A chief executive from a large policy agency sat in the audience at the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) conference in Brisbane, watching a live demonstration of The Professional Regulator programme.
She had spent decades in public service, risen through policy ranks, and now led an agency with significant regulatory functions. But as she navigated the foundations module – the entry-level course designed for people new to regulation – something clicked.
“She thought it was incredible,” recalls Adam Slater, who was running the demonstration. “She said it was so helpful for understanding how regulation actually works.”
The irony wasn’t lost on either of them: here was a chief executive discovering, late in her career, that she’d been doing regulation for years without recognising it as a distinct discipline requiring specific knowledge and skills.
Ten years ago, this moment wouldn’t have happened. Regulators were compliance officers, enforcers, the people who checked boxes and issued notices. They weren’t professionals with a coherent identity, shared language, or career pathways. They certainly didn’t have a 2,200-person training programme delivered jointly by universities, government agencies, and a practitioner network: NRCoP.
Today, regulation is becoming a profession – and Slater and Professor Veronica Taylor are two of the people building it.
From compliance officer to regulatory professional
“If we were having this conversation 10 years ago, it’s pretty unlikely that we would be talking about regulators as professionals,” says Taylor, Professor of Law and Regulation at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). “The way that we imagined regulators a decade ago was much more in terms of being compliance officers or enforcers.”
The shift has been deliberate and parallel across Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. Taylor has been central to the intellectual architecture: RegNet is marking its 25th anniversary this year, and those decades of scholarship gave practitioners something to draw on as the profession began to emerge.
Meanwhile, Slater – who has worked across New Zealand’s Ministry for Regulation, Ministry for the Environment, and Ministry for Primary Industries – has been translating that thinking into practice, first in government and now as Director of The Professional Regulator programme.
The distinction between what regulators were and what they’re becoming isn’t just semantic.
“I think getting people, particularly policy people, to see themselves as regulators is an ongoing challenge,” Slater says. “There’s lots of people in the public sphere that are regulators, and getting them to see themselves as regulatory professionals is particularly important.”
What changes when someone sees themselves as a professional? The ability to articulate why they’re doing something, not just how.
“It’s the difference between ‘we enforce because that’s our job’ and ‘we enforce strategically because we’ve assessed risk and considered alternatives and determined that this intervention creates the best outcome,'” Slater explains. “The key thing about recognising regulation as a profession is that it’s an important function of government – it’s really the whole reason why government operates. It requires a specific set of skills, and professionalising it and recognising that this is an important function means we need to do it well to create good outcomes.”
What’s landing with 2,200 practitioners
The Professional Regulator programme, designed and delivered jointly by NRCoP and RegNet, has now trained 2,200 people across federal, state, and local government in Australia and New Zealand. It spans regulatory functions from environmental enforcement to financial supervision, health regulation to local government compliance.
What’s working? “The shared foundation that enables a common point of departure,” says Slater. “That’s something that really gets people on board. I think it’s giving people, particularly at the foundational stage, the ability to come rapidly and comprehensively up to a certain standard so that people can get on with their roles. And I think the sheer quality of the work – there’s options in this space, but what really sets The Professional Regulator apart is the quality of it and the academic and intellectual rigour behind it.”
Taylor adds another dimension: “As regulation becomes pervasive and more complex in post-industrial economies, people are recognising that it’s a specific domain of knowledge. Policymakers who are coming fresh to a regulatory role and getting ready for that by taking The Professional Regulator recognise that there are simply things that they don’t know and need to know in order to be effective regulatory leaders.”
But professionalisation isn’t straightforward. Taylor flags several tensions that formal training throws into relief.
Regulation is a much more diffused kind of activity, so it’s not a profession in the traditional sense that law or medicine are professions.
First, the boundaries of “regulator” are blurrier than the training cohort suggests. “We talk about regulators as a kind of shorthand for public servants,” Taylor says. “We think the Venn diagram between regulators and public services is completely overlapping. Whereas in reality, increasingly, corporations are regulators. The companies that are developing AI-enabled tools for regulation are themselves regulators because the tools are a form of regulation. Communities regulate. Businesses that make design choices are also regulators.”
