Page 3552 - Week 11 - Thursday, 23 October 2014
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As I have stated, and I will repeat it, this bill does not get rid of nearly enough red tape. It merely tweaks, in fact, the government’s own red tape. And what of the red tape website the Treasurer speaks about? How effective is it? I will remind members that the last time we asked about it—and these are the government figures—the number of issues raised from the public were four and the red tape reduction action taken was zero. Possibly the Treasurer can update us when he comes back to discuss this.
What are the cost benefits? We get further insight into this Treasurer’s insincerity on his push to cut red tape. He noted just last November that his overriding goal on cutting red tape is to “identify and consider”. There you go: “identify and consider regulations that impose unnecessary burdens, costs or disadvantage on business activity in the territory”. When we asked the Treasurer how he measures the impact value of his red tape reductions, he responded by saying this:
… the focus of the Panel has been on improving efficiencies in response to concerns raised by industry, rather than quantifying the exact value of the red tape being removed.
So we do not even have any analysis of what the value of this red tape being removed is. There it is: the government is saying it will do something but it still cannot quantify what it is doing. And it is the Treasurer’s own committee; it meets several times a year. One would not know what is discussed at those meetings; you would have to say it cannot be a great deal if this is all that has come out of it.
There is a genuine lack of leadership on this issue. As management guru Peter Drucker once said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Then again, Mr Drucker also said, “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.” I think our Treasurer has got it front to back. If you look at the results so far, it certainly is defining his leadership.
I remind members that in the lead-up to last year’s federal election the chamber of commerce “too big to ignore” campaign focused quite a bit on red tape as a major concern for small businesses. It was a very effective campaign. You can see that the federal government has responded strongly to that. For the first time the Minister for Small Business—Bruce Billson—is in cabinet, and that is a tremendous outcome. We hear across parliaments—we have heard it in this place—that small businesses are the engine room of the economy. It is about time they got the attention that they deserve, and it is great to see that Mr Hanson has a dedicated small business shadow minister to make sure that those concerns are raised. And that is a great thing.
In September last year the Productivity Commission report looking into the interaction between small businesses and governments noted that there was a need to improve government regulatory agencies’ relationship with small business by maintaining an effective and facilitative regulatory posture. It noted that they needed to keep compliance requirements simple and readily understandable, they needed to develop better data sharing and data collection across government agencies to avoid duplication and they needed to reduce the cumulative compliance burden which includes taxation compliance. We could talk about lease variation charges and land tax burdens in that regard; we have had those debates.
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