Danielle Wood chairs Australia’s Productivity Commission and spent close to a decade at the Grattan Institute before that, the last three years as its chief executive. Her recent essay for Inflection Points, The Red Tape Impulse, opens with the story of an endangered frog whose habitat restoration was delayed so long by competing approval processes that the frog went locally extinct before the works were finished.
In this conversation, TMR Podcast co-host Simon Corden and I talk to Danielle about why regulators respond more to the fear of a bad headline than to the actual risk in front of them, and why that instinct, left unchecked, produces exactly the kind of self-defeating regulation the frog story illustrates.
This is a conversation about incentives, about compliance costs eating into board time meant for strategy and growth, and about why Danielle believes fixing housing supply would solve more of Australia’s problems than almost any other single reform.
In this episode:
- The green and gold bell frog, and how a well intentioned approvals process delayed a conservation project until the species it was meant to save had already disappeared locally
- The tabloid test, and why Danielle thinks the TikTok test has replaced it, plus what that shift means for how regulators manage risk
- Why board time spent on compliance has more than doubled in a decade, and what that costs the wider economy
- Consultation thresholds and when public input stops adding value, a theme from Danielle’s ACCC conference address
- The case for a growth duty, and the tension between short term political pressure and the long term cost of capping utility prices
- Danielle’s magic wand answer, broad scale upzoning for gentle density across Australia’s capital cities
Danielle also shared a few reads that have shaped her thinking on state capacity and growth: Eating Policy, Jennifer Pahlka’s reflections on state capacity; Derek Thompson, of Abundance fame; and Zac Gross, for thoughtful takes on Australian macroeconomics.
Listen now below, on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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