This diffusion complicates professionalisation. “Historically, professions were guilds – occupational groups that controlled knowledge, kept it close, and controlled the economic activity,” Taylor notes. “Regulation is a much more diffused kind of activity, so it’s not a profession in the traditional sense that law or medicine are professions.”
Second, regulators who are public servants already have professional and ethical obligations legislated separately.
“They have an identity as a public servant, as a person within an agency, and then also as a regulator,” Taylor says. “The regulator identity is a little bit harder to embrace because within government, certainly in Australia, policymaking is the high-prestige space. Policymakers think of themselves as directing traffic, controlling the economy, thinking the big thoughts, implementing the ideas of government. And regulation is that much less glamorous, much harder work of actually doing the plumbing and designing the stakeholder experience.”
It’s the difference, as one analogy goes, between the architect who gets the credit for the grand design and the structural engineer who makes it stand up. Or, as Taylor puts it more bluntly: “Regulation also extends to opening the cupboard under the sink and looking at that growing dark patch and figuring out what that is and what we’re going to do about it.”
The regulatory shepherd
When Slater talks about stewardship, he reaches for sheep.
“You’ve got your regulatory flock in the mountains, and you’re shepherding them through space and time,” he says, fully aware of the New Zealand stereotype he’s leaning into. “You’re adapting to the seasons, you’re reading the weather that’s coming over the horizon – sometimes by reading the tea leaves, because that foresight, that predictive ability, is such a key component of regulatory stewardship. You’re also talking to other shepherds that you meet along the way and seeing what’s been working for them – and what they’ve been experiencing. Your relationship between yourself and the flock is an intimate one – you’re constantly evaluating their happiness, and adjusting. And if you look after your flock, they’re going to look after you. Often the sheep you end up shearing at the end of the season look a little bit different to the ones you started out with, because the changing environment and conditions necessitate those changes.”
Strip away the pastoral imagery and what’s left is a definition: stewardship is about care, foresight, adaptation, and intimacy with the systems you’re responsible for.
On a day-to-day basis, that means something specific.
“I think it’s about teams and regulators asking why we’re doing it and whether what we’re doing is actually working, rather than just processing things,” Slater says. “It means regulators are out building real relationships with the public before problems, and creating those feedback loops where frontline insights about what’s broken and what’s working well flow upward and drive change. Making decisions with judgement and proportionality rather than just ticking boxes.”
The difference, Slater argues, is cultural.
“Agencies that nail stewardship – it’s not a separate thing. It’s really embodied and embedded into how they design processes and train people and communicate and learn. It shows up in the morning stand-ups and site visits. It’s a willingness to say what we’re doing is maybe creating problems and including space for people to care about what they’re doing and the value that they’re creating.”
Slater learned this the hard way. Early in his career at New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries, he was designing trawl corridors for the Hauraki Gulf – areas where bottom fishing would be allowed to continue while protecting sensitive marine ecosystems. “We went through this process and it felt so strong, the policy development side of things,” he recalls. “We came up with a set of options and I remember the feeling – we as a group just felt, oh man, it was beautiful – it was so good.”
His manager suggested one more step: take the options to the compliance team. “These are the guys who really have their finger on the pulse of all this stuff,” Slater says. “We went and talked to them and they just looked at the options and put their fingers on it and said, ‘That’s not going to work, because you can’t drop a fishing net at 90 degrees. You’re going to have to go back and rework the approach.'”
The lesson stuck: “Talking to people at the frontline and iterating things as you go, because you don’t know what you don’t know. I think human beings are so successful because we swap information with each other, we communicate, we learn from each other as we go along.”
Australia’s stewardship experiment
From her advisory role with the Australian Government’s Department of Finance, Taylor has watched Australia grapple with operationalising stewardship at the Commonwealth level.
