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The meetings, probably also with small business leaders (now that we have a ministry to show how Labor cares for entrepreneurs) will no doubt ask her to hector premiers and chief ministers for more work on ''a seamless national economy''.

At least as long as it is all in generalities. If she lets them get to specifics, she will lose rent seekers all along the way.

The COAG reform council reported a few months ago that progress has stalled on some projects to reduce regulation, duplication and red tape. It has stopped on common licensing and registration systems for many tradesmen, including lawyers, (but not health professionals and chiropractors, who are now nationalised), and rules about when company directors are criminally liable. (You can bet they'll be screaming for action on that.)

Work has slowed on occupational health and safety, the regulation of chemicals and plastics and of mine safety. Each has different rules in different jurisdictions, overlapping and often contradictory obligations to Commonwealth and state officials, and lots of form-filling.

Just what any prime minister might be expected to be against. And by golly, Julia is. She and Penny Wong are declaring war on red tape.

Just as, before her, Kevin Rudd and Lindsay Tanner went to battle. Tanner's chief dragon slayer was Dr Nick Gruen.

John Howard and Peter Costello were against it too. When they announced the formation of an entire army against the dreaded red tape, under Gary Banks, from the Productivity Commission, I scoffingly wondered if he would be any more successful than his predecessors in the same battlefield - and he assured me that this time there really would be action. Yet the amount of red tape and regulation increased relentlessly under Howard, some actually caused by the obstacles put in the regulation pathway by the regulation taskforce.

John Howard even had an internal taskforce designed to combat red tape within the public service - on the theory, as enunciated by PM&C chief Peter Shergold, that ''a public service that over-regulates itself will end up over-regulating its citizens''.

Need one add that Paul Keating, and with him, Kim Beazley and John Dawkins, were dead against red tape. Or that before him, Bob Hawke and Peter Walsh were. The actual man for that La Mancha was David Block, who couldn't understand why it took the public service $20 worth of farting about to buy a $1 pen.

Before that was Malcolm Fraser, whose chief agent against red tape was Phillip Lynch. A re-reading (fun in itself) of the Review of Commonwealth Functions - the first razor gang report - was all about red tape. Busily involved was the minister for small business, John Howard (soon to be treasurer, after Lynch skipped a bit of - as it turned out necessary - red tape in his own small business life).

Amazingly, Gough Whitlam was against red tape, and had taskforces too. So was and did Billy McMahon, and before him John Gorton. I cannot specifically recollect any of the taskforces or reports received by Jack McEwen, Harold Holt or Bob Menzies, but I'd be prepared to bet there were some.

This is a war they each seem to have lost, as Gillard will in turn. Perhaps they slayed Hydra but it grew new heads. Certainly no PM seems to have suffered much from their wounds.

A succinct account of the great war on over-regulation simply cannot find room for the countless reports received by government, or volunteered by urgers at, say, the Institute of Public Affairs, or the number of agencies, taskforces, inter-departmental working committees or announcements made by prime ministers, treasurers, or ministers for finance, or small business on the subject.

Even the scripts are the same. Gillard spoke yesterday of the ''dead hand of red tape and inefficiency'' … ''major drag on our economy'' and ''a huge cost to business and consumers'' and ''we've been in a circumstance where an electrician couldn't go from Queanbeyan (in NSW) to Woden (in Canberra) and ply his or her trade.''

The great advantage of this battle for Gillard is that no blood is at risk. She has no real enemy, as such. No one is actually in favour of red tape - at least while the war is fought only with rhetoric and meaningless examples.

Even those, like me, who do not see an acute problem, will mostly applaud. Even the media will generally pretend that it hasn't heard it all before. (Because most press gallery journalists are recycled every three years or so, it is possible some haven't heard it as often as I have.)

There is no general constituency for over-government, for forms, or for complicated processes.

But there are, often, big constituencies for why we had regulation in the first place. It simply is not true that any, or even most regulation is over-regulation, as the Prime Minister will find when she gets to examples - that part of the battle where contact with the enemy is possible.

We have forms and regulation so as to keep a close eye on those (including big and small businesses) to whom we give public money or benefits. To find out what is happening. To help us protect health and safety and the environment, human rights, our trade, our sovereignty and the stability of those who hold money on behalf of others.

The record shows as much criticism of regulators for failing to regulate as whinges about over-regulation. It's just that it comes from different quarters. Witness the international failures of regulatory bodies supervising banks, insurance companies and the securities industry, and major environmental disasters such as the BP oil spill. Yet it is ever banks, insurance companies and miners who are most likely to call for deregulation, and freedom of the markets.

Regulation, in short, is not there so as to serve what so many government departments mistakenly call ''stakeholders''; they are there to serve the public and the public interest.

It is, of course, true that regulation can become a corner in which some will hide from the operation of the public interest. Why, if a seamless national economy is such a good thing, are lawyers resisting a ''seamless national system'' of registration and discipline? Are lawyers really sui generis - requiring sensitive local treatment (by their own mates) different from that accorded to dentists, carpenters or insurance salesmen?

Mere love of regulation, moreover, does not always explain lack of progress. There are many, for example, who accept, in principle, the desirability of the same rights and rules all across Australia, but who are unwilling to sacrifice some right to local autonomy, or who rightly fear that the search for single standards is a search for the lowest common denominator, not the highest. This may well have happened with national school syllabus reform.

Some non-Labor premiers simply do not buy all of the ''reform'' consensus - even with reforms first proposed by John Howard. Our very sense of federalism, after all, implied more local control of matters such as health and education, and the cannier premiers play both sides against Canberra to maximum effect.

Here's betting this crusade, like its predecessors, strangles in its own red tape.