas.

One is flattening the process for obtaining environmental approvals in order to get major projects up faster. The plan has drawn criticism from environmental groups although Mr Morton has said their concerns are invalid.

Another has been reforming the old, paper-based method of exporting food.

"At the moment, you have to send that paper form to apply for an export certificate. You have to then receive your paper-based export certificate to attach to your shipment," Mr Morton said.

"It's clumsy, it's slow, it's inefficient and it's not very secure."