Simon Corden is co-host of The Modern Regulator Podcast. Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Simon Corden has spent more than three decades thinking about how regulators are designed, governed, and held to account.
He drafted the framework that became the OECD’s foundational guide on regulatory governance. He sat as a commissioner on Victoria’s Essential Services Commission for five years. He chaired the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP).
And now, as Chair of the Energy and Water Ombudsman Victoria (EWOV) and a doctoral researcher at the Australian National University, he is investigating a deceptively simple question: What effect do Australian governments’ independent reviews have on regulator practice?
It is a question contemplated well beyond Australia.
Governments in the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and across the OECD spend significant resources on royal commissions, performance audits, inspectors general reports, and ad hoc inquiries into regulatory agencies. The results land with much fanfare and the recommendations pile up.
What happens next is less clear.
An economist among regulators
Corden’s career began at the Productivity Commission, Australia’s principal advisory body on microeconomic policy, before he moved to the Victorian Premier’s Department as director of economic policy.
His formative turn came at WorkSafe Victoria – the state’s workers’ compensation and occupational health and safety regulator – where the dual mandate put economic efficiency and social protection in direct conflict from day one.
“I learnt a lot there about the balance between social and economic outcomes – the need to compensate injured workers fairly, while keeping employer premiums,” Corden says. “But also, that there wasn’t necessarily a tradeoff, if workers got the right support to return to work more quickly.”
“I learnt a lot there about the balance between social and economic outcomes…but also, that there wasn’t necessarily a tradeoff.”
From WorkSafe he moved to the Victorian Treasury, where he was tasked with establishing the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission (VCEC), a smaller state-level counterpart to the Productivity Commission. Its primary role was improving the quality of regulation – the quality of the rules themselves.
It was useful work. But Corden was forming a broader view.
The secret to good regulation, he concluded, rests on four elements: getting the rules right, getting the governance right, getting the processes and practices right, and getting the right people in place.
Plenty of practical guidance existed on the first element – the OECD, the World Bank, and others had produced volumes on rule-making. But on governance and practice, much less.
From Melbourne to Paris – via a lost election
Back at the Premier’s Department, Corden persuaded the government to commission a governance framework for regulators. He had surveyed roughly 60 regulatory bodies across Victoria and found that their governance arrangements – whether they were independent or departmental, governed by boards or single statutory officers, funded by cost recovery or not – followed no discernible logic.
“It wasn’t because there was a clear framework,” Corden says. “It was more random than that. It would have been driven by history, the particular preferences of the minister of the time, or senior policy officials.”
The resulting guide was released publicly about two months before a state election. The government was expected to be returned. It wasn’t. The guide became a publication of the outgoing administration and, as Corden put it, “disappeared almost immediately.”
But things sometimes come back. Through a contact at the OECD, Corden learned the organisation was establishing its Network of Economic Regulators and wanted a foundational publication. The OECD had obtained copies of the Victorian guide and asked whether it could be adapted for an international audience. By then Corden had moved to KPMG, so permissions were needed from both the firm and the Victorian government – a bureaucratic exercise that was, in his telling, somewhat ironic.
The final OECD guide, The Governance of Regulators (2014), is “about 80 or 90 per cent based on the Victorian guide,” Corden says. “It’s been tweaked and enhanced and improved, but it really could be put in brackets: Victorian guide adapted to OECD audiences.”
It remains in use. That the OECD chose it as the inaugural publication of a new international network, and that it has endured, suggests the problem Corden identified in Victoria was not a provincial one. He is characteristically cautious about claiming influence – “you could say that; I couldn’t” – but the document’s longevity speaks for itself.
The craft of regulation
At KPMG, Corden worked on roughly 50 regulatory projects across seven years, spanning a wide range of sectors and types of regulators. The breadth confirmed his conviction that regulation is a transferable professional craft – that the general principles of good regulatory practice apply across domains, even as subject matter expertise remains essential.
“A lot of the regulatory craft is more general,” he says. “A consultant can bring experience from one area and think, that’s a similar sort of issue. But it also highlighted to me that there is a concept of being a professional regulator – someone who has skills in occupational health and safety can apply those skills working for an environmental regulator, or a child safety regulator, or a social services regulator.”
“A lot of the regulatory craft is more general.”
Australia (and Victoria in particular) benefits from a culture of mobility among regulatory professionals, Corden notes. He contrasts this with a visiting delegation from an Asian jurisdiction where career paths are entirely vertical – regulators are hired as juniors at a single agency and rise through the ranks over a career. That model produces deep institutional knowledge but limits cross-pollination.
NRCoP, which Corden chaired for several years during his time as a commissioner at the Essential Services Commission (ESC), is built around exactly this kind of exchange. It provides a network for advice, builds connections that facilitate career mobility, and offers something less tangible but no less important: solidarity.
“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.
550 reviews – and counting
In 2024, after completing his five-year term as a part-time commissioner at the ESC, Corden began a PhD at the Australian National University’s School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). His research question: what effect do independent reviews have on regulatory practice?
The impetus is personal as much as academic. He has sat on both sides of the review table – helping draft recommendations at the Productivity Commission and VCEC, and supporting implementation of recommendations as a public servant or consultant. Too often, he observes, the conclusion was that recommendations went unimplemented and reviews had not achieved their intended impact.
