Alex McMinn is the New Zealand representative of the National Regulators Community of Practice (NRCoP), sits on its national steering group, and helped design the successor to the Government Regulatory Practice Initiative (G-REG) inside the Ministry for Regulation. He also thinks professionalisation can become “a comfort blanket” that lets regulators focus on the wrong things.
“Focusing on regulatory professionalisation can become a bit of a comfort blanket and can actually mean that you focus on the wrong areas or areas that don’t actually shift the dial in terms of regulatory system capability,” he says.
This isn’t a repudiation of NRCoP or The Professional Regulatoropen_in_new. Rather, it’s a practitioner’s caution from inside the system about what credentials and qualifications can and cannot solve. McMinn, who now runs New Zealand’s system capability function, has a more complicated view of what the profession-building project actually requires.
When capability isn’t the problem
McMinn’s claim is specific and testable: regulatory failure in New Zealand over the past 20 years was not caused by poorly trained practitioners.
“None of [New Zealand’s regulatory failures over the last 20 years] happened because the individual regulatory workforce didn’t have the right level of training or qualifications or credentials,” he says. “It was because decisions were made by leaders that either took them away from their core regulatory mandate or the way they chose to regulate.”
“None of (New Zealand’s regulatory failures over the last 20 years) happened because the individual regulatory workforce didn’t have the right level of training or qualifications or credentials.”
The 2018 road safety regulation failings at Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency support the point. McMinn worked there as Manager Standards and Operational Policy during the rectification process. The failure was not operational incompetence at the frontline. It was a governance and leadership decision that allowed systematic non-compliance to accumulate for years, creating liabilities that required external legal intervention and ex gratia payments to affected parties.
McMinn has since applied a similar lens at the Ministry for Regulation, where his team leads work to address systemic issues that cut across several regulatory systems in order to improve good regulatory practice and support the wider Ministry to conduct regulatory reviews. Asked what the Ministry tends to find when it examines a regulatory system, McMinn points away from the statute book. “Typically, around 80% of the issues are a mix of regulatory practice, organisational design and governance arrangements,” he says. “Only about 20% is the legislation itself.”
“A reform agenda that just focuses on reducing the stock of regulation really is only going to go so far,” he says. “It kind of sees legislation-making as this kind of magical solution.”
McMinn’s heuristic plays interestingly against a familiar one in New Zealand regulatory circles. Keith Manchopen_in_new, an architect of G-REG, argued that around 80% of regulatory craft is common across sectors and only 20% is domain-specific, a principle that helped justify a cross-sector curriculum and, later, NRCoP. Manch’s split was about what regulators need to know. McMinn’s is about where things go wrong.
The two views are not opposed. A common craft can still be teachable; McMinn’s point is that even well-taught craft will not save a system whose problems sit in how it is designed and governed. “Training matters,” he says. “It’s just not where most system-level problems originate.”
The Ministry for Regulation as regulatory treasury
The Ministry for Regulation is unusual by international standards. It’s not a regulator, not a watchdog, and not a policy shop in the traditional sense. McMinn describes it using a Treasury analogy.
“The best analogue is many jurisdictions have a treasury that looks after and monitors government spending and advises the government on how the economy can thrive,” he says. “The Ministry for Regulation was created around that same focus, but for regulation.”
The ministry does three things: builds system capability, conducts regulatory reviews, and advises government on policy. What distinguishes it from most central agencies is the first function, which involves direct work with regulators at a practical level around regulatory design, delivery and governance. The Regulatory Practice Essentials Quick Guidesopen_in_new and the recently published guidance on Regulatory Sandboxesopen_in_new and responsible AIopen_in_new, are just a few examples of the work they do to help regulatory leaders improve their practice.
Agencies come to the ministry proactively, not under compulsion. “The proof really is in the pudding,” McMinn says. “Many regulators come to us proactively, so that kind of changes the narrative that we are a scary watchdog.”
“Many regulators come to us proactively, so that kind of changes the narrative that we are a scary watchdog.”
