My business is at risk because of the dead hand of bureaucracy

There have been many comments made recently in the media about the dead hand of governmental regulation and bureaucratic interference on the efforts of business to grow and develop in this state. I offer another sad example of “gold fish bowl” thinking that lacks logic and fails to honour the science.

DPIPWE intends to introduce new plant import regulations into this state next month that damage productive assets, undermine small business, disrupt interstate trade, put at risk human health and pose a threat to the environment.

With that line up of negatives you’d think they must have some compelling reasons to do so.

Well no, there isn’t.

It seems that no prior documented risk analysis and or cost-benefit assessment has been undertaken. But they have offered up two fruit flies in Glenorchy and while this discovery is disconcerting it’s hardly a catastrophe and anyway fruit flies like fruit, which are not subjected to these new regulations.

In its Biosecurity Advisory 28/2011 DPIPWE cites the prevention of plant viruses present on the mainland but not in Tasmania as the key driver of the new regulations. Is this a valid concern? None of the other states have in place measures for virus prevention and even at the national level efforts are limited.

Quite apart from this, DPIPWE’s regulations which involve drenching plants with a cocktail of poisonous chemicals and a complex layer of accreditation and auditing for local importers are a dud because they yield no biosecurity dividend. They just don’t work, because viruses cannot be destroyed by poisons, they cannot be prevented from travelling into Tasmania within infected plants nor can they be detected through simple inspection and accreditation schemes.

It is also worth noting that all of the poisons proscribed by DPIPWE in these proposed regulations are either banned in most first world economies or severely restricted in their use and that the unwitting garden public will be directly exposed to them. And that the accreditation requirements for local traders operating in a domestic economy are equivalent to those of a sovereign country. Then juxtapose this with the European Union where 17 member countries have managed to develop a supra-national trading environment without the need for any of this.

It would appear that the local bureaucrats, and indeed the Minister, need a history lesson. One of the main reasons Australia became a federation was to harmonize trading arrangements between the states and avoid the tariff war that was stifling trade and setting state against state. The proposed regulations may be in breach of federal trading arrangements between the states because if they are proved ineffective for the purposes they were set up they could be considered as purely obstructive.

Given the public bipartisan political commitment towards developing Tasmania as a clean green, business-friendly state free of over-complicating red-tape I call on Minister Green to explain how his department’s new regulations acknowledge federal arrangements and support this objective.

Marcus Harvey is a local nurseryman who has developed a successful mail order business over the last 15 years in this state. He imports and exports internationally.