“You can have poor rules and a really good regulator will sometimes make the best of them,” Corden says. “But you can have great rules with an under-performing regulator not enforcing them well. I was really interested in the practice issue, because a lot of the focus on these independent reviews is whether they’ve led to legislative or regulatory change rather than changing the practice of the organisation.”
The pattern problem
One thread runs through many cases of regulatory failure that Corden has encountered: the information was there, somewhere in the organisation, but nobody assembled the picture.
He describes the pattern with a simple example. A medical practitioner abuses a patient. A complaint is lodged and investigated by a case officer. A second complaint arrives about the same practitioner, handled by a different officer. Then a third. Each case, taken individually, might appear medium-impact. Together they reveal a serious and systematic problem. But if the complaints system treats each as a standalone file, the pattern goes undetected.
“So often with regulatory failure, the lower-level incidents or near misses aren’t captured in a way that helps.”
“So often with regulatory failure, the lower-level incidents or near misses aren’t captured in a way that helps,” Corden says. “You need curious people to be looking for that, but you also need the system established so that when a complaint comes in, the first task is: have we had a complaint like this before?” The result is that pattern recognition depends on individual memory and initiative rather than institutional design.
And a related issue that came up in a survey Corden references, which found that very few regulators were able to form a single view of each licensed entity – complaint systems, investigations systems, and licensing systems were almost always standalone. So, for example, an entity that delivers a community service that has had recent changes of management or board upheaval may not be flagged as a priority for an inspection.
Evidence, culture, and the political dimension
Evidence should drive regulatory decision-making, Corden says – but he is clear-eyed about why it often doesn’t. The systems to capture data are often inadequate. And many regulatory professionals come from backgrounds oriented toward case-by-case analysis rather than pattern recognition. Data analytical capability within agencies is uneven.
And then there is the political dimension. Regulators cannot afford to operate in a purely technocratic mode. Regulators run on public trust, and that means being responsive to community concerns and media attention even when the evidence might suggest different priorities.
“All regulators rely very heavily on credibility and trust,” Corden says. “You can’t ignore what the media is focusing on or what the community is focusing on.”
He is also sceptical of the instinct to prescribe domain-specific qualifications for senior regulatory roles. He has seen advertisements requiring degrees in law, environmental science, or public administration for positions where the appointee’s undergraduate degree, earned 30 years prior, bears no relationship to the skills that matter. He points to a successful senior workplace health and safety regulator who recently became deputy ombudsman – her PhD is in parasitic immunology.
Burden reduction without regression
On the current push by UK and Australian governments to reduce regulatory burden, Corden draws a sharp distinction between two kinds of reduction: cutting compliance costs while maintaining standards, and lowering standards while accepting higher risk.
There is, he argues, enormous scope for the first kind. Licensing processes routinely collect too much information, ask for it in unclear ways, and impose unnecessary delays. He cites a case in New South Wales where approval processes for large-scale battery installations required public comment periods and triggered review panels when 50 or more objections were lodged – even when the vast majority of objectors lived hundreds of kilometres from the site and had no connection to the local community.
“These processes, the regulatory process is being slowed down to no benefit to the local community, to no benefit to safety, with people putting in all these objections,” Corden says.
He also raises the case of overseas-trained practitioners registering in New Zealand – where processes seem less rigorous – and then using mutual recognition agreements to practise in Australia. The arrangement has prompted concern in the media, but Corden notes something telling: no one has presented evidence that these practitioners cause greater harm. That, he suggests, should prompt governments to ask whether the rigorous application of Australian standards is delivering the benefit they were designed to provide.
Technology, disruption, and arrival cards
On the question of technology, Corden declines the all-too-familiar binary: AI as either saviour or threat. AI will help, he thinks – on drafting, on pattern detection, on cutting administrative overhead. But that’s not where he sees the bigger story. The disruptions that most transform regulatory work are often business model changes as opposed to technological ones.
Product regulators, he argues, have been more profoundly affected by the shift to direct-to-consumer e-commerce from overseas sellers – flooding markets with small packages that bypass traditional wholesale quality controls – than by any algorithm. The challenge there is structural, not computational.
“Regulators always had to be nimble,” Corden says. “The world has, and has always been, pretty dynamic.”
”Anyone who’s flown into Australia and had to fill out the arrival card will attest that we are working with the technology of the 1940s.”
As for Australia’s adoption of regulatory technology more broadly, Corden is blunt.
“Anyone who’s flown into Australia and had to fill out the arrival card will attest that we are working with the technology of the 1940s. It’s puzzling that, for example, so many South American countries have implemented online solutions, and we are searching for a pen!” That said, he notes that there are many regulators who are doing innovative work using digital tools, even though the opportunities to do more remain plentiful.
A question for every regulator
Toward the end of the conversation, Corden raises a topic he considers underexplored: the relationship between complaints functions and regulatory compliance functions. In some sectors – telecommunications, energy and water, and financial services – the complaints-handling ombudsman is separate from the regulator. In others, the complaints function sits within the regulatory agency itself.
When they are combined, the tension between investigating individual grievances and pursuing systemic enforcement must be managed internally. When they are separate, the risk is that the regulator misses intelligence that only the complaints body sees. Neither model is inherently superior, but the question of how each is managed rarely gets the scrutiny it should.
It is the kind of granular, institutional design question that Corden has spent a career pursuing.
Simon Corden is co-host of The Modern Regulator Podcast with TMR Managing Editor Paul Leavoy. Listen to their conversation with veteran regulator Keith Manch on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
