Somewhere in the daily work of almost every regulator in New Zealand and Australia – in the qualifications they hold, the communities of practice they belong to, the frameworks their agencies use to assess capability – there is an idea that someone had to fight to make real. Most don’t know where it came from.
It’s not an exaggeration to say Keith Manch is where it came from.
Manch spent nearly five decades in New Zealand public service, moving from the New Zealand Police in 1977 through competition law, consumer affairs, gambling, real estate, maritime safety, civil aviation, and most recently road and rail at the New Zealand Transport Agency (Waka Kotahi). He recently joined Simon Corden and I for the first episode of The Modern Regulator Podcast, and the conversation that followed covered nearly all of it.
The breadth of his career is unusual, certainly. But what he did with it is rarer still.
Regulation as a discipline, not a series of jobs
Early in his career, Manch developed a conviction that has shaped everything since: that the core craft of regulation is fundamentally the same regardless of domain. He calls it the concentric circles model – each new sector adds a ring around the same centre.
“Moving from competition and consumer law into gambling, into real estate or maritime or civil aviation – that was taking the core and wrapping another circle around the outside of it.”
The practical expression of this is an 80/20 principle: regulation is 80% the same across domains, 20% different – not the other way around.
At the time Manch began moving between agencies, that idea was far from accepted. Regulators operated in silos, each convinced of their own sector’s uniqueness. The professionalisation project he went on to help build was, in part, an argument against that instinct.
The full conversation goes considerably deeper into this, including how Manch navigated the resistance from specialists who did not see why they needed to think of themselves as regulators first.
The garage startup that became a profession
The origin of what is now G-REG – the Government Regulatory Practice Initiative – is not the story of a policy directive from the centre. It started with a small training function at the Department of Internal Affairs, a couple of people, and a realisation that every agency in Wellington was solving the same capability problem independently.
Manch convened about 25 people. The diagnosis was immediate and unanimous.
“Instead of investing quite a lot in developing something for our 50 people, why don’t we try and pull everybody together and develop something that’s got more of a system impact?”
The deliberate choice – to go cross-regime rather than sector by sector, and to include local government – is what set the initiative apart from comparable efforts.
The 2014 New Zealand Productivity Commission inquiry picked up their work and lifted it from what Manch calls “a startup in one of our garages, metaphorically speaking” to an institutionalised effort hosted by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) with chief executive backing. G-REG has since qualified more than 2,000 regulatory practitioners. The National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) has extended the model across the Tasman.
It was never well funded, and it was never guaranteed. Manch is candid about the fragility: the initiative went up and down with the people who drove it, the club funding that sustained it, and the political weather. When it moved into the Ministry for Regulation, something changed – the voluntary energy of a self-organised community is not easily replicated inside an institution.
The G-REG origin story is the centrepiece of the podcast conversation, along with an honest account of what has been lost and gained in its institutionalisation.
What regulatory stewardship actually looks like
Stewardship has become a statutory obligation in New Zealand and an increasingly cited concept internationally. Manch’s view is that the concept is well understood and under-operationalised.
The bottleneck is familiar to anyone who has tried to fix a rule that is not working: identify the problem, engage the policy agency, secure ministerial support, and watch the agenda shrink. He describes it as trying to pour a bucket of water through a tiny garden hose. The systems his agencies built were designed to keep that cycle turning even when the hose stayed narrow.
At Waka Kotahi, where he is currently filling a short-term role as acting Deputy Director of Land Transport, three staff carry the job title regulatory stewardship lead. The concept is becoming operational, not just declaratory. Manch also touches on how stewardship played out in a co-regulatory context at Maritime New Zealand, and why the instinct to fix a failing rule by changing it is not always the right one.
Corden – whose own career spans the Essential Services Commission of Victoria, the National Regulators Community of Practice, and a doctoral research project on what regulatory reviews actually change – draws out the contrast between New Zealand’s early investment in practitioner capability and the slower movement on that front in Australia.
“Regulation is a political act”
Manch closed the conversation with a line that is easy to quote and worth sitting with. The driver for regulation, he argued, is shifting: from reducing burdens and staying out of the way, to being asked to actively drive economic activity and innovation. That is a significant change in what regulators are being asked to be. It connects directly to the question TMR has been exploring in its coverage of regulatory posture – what agencies signal about how they intend to act, and whether they follow through.
And then: “Regulation is a political act.”
He said it plainly, without elaboration. In the context of a conversation about independence, capability, and the long project of building a profession, Manch’s final observation is worth hearing in his own words.
Episode 1 of The Modern Regulator Podcast, featuring Keith Manch in conversation with Paul Leavoy and Simon Corden. Listen now here on TMR or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Also, subscribe to The Modern Regulator newsletter for monthly analysis and practitioner insight.
