Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Finance Minister on Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wills for his question. Earlier this year the Council of Australian Governments agreed to a program of regulatory reform covering no fewer than 27 areas of business regulation—an unprecedented commitment. Never before, in fact, in Australia’s history has a government attempted such an ambitious program of reducing unnecessary business regulation, including the red tape that has been strangling small businesses. But I will point out that the Rudd government is doing this in the tradition of reforming Labor governments, such as the Hawke and Keating governments, which were committed to transforming Australia into an open, competitive economy.

My colleague the Minister for Finance and Deregulation and I have been co-chairing the Business Regulation and Competition Working Group that was established by the Prime Minister, the premiers and the chief ministers late last year. This program of cutting business red tape is designed to move Australia to what both the Business Council of Australia and the 2020 Summit have described as a seamless national economy. That is where we want to take Australia.

Do you know, Mr Speaker, that in many areas of business regulation there are fewer impediments within the European Union, with its 467 million people, than there are within Australia, with its 21 million people? So we are moving Australia from being nine markets to being one market, a seamless national economy. In doing that, we are putting an end to what we call ‘rail gauge economics’. Rail gauge economics has plagued the business community for more than a century now.

Australia can no longer justify having eight different systems for licensing tradespeople. Australia cannot justify any longer having eight different systems for small businesses just to register their business names. Australia can no longer justify having eight different systems of weights and measures. I remember that the member for Forde, in particular, spoke eloquently of the need to have a single system for weights and measures. I can announce to the House that just before question time the Senate passed the National Measurement Amendment Bill 2008, which means that we will now move to a single national system of weights and measures.

The significance of that is doubled by the fact that this is one of the regulatory hot spots that was identified by the Council of Australian Governments in 2006, when the coalition was in power. And what has happened to those 10 regulatory hot spots? What has happened to the reforms? Ms Katie Lahey, the head of the Business Council of Australia, said that she does not know what happened to those hot spots under the previous government. She said they were so hot they must have burnt a hole in the paper and fallen to the floor. Nothing was done—and that is the problem.

The Rudd government is vigorously pursuing the reform of Australia’s tangle of business regulations. Why? Because it will help lift productivity growth off the floor and reverse what the Business Council of Australia, in this document, has described in these terms:

The creeping re-regulation of business and the introduction of policies that are inconsistent and overlapping across jurisdictions are additional examples of how the benefits of past reform can be quietly eroded over time.

Hear, hear! That was an indictment on a decade of squandered opportunity by the previous government, which re-regulated the Australian economy. While the government is managing the impacts of the global financial crisis and navigating with the business community and the Australian people at large through the turbulence created by the global financial crisis, we will never give up. We will never give up on fundamental economic reform that will boost productivity growth and the competitiveness of Australian industry. On that point, the OECD, in its policy brief just recently said:

It is also important to reduce product market segmentation caused by the regulatory differences between the states … The government—

that is, the Rudd government—

is putting a wide-ranging reform programme in place.

The report went on:

It is promising, for example, that there are now financial incentives for the states to move this process forward.

Those are the very financial incentives that the coalition has described as the creation of slush funds. This comes after 10 years of policy sloth, neglect and nothing being done in the business regulation area—nothing at all, other than the creeping re-regulation of Australian business. I want to thank the states and territories for their cooperation in pursuing these reforms and lifting productivity growth so vital to Australia’s future.

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