They are promoting the use of the safety management systems and ensuring that the airlines and the maintenance companies themselves have proper systems in place to ensure safety.
The regulator's focus on oversight is on assessing these systems. The regulator can always carry out inspections or audits as it wishes, but it is a move to putting more emphasis on safety management systems.
This has happened in other areas. It has happened notably in rail and, I would even advance, in food safety. The whole HACCP program is the same kind of approach, and it is seen as being a better way of using resources to target the higher-risk areas.