The positives: “There is bipartisan interest in improving regulation, and that was certainly demonstrated in the Economic Reform Roundtable last year. There’s a common understanding that much of the work of government is in fact regulation, and so if you want to increase productivity, if you want to improve the quality of life for citizens, then the regulatory levers are certainly tools that need to be used.”
Australia has been progressively formalising stewardship as an APS value, with recent reforms and Finance’s regulatory framework pushing it from principle to practice. The core idea, Taylor says, is “the ability to forecast, to be thinking forward about problems coming over the horizon and how to anticipate and deal with those.”
But implementation has been uneven. “We haven’t yet defined stewardship very well in Australia,” Taylor says. “There are some blind spots.”
The Department of Finance has made progress: a regulatory maturity model allows Commonwealth agencies to self-assess capability, calibrated for size and longevity. There are principles and attributes of high-quality regulation. And active engagement with the OECD on simplifying regulation links directly to productivity and improvements for everyday Australians.
The blind spots? There are three, by Taylor’s count.
First, forecasting. “That ability to anticipate effectively, to do more forecasting – we’re still struggling with that.”
Second, coordination. “We still don’t coordinate and cooperate effectively across agencies, and in a federation like Australia, vertically.” Finance developed the Regulator Leadership Cohort to address this at the federal level, and NRCoP performs the function nationally. “Creating a forum and a space for people to share good practice, share ideas, share challenges, sometimes share failures – without that constant conversation and relationship building, you’re unlikely to get spontaneous cooperation or collaboration unless there’s a crisis,” Taylor says. “The typical pattern is a terrible event or calamity occurs, and then suddenly everybody’s involved. There’s also quite a bit of finger pointing. But at that point you have to figure out who’s the lead agency and how we’re actually going to get past the calamity.”
The typical pattern is a terrible event or calamity occurs, and then suddenly everybody’s involved. There’s also quite a bit of finger pointing. But at that point you have to figure out who’s the lead agency and how we’re actually going to get past the calamity.
Third, looping back. “The failure to do what Adam was describing – get the data on how things are tracking, find out how the regulation has actually landed, work out whether there are pinch points or whether technology has moved us on or whether there are economic or social changes that mean we need to rethink this approach, and then actually take that data and use it to inform a quick, responsive course correction.”
One of Taylor’s colleagues, she notes, is focused on making that more routine. “Making evaluation of regulatory systems everyday business for all regulators rather than the sort of stop-start, problem- or crisis-driven evaluation of a field. Actually stewarding by continually looping back and checking how things are working and making system adjustments regularly rather than in an episodic way.”
Measuring what actually matters
When Taylor talks about measuring regulatory performance, she starts with what’s wrong with the old way.
“In the past, when we evaluated regulator performance, there was a tendency to count activity and try to represent the performance numerically,” she says. “How many enforcement actions taken? How many inspections completed? How many notices issued? But there’s, I think, now a really profound shared understanding that those numbers only tell a fraction of the story.”
What regulators are actually trying to do, if they’re stewarding a system, is change behaviour. “To change behaviour to make it conform to the public interest – whatever the declared public interest is, whether it’s safety, food safety, consumer protection, environmental damage minimisation, or a combination of those.”
If you’re trying to change behaviour, Taylor argues, you’re using a much wider range of tools, and some of that behavioural change will be invisible. “It manifests as an absence of harm or an absence of breach or an absence of damage to people or the planet. So it makes more sense, if you’re looking at a regulator’s performance, to do a qualitative assessment of what they’re actually doing and how they’re interacting with their stakeholders.”
There might still be numbers that matter – budget allocation, time spent, headcount, outcomes for the period – and those outcomes will include enforcement action. “But it needs to be a more holistic assessment than simply counting activity.”
This is where RegValue 1.0 enters. Developed by Taylor and colleagues at ANU, it’s a tool for assessing how regulation is landing in practice for different types of stakeholders, using both qualitative and quantitative measures.
What makes it novel: “It treats stakeholders as a flexible category,” Taylor explains. “It looks at not only the impact of regulation on businesses, which is what we’ve traditionally tried to measure – how much regulatory burden is business experiencing? – but it also considers that stakeholders could be government itself, other government agencies, the community, a particular geographic area, business, other types of stakeholders.”
