ABSTRACT
Government regulation ofbusiness, a feature of corporate life, has varied in scope and effect over time and across countries. How we are regulated, and by how much, are influenced by political forces, as institutional authorities respond to demands from vested interest groups. In 1997, political activity saw the LiberallNational party coalition government, led by John Howard, introduce its Corporate Law Economic
Reform Program (CLERP) early in the life of that government.1 The first paper in a whole series of reforms, CLERP #1, proposed substantial changes to the way Australian accounting standards are set. Had the proposals come to fruition, Australia would have been the first economically developed nation with a strong standard setting tradition to commit to the adoption of International Accounting Standards (IASs)2 as a matter of course, with potentially profound consequences that were not widely understood at the time.
