Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today, I'm giving a voice to every small-business owner in Australia who is drowning in red tape while this Labor government looks the other way. In the small-business capital of the nation, the Sunshine Coast, a cafe owner can face up to 30 separate licences and approvals before they've poured their first coffee. A local tradie needs to pay hundreds of dollars in permits just to fix a tap. An engineer working across state lines must obtain separate qualifications and pay multiple fees in each jurisdiction just to do their job. Red tape in Australia has become a war on enterprise. The numbers are damning. Compliance with federal regulation now costs Australian businesses $160 billion a year—nearly 6c in every dollar of GDP. That's up from $65 billion a decade ago. Boards are now spending more than half their time, 55 per cent, just managing compliance. That has more than doubled since Labor came to office. That is time not spent on hiring, investing or growing their businesses.

While Labor adds layer upon layer of red tape, our competitors are moving in the opposite direction. The UK has committed to cutting its regulatory burden by 25 per cent. Canada has introduced a one-for-one rule—remove a regulation for every one that has been created. The EU—even the EU!—is slashing red tape for small business. And Australia? We have no national target and no plan.

The Productivity Commission has confirmed what every small-business owner already knows—Labor's regulatory weight is crushing investment, stifling innovation and dragging down living standards, and capital is going elsewhere. And who could blame it? The coalition has a concrete plan to fix this. We will conduct a full national regulatory stocktake. We will set a target to cut the red tape burden informed by a consultation with business and the community. We'll block the flow of new red tape by requiring regulatory offsets—if you want to add a rule, you have to remove one first. We will strengthen the scrutiny of new regulation so that no proposal passes without a rigorous assessment of its real cost to business, and we'll lift the reporting thresholds that are forcing thousands of medium-sized businesses to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on compliance that adds nothing to their bottom lines or to the national interest. Labor is choosing complexity. The coalition is choosing growth. Australia deserves better than this hopeless Labor government that just doesn't understand business.