There’s nothing more lonely than when you get something wrong as a regulator and the department goes radio silent.” Sandra Parker PSM said that from experience. She spent eight years as a Commonwealth Deputy Secretary before taking on the role of head of the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) in 2018. The transition, she says, was a genuine shock. Not because the work was harder than expected, but because the support simply wasn’t there.
In this first episode of a two-part conversation, The Modern Regulator Podcast co-hosts Simon Corden and Paul Leavoy sit down with Sandra to talk about what that transition actually costs, and what she found when she arrived at an agency publicly described as toothless.
This is a conversation about the gap between designing regulation and enforcing it. About the informal infrastructure that disappears the moment you become independent. And about what Sandra did with an enforcement toolkit the FWO had been quietly avoiding for years.
In this episode:
- Why independence arrives without scaffolding, and why regulators rarely admit it
- The 7-Eleven wage theft scandal, the Fels task force, and the burning platform Sandra inherited
- A legal interpretation that had been paralysing the agency’s compliance notice tool for years
- How Sandra rebuilt the FWO’s enforcement posture from the ground up, and what it took
Listen now below or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Part two is also available now.
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