PRIME Minister Scott Morrison has announced plans to examine red tape in mining and other key industries as part of a push to ramp up Australia’s economy.
In a speech to business leaders in Perth last week, Mr Morrison said he had charged his assistant minister Ben Morton with investigating the levels of existing bureaucratic hurdles, with the government’s previous red tape-cutting initiatives already creating savings of $5.8 billion.
Addressing the WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr Morrison said he wants to go further, shifting the onus to business and industry to identify the delays, using Donald Trump’s economic plan as the inspiration.
“This will be a renewed focus on regulatory reform but from a different angle,” Mr Morrison said.
“Take the WA mining industry for example. In 1996, the late Sir Arvi Parbo took the Kambalda nickel mine near Kalgoorlie from discovery to operation in 18 months.
“By contrast, the Roy Hill iron ore mine took around 10 years to complete around 4000 approvals. Delays to the project meant delays to over 5000 construction jobs and 2000 ongoing jobs.
“Rather than setting targets for departments or government agencies, we’ll be asking the wider question from the perspective of a business. By focusing on regulation from the viewpoint of business, we will identify the regulations and bureaucratic processes that impose the largest costs on key sectors of the economy and the biggest hurdles to letting those investments flow.”
Mr Morrison said while reducing taxes has had a major impact in the US, it was actually the Trump administration’s commitment to cutting red tape and transforming the regulatory mindset of the bureaucracy that delivered the country’s first wave of improvement in their economy.
To provoke the much needed impetus to the economy, Mr Morrison said there was a need to remove regulatory barriers to businesses investing and creating more jobs.
He asked department heads to look at regulations from the viewpoint of business to better identify the bottlenecks for users and investors.
Mr Morrison said it was also important to focus on infrastructure building and a revamp of skills training and industrial relations.
Tasking Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter to assess the nation’s industrial relations system, Mr Morrison said his government would prioritise tax cuts and its proposed Ensuring Integrity Bill, which will make it easier to deregister unions and ban officials over misconduct.