Regulation

Table of contents

3 - Progress in Australia on recommended policies and programs

Regulation

Stephen Sugarman has raised for discussion the idea of ‘performance-based regulation’ which would impose a legal obligation on manufacturers to reduce their negative social costs. Rather than suing the firms for damages, or telling them how they should run their businesses differently (as typical ‘command and control’ regimes would do), performance-based regulation allows the firms to determine how best to decrease today’s negative public health consequences. Like other public health strategies, performance-based regulation shifts the focus away from individual consumers onto those who are far more likely to achieve real public health gains. Analogous to a tax on causing harm that exceeds a threshold level, performance-based regulation seeks to harness private initiative in pursuit of the public good.[30] In a debate about the proposal published in the BMJ, Sugarman argues that current approaches to some of our most pressing public health problems – voluntary cooperation with business and requiring companies to change how they operate – are not moving us effectively or efficiently in the socially desired direction. Through performance-based regulation, the government informs businesses on the outcomes it wants from them and leaves them to work out the best ways of attaining those regulatory targets.[31]

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