The Fiscal Responsibility Act forces government to pay attention to its expenditures. But what about the cases where government instead compels you to do the spending on its behalf?

Sadly missing from every budget is any accounting of the costs government regulation imposes on the country. The Productivity Commission says we have about 200 different regulatory regimes and over 10,000 people employed in regulatory activities. New regulations are supposed to be accompanied by a cursory cost-benefit assessment, but we have no clear picture of the overall burden (or benefit) of the existing regulatory estate.

Spending programmes are bound by the government’s budget constraint. But we rarely even measure the costs imposed through regulation – and especially for rules that have been around for a while. An annual regulatory budget would provide some much needed transparency – and might force the regulators to find more efficient ways of doing things.