Minister Assisting the Prime Minister and Cabinet,
Minister for the Public Service,
Special Minister of State
Getting regulation right and light is as critical today as it has ever been. Everyday Australians and their businesses navigate a sea of regulations imposed on them by governments at all levels.
Regulation determines when a business can open, what they can sell, the services they can provide and opportunities to grow and invest. When the Prime Minister asked me to take on the Morrison Government's Deregulation Agenda, I jumped at it because of my own experience and that of my parents who had successfully run their own family businesses.
After high school, when I moved to Canberra to study at the Australian National University, I needed a part-time job. So I decided to learn how to drive a bus in Queanbeyan, one of Canberra's border towns in NSW. I took the lessons, went to the NSW transport authority to take my test, and successfully got my bus licence. But then I found out I had to get a public passenger authority from the NSW Government - a totally different set of tests. So, I studied for and passed those tests, but when the NSW Government processed it, they realised I was actually too young to apply for public passenger authority. So I was the most useless bus driver in NSW - being able to drive a bus, but not carry passengers. Today, as a Minister, this inspires me to ensure regulations are fit-for-purpose to make it easier for Australians dealing with unnecessary red tape and support businesses to grow and create jobs.
As we look forward, we need to turbocharge our economy and unlock the latent potential in Australian businesses. That's exactly what we're doing through our Deregulation Agenda. As I revealed at Australia's inaugural Regulatory Reform Conference this week, our Deregulation Agenda is expected to deliver benefits of over $21 billion over the decade. The benefits will ripple across the economy - building wealth, creating jobs, and improving living standards - helping Australians and their businesses achieve their full potential.
Good deregulation means removing duplication. We know from talking to businesses, they want to comply with regulation, but they only want to do it once. And fair enough, too. We have numerous regulators at different levels of government monitoring the same businesses and mandating the same information from them in different ways. Rather than talking to each other, they push the burden onto business to resubmit the same data over and over again. Creating duplicated efforts, wasted time and lost revenue.
Imposing duplicative standards on businesses doesn't help anyone; it just jacks up prices for consumers and wastes businesses' valuable time. This week my Ministerial colleagues and I announced more cross-government common sense changes that will cut red tape and save time and money for hundreds of thousands of businesses. We're changing laws to allow the use of trusted overseas product safety and information standards in Australia. We estimate this will save Australian businesses $136 million every year and improve safety for Australians and their families.
My long-held view is that our starting point should be not to regulate. Instead we should take a hard look at regulations to ensure they're justified and minimise burdens. When we talk about deregulation, we don't mean no regulation, we mean well-designed, well-targeted and well-implemented regulation. We want to free businesses from the barriers, blockages and bottlenecks that put undue obstacles in their way.
We're taking advantage of technological solutions to make it easier for businesses to meet their requirements. We committed $2.8 million to digitise legal documents making it easier and quicker for individuals and businesses to communicate with each other. We've also invested in a range of technologies that make it easier, cheaper and quicker for businesses to comply with a range reporting requirements. This includes $48 million to make it easier for industry to seek environment approvals for major developments, $20 million to slash time for up to 55,000 small and medium businesses lodging mandatory reporting, and $33 million to help farmers and businesses wanting to participate in the carbon market. Because deregulation is not just for business.
We're working with States and Territories to make it easier for tradies and licensed professionals including teachers, architects and real estate agents to work where the work is. Almost all States and Territories have amended laws to remove the need for licensed workers to apply and pay for additional licences to work in different States and Territories. I'm pleased WA is set to pass its own law by July. Some fly-in, fly-out workers have wallets packed with different licences just to do their job. Many others simply don't bother to take up work interstate.
Our reform has worked, not by having a national licence, not by trying to harmonise or align State rules, but to replace them with a description of accountability and transparency. We shifted the focus on the needs of businesses while ensuring we continue to keep workers and the community protected. We estimate this will benefit 168,000 workers each year and add about $2.4 billion to the economy over 10 years.
While I was pleased to see the Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, recently speak about deregulation, it was quite disingenuous. Labor were not supportive of these reforms. Instead, they voted in support of the Greens who tried to destroy them. Imagine the lost opportunity if they were successful. Mr Albanese claimed Labor would deliver "microeconomic reform through national consistency and removing duplication" but fails to realise the Morrison Government has already achieved this through National Cabinet last year.
By listening to what Australians and businesses have to say, and freeing them from the burdens of cumulative, duplicative and unnecessary regulation, the Morrison Government is enabling industries to grow and create jobs. I'm proud of all we've achieved as part of the Deregulation Agenda, as well as the foundations we've built to support consistent reform in years to come. We will continue to find the best and most efficient ways to make Australians' lives easier.
