Ten years ago, “regulator” was not how most people in regulatory agencies described themselves. They were lawyers, economists, inspectors, compliance officers – specialists who just happened to be doing regulatory work.
The idea that regulation was a discipline with its own knowledge base, its own craft, and its own professional identity was largely absent from how governments organised and developed the people responsible for some of their most consequential work.
“The way that we imagined regulators a decade ago was much more in terms of being compliance officers or enforcers,” says Professor Veronica Taylor, a professor of law and regulation at the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). She argues that regulation is “a much more diffused kind of activity” than law or medicine, which is why professionalising it has meant building shared concepts and tools rather than a closed, credentialled guild. What has changed is not just the language but the infrastructure behind it.
Australia and New Zealand have spent that decade building something that no comparable jurisdiction has assembled: a curriculum, a national practitioner network, and a system-level diagnostic tool operating simultaneously. The question now is whether the infrastructure keeps pace with the demands being placed on it.
What has been built
The Professional Regulator, designed and delivered jointly by the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP) and RegNet, has trained 2,200 practitioners across federal, state, and local government in both countries. Six self-paced online modules take participants through the theory and practice of modern regulation from first principles – not compliance procedure, but regulatory design, risk-based intervention, communication, and ethics. The programme’s four-level architecture – Foundation, Extension, Expert, Leader – is being built progressively.
The most important structural feature of The Professional Regulator is cross-sector reach: an environmental regulator and a financial supervisor complete the same Foundation course and develop a common vocabulary for how regulation works before they diverge into their respective disciplines.
That cross-sector dimension is also the defining feature of NRCoP itself. Hosted by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), NRCoP connects regulators from all three levels of government across every regulatory sector in both countries. Free to join, it convenes a national conference annually and provides the cross-sectoral exchange that no single-domain professional body can replicate.
“It’s quite unique,” Taylor says. “It’s not uncommon for people at international meetings to say, ‘How can we get some of that?'”
“Instead of investing in developing something for 50 people, why don’t we try and develop something that’s got more of a system impact?”
The network has roots in an earlier New Zealand initiative. Keith Manch, a veteran of nearly five decades across New Zealand regulatory agencies, convened about 25 practitioners at the Department of Internal Affairs and asked a pointed question: “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?” That gathering became what is now the Government Regulatory Practice Initiative (G-REG), which has since qualified more than 2,000 regulatory practitioners and provided the template NRCoP extended across the Tasman.
The intellectual spine of that work is captured in the 2020 volume Professionalising Regulatory Practice, co‑authored by Pelin Fantham, Wendy Kale, Keith Manch, Nick McGirr, Peter Mumford, and Sanjai Raj. It has become the handbook other jurisdictions reach for when they ask how G‑REG was built and what it would take to replicate it.
The Department of Finance’s Regulator Maturity Model provides the system-level diagnostic. It covers 12 capability domains aligned to the Regulatory Policy, Practice and Performance Framework (RPPPF) – spanning risk management, foresight, collaboration, ecosystem understanding, transparency and governance, evidence and data, and digital and technological innovation. Commonwealth agencies self-assess every two years and produce a Maturity Action Plan against findings. It is the closest thing to a system-wide health check that Australian federal regulation currently has.
TMR’s companion feature on who built the regulatory profession provides a deeper look at how G‑REG, NRCoP, and The Professional Regulator came together.
Where it lands unevenly
Progress has been made, but it is uneven.
Agencies where regulation is core business – standalone regulators with clear mandates – are investing in capability even as headcounts shrink. Fewer people doing a more demanding job requires higher per-person capability, and a shared foundation across sectors enables the kind of cross-agency collaboration that fragmented professional development cannot.
“Qualitative capability that pays off in five years as better cross-agency collaboration and fewer regulatory failures” is not a category that competes well against enforcement action counts in a budget submission.
There is also a structural prestige problem. Taylor is direct about it: “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.”
“Regulation is that much less glamorous, much harder work of actually doing the plumbing and designing the stakeholder experience.”
The federation problem compounds both. NRCoP performs the national coordination function across the AU/NZ regulatory community, but without a structural mechanism to ensure that capability investments at the Commonwealth level translate into compatible practice at state and local government levels, where much frontline regulation actually happens. Cross-jurisdictional enforcement – increasingly common in consumer protection, environmental compliance, and anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) – requires regulators who have not merely developed individual competence but shared operating models. That work remains unfinished.
Simon Corden, who chaired NRCoP for several years during his time as a commissioner at the Essential Services Commission (ESC), argues the network’s less-tangible value is just as important as its formal capability function. Earlier in his career he wrote a governance framework for Victorian regulators that later formed the backbone of the OECD’s Governance of Regulators guidance, giving him a clear view of what other systems lack.
“Everyone can go, ‘Oh God, this has been terrible, this has been hard going’ – and knowing that other people have been through similar difficult challenges and have come out the other side is also really helpful,” he says. That solidarity, built across sectors and jurisdictions, is part of what makes NRCoP more than a training infrastructure.
The stewardship question
“Stewardship” entered the Australian Public Service (APS) lexicon as a formal value through the RPPPF and related public service reforms. It’s the idea that regulators should not just respond to current problems but forecast, anticipate, and adapt across regulatory systems over time. Finance’s maturity model includes foresight as a capability domain. The RPPPF embeds it. The Professional Regulator’s curriculum addresses it.
The honest assessment from those closest to the work is that stewardship is not yet well-defined in practice. Taylor identifies three specific blind spots.
The first is forecasting. Horizon scanning and trend analysis appear as capability domain criteria in Finance’s model. Whether agencies are genuinely using them to shape regulatory strategy – rather than simply ticking an assessment criterion – is a different question.