The ministry absorbed G-REG in its formation, which gave the initiative secure funding but changed its character. The club funding model that sustained G-REG for years disappeared, as did the steering groups that had governed it. Keith Manch, reflecting on the transition, noted that “it takes a while to settle into a new kind of rhythm.” The ministry is still finding that rhythm.
Stewardship as navigation
Stewardship has been embedded in New Zealand’s public service legislation since 2013 as part of an amendment to the State Sector Act and then brought through into the Public Service Act in 2020. In practice, McMinn says, it often remains abstract.
“Regulatory stewardship can become this really academic concept,” he says. “To me, regulatory system capability is the practical application of regulatory stewardship.”
His definition is practical rather than philosophical. “It’s about navigation, understanding the system, using that knowledge to help make deliberate choices, and at the same time sticking to the basics. Really understanding what your mandate is, what your objective is, and doing that really well, but not at the detriment of continuous improvement or innovation.”
The practical application involves trade-offs. Regulatory leaders will never have resources to address all harms across their system. Stewardship is the proactive governance, monitoring and care of regulatory systems to avoid taking a ‘set and forget’ approach to regulatory systems. In McMinn’s view, this can mean being explicit about which harms you’re prioritising, why, and what the consequences of that choice are. “Once you raise that level of transparency with your board or your minister, then if that decision is accepted, that’s your mandate to carry on,” he says.
It also means being willing to pull back when interventions aren’t working. “We’re bold enough to go, actually this may not be the solution that’s needed, and so we’ll pull back. We’re not going to get caught in that sunk cost fallacy.”
The gap between stewardship as a statutory obligation and stewardship as daily practice remains the implementation challenge. Veronica Tayloropen_in_new and colleagues at the Australian National University’s RegNet have been developing RegValue, an evaluation tool designed to assess how regulation is landing in practice across different stakeholder groups, not just how many enforcement actions were taken. McMinn is describing what happens when a regulatory leader walks into work on Monday. Both perspectives are necessary.
The trans-Tasman conversation and the Anglo bubble
McMinn is the New Zealand representative of NRCoP through the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), which gives him a vantage point on the trans-Tasman regulatory reform conversation. He’s willing to say the conversation can become insular.
The profession-building work in Australia and New Zealand is advanced by international comparison. No comparable jurisdiction has assembled a cross-sector practitioner network, a foundational curriculum, and a system-level maturity model operating simultaneously at this scale. But McMinn’s observation is that the benchmarking tends to be circular: Australia looks at New Zealand, New Zealand looks at Australia, both look at the UK, and the conversation stays largely within that triangle.
Singapore’s regulatory sandbox modelopen_in_new has been adopted more widely globally than anything NRCoP has produced. Estonia’s digital governance infrastructure, including the X-Road data exchange layeropen_in_new, is studied by the World Bank as a standard for interoperabilityopen_in_new. These examples don’t fit neatly into the Anglo regulatory reform template, and they tend not to feature prominently in the NRCoP or Institute of Regulation conversations.
It’s an acknowledgement that regulatory innovation is happening in places the profession-building conversation doesn’t always reach, and that those innovations might offer lessons the current model isn’t set up to learn from.
Finding its footing
McMinn’s honest assessment of where New Zealand’s regulatory system stands after more than a decade of capability investment is direct: “My honest assessment is it’s still finding its footing.”
The infrastructure is real. The profession exists. The system is learning how to use it, but the learning is slow, uneven, and there’s more work to be done. The 20-year vision McMinn offers is modest and specific.
“My hope is that we no longer see major regulatory failures that trigger a knee-jerk response. Instead, regulation adapts proactively, in small and frequent steps, drawing on the full range of tools available. What I really want is a genuine shift in how the system behaves, where regulators learn from practice and improve continually. Good regulation shouldn’t need a crisis to get better.”
Twenty years from now, if the system works as intended, no one will notice. The regulatory system will adjust quietly, respond early, and avoid the failures that make headlines. That’s the point.