Neither of those treacherous places had warning signs, handrails or the like. Nor would I have wanted those peaks marred by these things. That they were hard to reach was part of their beauty.

It was a marked contrast to a recent trip to the Blue Mountains, NSW, where most cliffs were blocked off by steel mesh and stark warnings of the grave dangers of gravity. I winced when I saw these signs scarring such a magnificent site.

This isn't a gripe about the Australian "nanny state". We're hardly Singapore.

Yet there are countless examples of our governments, especially local councils, adopting risk-averse measures to public spaces that end up spoiling their amenity. Sometimes, it's driven by tort law and insurance premiums. Other times, it's just unthinking proceduralism.

Critics savaged Tony Abbott in 2014 when he held biannual "red-tape repeal days". He would create "the biggest bonfire of regulations in our country's history", he promised.

Which was a shame, because it meant that, from the start, he was using a nonsensical measure of "success". He argued that abolishing and merging legislation was progress. As it turned out, listed among his red-tape "triumphs" were bills to correct grammar and spelling in legislation – for example, changing "e-mail" to "email". Labor's Bernie Ripoll called the day one of the most laughable he'd seen in Parliament.

I was a fan of the idea, but despaired at its execution. The previous government, Julia Gillard's, had often lauded its own performance by pointing to the number of bills it passed through Parliament; a measure of "progress" equally as useless as Abbott's inversion of that measure.

The bureaucracy, too, was badly misused. Each department of state was made to set up a "deregulation unit" led by a senior executive. They were tasked with scouring every nook of their portfolio's fiefdoms to remove at least $1 billion worth of "unnecessary or inefficient regulation imposed on individuals, business and community organisations".

They succeeded, of course; they cut $5.8 billion worth of "red tape" in just over three years.

But how was that measured? Some was straightforward, such as the removal of fees to access government services. Yet most of the dollar savings were actually time savings. Those deregulation units were made to count the words on every government form, website and sign so as to calculate the time taken to read them, and hence the opportunity cost of doing so. Yes, including warnings on cliff tops.

There were genuinely commonsensical cuts – film producers, for example, now need only apply for a classification once rather than twice if they choose to release both a 2D and 3D version of their movie. But the cutting of red tape became, in some places, simply the cutting of words; at least that was clearly measurable and could be reported back to the minister.

Image the chaos that would have been unleashed had the Coalition upheld its farcical election promise of tying every senior public servants' performance pay to "cuts to red and green tape". Imagine the frenzied slashing of words. As much as I dislike those warning signs, how many would have been uprooted in the name of, well, "deregulation, of course – and certainly not the size of my bonus"?

The deregulation units were quietly disbanded after Abbott was ditched. I can't help but think it's a shame. Public servants need to think constantly, and consciously, about the burdens they can unwittingly create. Just with a little less panic about measuring it all.

Markus Mannheim edits The Public Sector Informant.