The starting point – the clue is in the name – is value.
“To think about what value the regulation is trying to generate. What’s the public interest or the public value that the regulation and the system contributes to?”
Take regulating venues that serve alcohol. “You’re trying to regulate noise, live music performance, public safety, safe service of alcohol, levels of consumption, and also consumer protection. You’re trying to do multiple things at once.” If you’re meeting those goals, there’s cost involved. “What we’re trying to do is establish whether we’re not meeting the goals and as a result burden is being created, and then figuring out where the burden lands and how it affects different types of stakeholders.”
It’s a more sophisticated way, Taylor argues, of looking at how regulation works in the economy and society than simply counting rules or calculating whether a business has to spend a certain percentage of its budget on compliance costs.
The typical need to monetise costs and monetise benefits, to take that quantitative approach – I find that frustrating.
Slater has a particular bugbear on this front: “The typical need to monetise costs and monetise benefits, to take that quantitative approach – I find that frustrating.”
He concedes the tension: “Things always cost money. It always costs money to get regulatory outcomes and public value. But the value that you create is typically qualitative. When you try to quantify the value of, say, ecosystem services, it’s difficult and you lose some of the magic. There’s an inherent value in nature existing simply for the fact that it’s there. And yeah, if there’s no more fish, that’s probably not going to be great for the economy either. But at the same time, you’re trying to measure the immeasurable, and I think that’s tricky.”
He points to work he did in fisheries, developing a strategy called Revitalising the Gulf for the Hauraki Gulf. “You start from the initial problem (the state of the Gulf) and eventually work back, to narrow things down to a discrete amount of actionable regulatory interventions, but how do you know they’ve worked? Some of the work that I was most proud of was a set of ecosystem indicators and monitoring framework that we developed in collaboration with a really diverse group of stakeholders and tangata whenua. You’ve designed this whole strategy and operational plan in conjunction with these people and so co-designing what success looks like is part of that too. You’re evaluating the success of the interventions through success stories that matter to the community the regulations are meant to be serving, and in a language they understand. And then that evaluation feeds back into the system itself – stewardship.”
Taylor sees the qualitative assessment extending beyond environmental or social outcomes to something more immediate: “The psychosocial costs of regulation – the distress that people experience when they’re trying to navigate systems and don’t know how to.” This ties to work on sludge, simplification, and Geoff Mulgan’s thinking on government as an affirmative provider of value, not just a source of compliance burden.
Networks that actually work
If The Professional Regulator is the curriculum, the National Regulators Community of Practice is the forum where regulators figure out how to use it.
NRCoP, hosted by the Australia New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), connects regulators from all three levels of government across every regulatory sector in Australia. Taylor serves as senior academic advisor; Slater, as director of The Professional Regulator, is deeply embedded in its operations.
What makes it work?
“People bond really rapidly over mistakes and things that don’t work,” Slater says. “You need to move beyond that into more positive spaces, but that’s what works with a really good community of practice – being a safe failure space. People want to share problems. ‘How do we actually investigate this? How do we approach this really tricky enforcement action?’ Those are the things that people really want to engage with.”
The cross-sectoral mixing is critical. “Environmental regulators learning from financial regulators, health regulators picking up digital investigation techniques from telecommunications – that’s where the value compounds,” Slater notes.
There’s also what Slater calls a “parallax effect,” borrowing from physics. At a CLEAR conference, he noticed that jurisdictions facing identical problems – how to regulate AI, how to modernise enforcement systems – gained insight not from radically different solutions but from “the same problems with a slight shift in perspective.”
The practitioner-academic bridge is another feature.
“It’s not ‘here’s research’ delivered from on high,” Slater says. “It’s ‘here’s a practice problem we’re stuck on – what does research tell us?’ And then you’ve got PhD candidates who are senior regulators themselves producing deep empirical work that will significantly advance the ball.”
