Adversary culture

The adversarial process forces parties to a dispute, such as industry and environmentalists, to assume the worst about each other as each applies pressure on the position of the other. Each side's behaviour then confirms the other's worst expectations. The regulatory process becomes time consuming and costly since legislation may take a decade to formulate and another decade to implement, and any litigation can involve further delays. When scientific understanding is advancing rapidly, such delays can mean that the regulatory system is quite out of step with the state of knowledge.

Adversarial politics is becoming increasingly redundant, irrelevant, and a costly anachronism from which legislators seen unable to escape. Political point-scoring in the media is irrelevant to the needs of society and is increasingly felt to be contemptuous of the electorate.