Tell us your issues and challenges

The NRCoP provides an opportunity for regulators to connect with their fellows in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Give a shout out about a success, seek help with a challenge or recommend some useful research.

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NRCoP Survey of regulators’ experience, needs and preferences for training and professional development

As part of the NRCoP’s commitment to building regulators’ capability and professionalism, we conducted a survey in late 2020. Appreciation to people who responded and pdf here (230 KB) are the results. Next steps are to hold focus groups with a sample of managers responsible for recruiting and leading regulatory workforces.

 Read the report

The 2020 annual participant survey: what you told us, what we’ve delivered in response

In late 2020 and early 2021, 228 individual NRCoP members gave generously of their time and insights to help us plan our future offerings. Thank you to everyone who responded. Here are the most important things we learned about our participants and your learning needs and preferences.

The top 10 issues in descending order (% respondents supporting as topic for future deliveries):

  1. Learning to be virtual regulators: inspection and compliance in the age of COVID (62%)
  2. ‘Regulatory capability’: what does it mean and how do we acquire it? (58%)
  3. Frameworks for contemporary regulators: a comparative look at RegX, public value and others (57%)
  4. Telling our story to the community: why good Comms matter (54%)
  5. The regulators’ new tool kit: a post-COVID survey (37%)
  6. Royal Commissions, Commissions of Inquiry Productivity Commissions: are we outsourcing regulatory reform? (37%)
  7. Regulating the integrity of the powers that be’ (36%)
  8. RFH: Regulating from home. Recruiting, managing, motivating and connecting our teams (35%)
  9. (Un)fit, (im)proper: getting it right on licensing as a key task for regulators (34%)
  10. Is regulatory failure a good teacher? (34%)

And some ideas emerging through the free text:

  • Technology/AI/machine learning/digital solutions to regulatory problems
  • Cross agency/cross jurisdictional regulation, regulation in a federation
  • Complaints: encouraging them as a tool for improvement, dealing with them
  • Regulators’ self-regulation in the wake of recent scandals

In response, the first quarter of our 2021 webinar program is delivering webinars on your most popular topics:

Impact of our learning opportunities

82% of respondents told us that they had shared insights from seminars with others in their workplace and/or networks, through a range of mechanisms; 71% that they had been able to apply insights gained from seminars they’ve attended to thinking about their work as regulators. The proposition ‘I have found participating in the NRCoP valuable in developing my capability and professionalism as a regulator’ scored 4.1 out of a possible 5.0.

79 people went to the trouble of explaining the impact of various seminars, forums and webinars in greater detail, for example:

Found insights from cross-border webinar [Regulating the border: An ANZSOG/NRCoP webinar - YouTube] of value, and was able to discuss/distribute to my team members that dealt with NSW/VIC, NSW/QLD, NSW/ACT cross border issues.

Regulating culture and regulatory capture have been very useful topics. The points, views and discussions from the NRCoP sessions have been very topical, timely, created a lot of discussion at my workplace, and have helped frame education session and audit tool development…

Aspects from various regulatory topics have been included in internal training, external presentations and in procedural amendments.

Our respondents

  • The jurisdictional spread was:
  • 24% Commonwealth
  • 21% Victoria
  • 12% NSW and Queensland
  • 11% Western Australia
  • 8% New Zealand
  • 4% National (ie all states and territories but not Australian Government)
  • 3% ACT
  • 2% South Australia
  • 1% Tasmania

53% of public sector respondents were employed by an Australian state or territory government, 35% by a national government and 1% by local government. 11% of respondents had other employers, including universities, non-government organisations, overseas governments and consultancy firms.

There was a widespread of regulatory sectors, with the largest being safety (12%), health (9%), economic (9%), consumer (8%), Financial (7%) and education (6%).