Taylor is careful not to oversell. “Grassroots strength is also a blind spot. Bottom-up engagement is great, but you can miss gaps – emerging issues that aren’t yet on practitioners’ radar.”
Still, when she presents at international conferences, the response is consistent. “It’s quite unique,” she says. “It’s not uncommon for people at international meetings to say, ‘How can we get some of that?’ It’s a national resource and capability Australia doesn’t talk about enough. Countries are asking for help to set up similar organisations.”
Surviving the red tape rhetoric
Taylor was at an OECD event recently where two camps emerged: Team Deregulation and Team Simplification.
“I’m on Team Simplification,” she says, “because it recognises the value of regulation. The message is: this is useful, it’s achieving important goals, but we’re improving it. We’re making it easier for people to navigate, easier to interact with, more responsive.”
Red tape reduction, by contrast, is backward-looking. “Given the quantity of legislation our systems rely on, you’re never going to cut it all,” Taylor says. “It’s much more sensible to take a forward-looking approach open to innovation and experimentation.”
She cites statutory declarations as an example. In some Australian states, digitisation means you can complete one in under a minute. “The savings for disadvantaged people – people without transport, people caring for others – are huge. And there’s also savings for government because processing is faster.”
That kind of visible improvement resonates politically. “Ordinary people can see that, can relate to it, can understand what the benefit is.”
Slater frames the political navigation slightly differently. “Providing really clear examples of how things are working – and taking ownership of the stuff that’s not – is critical. When things go wrong, don’t blame the legislation or the minister. Say, ‘This is our remit, this is what we’re responsible for, and here’s how we’re going to fix it.'”
Taylor agrees but adds a structural caveat: “Stewarding means occasionally looping back to clean up blockages. But the forward-looking narrative is politically more appealing than the backward-looking ‘we’re going to cut red tape.’ That’s language that implies you’re undoing things rather than building better systems.”
When professionalism is peripheral
For all the momentum, the professionalisation agenda still runs into institutional barriers.
“Agencies that are regulators themselves – where regulation is core business – they really see the value in it,” Slater says. “Something we’ve been finding is that even agencies with a shrinking FTE count, they’re investing heavily in the people that they do have to make them more capable, because they see the value in it.”
Where it’s harder: “Places where the regulatory functions sit alongside the policy ones and service delivery. That’s a little bit more of a difficult nut to crack.”
There’s also the return-on-investment problem. “Finance teams want hard numbers,” Slater notes. “It’s tricky to say, ‘We’re building qualitative community capability and it will pay off in five years when we have better cross-agency collaboration and fewer regulatory failures.’ That’s not a budget line item that competes well against measurable outputs.”
Taylor identifies a deeper structural issue: budget design. “There’s no recurrent element for evaluative work. Agencies have to stand that up as a separate project every time. And so the temptation is always to push it off to next year when there’s more capacity.”
The legacy of New Public Management compounds this. “So much energy is consumed by audit and reporting requirements that the loopback function – actually using data to improve systems – becomes an add-on rather than core business.”
She’s blunt about the implication: “What gets funded is actually what you value. And right now, most governments are funding compliance outputs, not stewardship capabilities. Really implementing stewardship means rethinking what we’re spending time and money on.”
Advice for the next generation
What would Slater tell a regulator stepping into the role in 2026?
“See yourself as a regulator. Know your mission: create public value, act in the public interest. You also don’t have to be at the mercy of the currents – you can be the wind that generates the swell.”
Taylor’s advice is more cautionary.
“Don’t be dazzled by AI tools. Technology itself is regulatory – it embeds values, makes choices, shapes behaviour. Increasingly we need to take responsibility for overseeing those processes much more carefully. The core of professionalism is ethics, values, balanced judgement. That doesn’t change just because a tool automates part of the process.”
She pauses, then adds: “And remember that regulation is about people. We’re not just managing systems in the abstract. We’re the architects of those systems, and the choices we make affect real lives.”
Slater nods. “Yeah. Regulation is about people. And if we get it right, we’re building the infrastructure for a society that actually works for everyone.”
