Industry Self-Regulation: Panel and Book Launch

To celebrate the launch of The Legitimacy and Responsiveness of Industry Rule-making, a new book written by Dr Karen Lee and published by Hart, the Centre for Media Transition hosted a panel discussion about industry self-regulation in Australia.

Since the micro-economic reform of the 1980s and 1990s, Australian legislatures, governments and regulators have embraced industry self-regulation in an array of industry sectors, including financial services, communications and other utilities. However, the misconduct of banks, superannuation and financial service providers revealed during the on-going Royal Commission, the rise in the number of customer and small business complaints about telecommunications service providers and repeated findings by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission that leading telecommunications companies have engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct have (again) called into question whether industry actors have the capacity to regulate themselves. 

The panel, moderated by CMT's co-director Dr Derek Wilding, featured Emeritus Professor Arie Freiberg AM (Faculty of Law, Monash University), Dr Karen Lee (School of Law, University of New England) and Associate Professor Darren Sinclair (University of Canberra). They discussed the rule-making, compliance and enforcement issues surrounding industry self-regulation and consider if reliance on self-regulation by legislatures, governments and regulators needs to be rethought.

Following the panel discussion, Ms Delia Rickard, Deputy Chair, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission officiated the launch of The Legitimacy and Responsiveness of Industry Rule-making.

Following this event, Derek Wilding interviewed Karen Lee about industry self-regulation including when is it legitimate and responsive. You can watch the 11-minute video interview here.

Participants

Emeritus Professor Arie Freiberg AM: Former Dean of the Faculty of Law at Monash University between 2004 and 2012 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2003. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law. His particular areas of expertise are regulation, non-adversarial justice and sentencing. He has around 150 publications in areas such as sentencing, tax compliance, corporate crime, sanctions, superannuation fraud, trust in criminal justice, commercial confidentiality in corrections, the role of emotion in criminal justice and public policy, non-adversarial justice and regulatory theory. He has also consulted for a number of state government agencies and departments on regulatory reform.

Dr Karen Lee: Lecturer in the School of Law at the University of New England and the author of The Legitimacy and Responsiveness of Industry Rule-making. The book is based on her PhD thesis for which she received the UNSW Faculty of Law’s PhD Research Excellence Award in 2017. She has published in the Federal Law Review, the Media and Arts Law Reviewand the Australian Journal of Competition and Consumer Law; and is a contributor to Australian Telecommunications Regulationand Telecommunications Law and Regulation. She was the runner up for the Giandomenico Majone Prize for Best Conference Paper Written and Presented by Early-Stage Researchers in 2016. Prior to becoming an academic, she worked in the TMT department of the London office of Denton Wilde Sapte (now Dentons).

Delia Rickard: Appointed to the position of Deputy Chair of the ACCC in June 2012 for a period of five years and reappointed for a further five years in August 2017. She takes a particular interest in the ACCC’s consumer protection work and plays an active role in the Commission’s product safety work as well as its consumer protection compliance and enforcement work and scam disruption.

Immediately prior to her appointment to the ACCC, Delia held a range of senior positions at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). She led much of ASIC’s consumer protection work covering areas such as financial literacy, dispute resolution schemes, e-payments and industry self-regulation. She was responsible for developing the first National Financial Literacy Strategy and chaired several OECD Financial Literacy sub-committees. She also led ASIC’s role in the implementation of the Government’s Super Choice policy and was the founding Chair of ASIC’s Corporate Social Responsibility program.

Delia is a former head of the ACCC’s then Consumer Protection Branch and was a member of the Secretariat to the Wallis Inquiry into the regulation of Australia’s financial system.

Associate Professor Darren Sinclair: Former Senior Research Fellow, School of Regulation and Global Governance, The Australian National University. His research interests include regulatory pluralism in an environmental context, in particular, ‘smart regulation’ and instrument choice; ‘next generation’ environmental regulation; occupational health and safety regulation in Australian mining; and the regulation and governance of non-urban water use in the Murray Darling Basin, the United States, Spain and France. He has co-authored (with Gunningham and Grabosky) Smart Regulation: Designing Environmental Policy, (with Gunningham) Leaders and Laggards: Next Generation Environmental Regulationand (with Gunningham) Managing Mining Hazards: Regulation, Safety and Trust. He has also co-edited and co-authored (both with Holley) Reforming Water Law and Governance: From Stagnation to Innovation in Australia and Intelligent Regulation: Water Markets, Compliance and Technology. He has been a consultant to government and industry, and produced many policy reports.

Dr Derek Wilding: Co-Director of Centre for Media Transition, was previously Director of the Communications Law Centre at UNSW, but came to UTS after a decade working in government and industry regulatory roles. He was Executive Director of the Australian Press Council, implementing major structural changes to embrace online and other digital publishers. At the Australian Communications and Media Authority he managed the media ownership rules, broadcasting investigations and digital transition projects.

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