Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 10, 1999

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting

New Approaches to Public Consultation on Policy and Regulation in Australia

This paper represents a preliminary report on ongoing case studies of public consultation in Australia, where significant changes in the political environment have impacted on the regulatory process. The cases reported here suggest that the common arguments for increased public consultation should not be accepted uncritically. In technical areas of policy, however, there are experiments with new approaches to effective regulation involving dimensions of consultation that merit further study and suggest a need for training of players in the consultative processes.