John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think one of the major jobs our government had on taking office was to reduce the costs of doing business. In the main, you could say that what we have done so far in dealing with state governments, once the Senate signs off on it, is create one-stop shops and lower the cost—it looks like almost half a billion dollars a year—to have a simpler, faster, cheaper approval process. If businesses have to get approval to do things from two levels of government, you would think that they were mostly big businesses and corporations, but they are not always. And, whether it is or whether it is not, it is not a good reason to have an incredibly expensive process, going through multi levels—quite often, three levels—of government, to simply get an approval to proceed, to get a development application through or to get a business model through. It is incredibly expensive. To have a one-stop shop where we agree to state governments signing off on our behalf makes a lot of sense.

I do recall that, under the previous government, when the current Leader of the Opposition in the House was environment minister, he pretty much totally copied existing state legislation for coalmining and the like, which was absolutely unnecessary in the state of New South Wales because it pretty much mirrored what was already happening. So, where we have this sort of thing, it makes absolutely no sense to have the multilayered levels of government tripling the cost of what should be simple and able to be processed far more cheaply, far more rationally and far more pragmatically, to allow business of all sizes, small or large, to go about increasing our nation's productivity and efficiency and giving us something to look forward to in the future.

Deputy Speaker—I see it is the new Deputy Speaker—

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