Basel III reforms that focus solely on regulation "will not get the job done", a senior regulator said yesterday. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority's executive general manager of diversified institutions, Wayne Byres, said there was a risk in re-writing the prudential rule for banks and insurers, using a strict rules-based approach would take away regulators' power to act. Speaking at yesterday's Institute of Global Finance conference, held in Sydney, Byres said: "We have to be very careful not to limit intervention. "You might have a rule that says you can intervene once a certain capital level is reached. That sounds fine, but what it is actually saying is that unless you hit that trigger you do nothing." He said two of the strengths of the Australian regulatory system were the power to set individual capital requirements and the power to give directions. "We can say to an institution that its loan loss provisions are not adequate and tell it to put its capital requirement up by 50 basis points. Not a lot of jurisdictions have that. "At APRA, our philosophy is that a set of rules is never going to deal with something as complex as a financial system. Supervision is the primary means of stability. It can be tailored to individual circumstances in a way that no rule book can." He said Australia should also maintain its powerful information-gathering regime. "We can access any piece of information that is available to the board and management of an institution. That power informs risk assessment. "Easy access to information should be something that all supervisors can take for granted, but not all regulators have it." The framework also requires political support. "We need moral support from government to be firm in our supervision. We have that in this country but it was there in many countries before the financial crisis.