The Queensland Competition Authority has released an informative issues paper on Measuring and Reducing the Burden of Regulation for the purposes of an inquiry it is undertaking for the new Government. The issues paper contains a lot of useful ammunition for the economic rationalists among us, including the following:

The burden of regulation is estimated to be of the order of 1% of Gross State Product, or some $2.5 billion…

…Queensland led the states and territories in the number of pages of rules and regulations [in 2007]

I found the last quote so interesting I created the following chart based on the underlying Productivity Commission data: