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Regulatory Impact Analysis: promise and reality The Australian national government was one of the first OECD nations to adopt a process of RIA, in the shape of its regulatory impacts statement (RIS), process, adopted over twenty years ago, in 1985. Yet, despite over twenty years of development, in 2005 the Prime Minister felt compelled to establish the Regulation Taskforce on reducing the Regulatory Burden on Business. In its 2006 Report ‘Rethinking Regulation’, the Taskforce identified some ‘100 reforms to existing regulation’, that were needed and another fifty to be investigated in further depth. It laid the blame for the sharp increase in the regulatory burden on an increasingly risk averse society and a ‘regulation first, ask questions later’, culture within government departments and agencies. At the very least the findings of the Report imply that the RIS process and the regulatory review system in which it was embedded had been a failure. The aim of this paper is to assess the development and role of the RIS process in order to identify the performance of that process, the environment within which it has operated and the compliance record of the departments and agencies subject to RIS. It argues that its performance can be explained, in particular, by the varying levels of ministerial commitment to the process, variable degrees of commitment from departments and agencies, several of which did not integrate the needs of RIS with their standard policy development processes, inadequate cost/benefit assessments and inadequate consultation with stakeholders