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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (17 April) . . Page.. 1016 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Having said that, I am somewhat cynical about this report. Let us look at the recommendations in that report. They have pretty well all been accepted. We are going to get a Minister for red tape. A Minister is being designated to take control of this. I wonder whether this is the long-rumoured fifth Minister. Why do we need a Minister? We are going to have a unit. We are going to establish, presumably, a new unit in the bureaucracy. We are going to have a business regulation review unit. Bear in mind that we are getting rid of red tape. What else are we going to have? We are going to have a panel of business representatives to give advice on certain matters. So, here is another group that has to be serviced. Someone has to provide the secretarial work and do all of that organisation.

What else are we getting? Each agency is going to develop a range of further reviews, in this case of explanatory material. That is fine. I am not sure that we need recommendations to spell that out in great detail. I wonder whether many in the community will be satisfied with some of the other red tape we are going to get - because that is exactly what it is. We are going to get regulatory needs analyses. Someone, somewhere in our bureaucracy, is going to sit down and analyse proposals to see whether or not these regulations are fine. I would have thought that was part of routine administration; but now we are going to go out of our way to do that.

Each government agency is going to prepare a regulatory plan, and we are going to have guidelines for regulatory enforcement. Let me hope that this does get rid of unnecessary red tape - red tape that nobody wants. Let me also hope that, in doing so, we do not set up a whole new bureaucracy and a whole lot of new strands of red tape. That is the way it looks to me. There is one point in the report that I agree with. That is that we have to look to culture. I think it is the bureaucratic culture and governmental culture - and I will include myself in that in the time that I was a Minister - that does wrap this up. I have listened to debate in this Assembly over seven years now, and a lot of that debate has been focused on increasing red tape, or, to put it another way, to put in processes where people beyond the bureaucracy can have some measure of control or some measure of influence.

So, I do have concerns about just how far this is going. Let us change the culture indeed. If we could induce a culture change - and I acknowledge that that is very difficult - we might do away with red tape that nobody wants. I emphasise "nobody". But this looks to me very much like a bureaucratic report, and I ain't convinced that it is going to get rid of red tape.

MS TUCKER (3.31): I also am interested in making a comment on the Red Tape Task Force report. The exercise was undertaken as part of fulfilling obligations to the competition principles agreement that legislation must be reviewed to make sure that it is not anti-competitive; but the Government broadened the scope of the review to include an examination of areas which place unnecessary burdens on business. I studied this report as part of my work for the Select Committee on Competition Policy Reform. Page 5 of the task force report caught my eye, where it reads:

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