“We still don’t coordinate and cooperate effectively across agencies and, in a federation like Australia, vertically,” Taylor says. That’s the second blind spot: vertical coordination. Finance’s Regulator Leadership Cohort addresses the Commonwealth tier; NRCoP addresses the national cross-sector tier. The gap between Commonwealth policy intent and local government operational reality largely remains.
Taylor identifies the third blind spot as the failure to loop back: “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.”
Manch, who at the New Zealand Transport Agency – Waka Kotahi has seen staff carry the formal title “regulatory stewardship lead,” shares the view that the concept is well understood and under-operationalised. The statutory embedding matters. Making it a daily habit is the work still ahead.
This is where RegValue 1.0, developed by Taylor and colleagues at ANU, is relevant. It assesses how regulation is landing in practice across a flexible category of stakeholders – not just regulated businesses, but government itself, other agencies, communities, and specific geographic areas.
“When we evaluated regulator performance, there was a tendency to count activity,” Taylor says. “How many enforcement actions taken? How many inspections completed? But there’s, I think, now a really profound shared understanding that those numbers only tell a fraction of the story. What you’re really trying to do is change behaviour.” RegValue is an attempt to build the evaluation infrastructure that stewardship actually requires – not as an episodic intervention but as part of ordinary practice.
Individual capability is not where most regulatory failures originate. Failures tend to originate in leadership decisions, structural design, and the absence of feedback loops. Training matters. It is not on its own the lever that moves system performance.
AI capability and the late-2026 pressure point
The APS’s whole-of-government AI plan arrives on a compressed timeline: Chief AI Officers in every Commonwealth agency by July 2026, an APS-wide training mandate, and a secure government chatbot already in deployment. For regulatory agencies, the AI capability question is not only operational but governance-critical.
How do regulators supervise AI-assisted decisions, maintain explainability requirements, and apply risk-based intervention frameworks to AI-enabled compliance tools procured from third parties? These are not abstract governance puzzles – they are operational questions that will need answers before July.
Rebecca Billings, commissioner at the Essential Services Commission of Victoria (ESCV) and chair of NRCoP, was candid about where the sector stands. “We’re really at Ground Zero with data, digital, AI,” she told TMR. “I don’t think there’s any regulator who is – you know – top of school at this at the moment. I imagine if we all rated ourselves, we would probably be pretty, pretty low.”
The current Foundation curriculum covers risk-based decision-making, evidence use, and ethical reasoning – all directly applicable to AI governance questions. What it does not yet include is AI-specific content: algorithmic literacy, automated decision-making governance, or how to evaluate an AI tool a third party is selling you.
Adam Slater, former Director of The Professional Regulator programme and now CEO of AELERT, the Australasian Environmental Law Enforcement and Regulators neTwork, points to a governance boundary that will define the next phase of AI capability-building in regulatory agencies. Nic Granger, chief financial and information officer at the UK’s North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), put the principle plainly: “AI can inform decisions, but shouldn’t make them. Individuals making decisions are still accountable, whether it’s a regulatory one or a normal organisational one.”
Corden makes a related point: the disruptions that most transform regulatory work are often business model changes as opposed to technological ones. The profession’s cross-sector craft is what allows regulators to recognise and respond to both.
That distinction – AI-informed versus AI-made – is the governance boundary regulators will need to hold. The profession-building infrastructure is well-positioned to address it. Whether the curriculum development cycle can keep pace with the APS deployment timeline is the live question.
The international comparison, briefly
No comparable jurisdiction has assembled what NRCoP and The Professional Regulator represent at this scale. The UK has the Better Regulation Executive, a capable body focused on regulatory impact assessment and reform across Whitehall, and the Regulatory Policy Committee, which scrutinises the evidence base for new regulation. Both are valuable. Neither is a practitioner network – they operate in the policy and scrutiny space rather than the professional development space, and they do not connect regulators across sectors for peer learning and knowledge exchange.
The UK has also created the Institute of Regulation (IoR), a professional body launched by Marcial Boo to give regulators a home of their own. Its ambition – qualifications, career pathways, and a shared professional identity – is essentially to build for the UK what G‑REG and NRCoP already provide in Australasia. Canada has nothing comparable at national scale. Several OECD members have asked how it was done.
Manch’s explanation for why the model is replicable is instructive. His “80/20 principle” – that the core craft of regulation is about 80% the same across domains and only 20% domain-specific – is why a cross-sector network works in practice, and why approaches built sector by sector tend to produce less generative exchange.
Scale and novelty are not the same as maturity. The gaps identified above – vertical coordination, routine evaluation, AI capability – exist in a system that is also, by international comparison, advanced. Holding both of those things simultaneously is the more accurate picture.
The test gets harder
Ten years ago the regulatory profession did not exist as a coherent identity in Australia or New Zealand. It does now – incompletely and unevenly, but recognisably. Manch is blunt that the New Zealand effort has been “up and down” and that, a decade in, “we still have not done everything we set out to do” – which is partly why he wants other countries to treat G‑REG as a work in progress rather than a finished model.
What has been built is more original than either government tends to acknowledge. The next phase is not consolidation. The AML/CTF Tranche 2 expansion has multiplied the regulated population. AI tools are arriving in regulatory agencies without agreed governance frameworks. The implementation crunch of mid-2026 requires regulators to operationalise multiple major frameworks simultaneously. All of that lands on a workforce whose professional foundation is still being laid.
“The key thing about recognising regulation as a profession,” Slater says, “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 – recognising that this is an important function of government – means we need to do it well to create good outcomes.”
That’s a strong statement of purpose. Whether the infrastructure can keep pace with the demands now arriving at its door is the decade’s next question.
This article sits alongside TMR’s feature “Who built the regulatory profession – and what it took”, which traces the origin story and key people behind this work.
