There isn't any way to write any legislation guaranteeing that everybody will always be dealt with in exactly the appropriate manner all the time. This is a human effort, and humans will make mistakes and do things they will regret, etc. We all do, and we try to minimize them, but there's no perfection to be had out there.
Let me put it another way. A rules-based regime, if it's a good one—and let's assume they're all reasonable—tends to be a smaller box, as this one is compared with the previous one, and a stronger box. It's smaller; it's much more carefully defined. I think it provides less flexibility—not no flexibility, but less flexibility—than would otherwise be the case. And what I'm suggesting is not necessarily a set of principles, although that's one approach, but that a preamble might perhaps be devised. Again, I'm not part of the writing team for this legislation, so I don't want to put words into their mouths. I'm suggesting a preamble that might at least give the people subject to the regime and the person administering it—the new Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner—some way to make advice more meaningful, by being able refer back to something and therefore appear less arbitrary than might otherwise be the case.
None of these regimes is perfect; let's not pretend they are. Nevertheless, that's the challenge for those people putting the legislation together.