On 10 February 2006, COAG agreed to the National Reform Agenda (NRA). The NRA is designed to underpin Australia’s future prosperity. The NRA is aimed at further raising living standards and improving services by lifting the nation’s productivity and workforce participation over coming decades. It will also continue and strengthen National Competition Policy (NCP) reforms to make markets work more efficiently and will aim to reduce the regulatory burden imposed by the three levels of government.

The NRA encapsulates a range of measures to ensure best-practice regulation making and review, including:

• establishing and maintaining effective arrangements to maximise the efficiency of new and amended regulation and avoid unnecessary compliance costs and restrictions on competition;
• targeted annual public reviews of existing regulation to identify priority areas where regulatory reform would provide significant net benefits to business and the community;
• the identification of additional reforms that enhance regulatory consistency across jurisdictions or reduce duplication and overlap in regulation and in the role and operation of regulatory bodies; and
• an aim to adopt a common framework for benchmarking, measuring and reporting on the regulatory burden.

• Competition Reform: to make our economy more competitive and continue the successful reforms of the 1990s;
• Regulation Reform: to reduce the red tape burden on businesses; and
• Human Capital Reform: to improve health, learning and work outcomes for all Australians.