As often as not, the light will be on in the spare room in farmhouses across the Tasmanian landscape each night as farmers burn the midnight oil to try to keep up with the paperwork of running their businesses.
And, as the night wears on, their level of frustration increases. There is no end to the government red tape of growing food and livestock and getting them to market.
We call it red tape. The term carries with it the implication of unnecessary demands on what should be our downtime. The bureaucrats call it “compliance burden”.
In Tasmania, the government recently decided to measure the burden of compliance of the various industry sectors operating within the economy. The Department of Economic Development, Tourism and the Arts surveyed businesses. Each had to assess the business time and external costs associated with managing state-based regulatory requirements. The survey focused on 12 broad areas of regulation; others were not surveyed.
Guess what? Farmers are copping it more than anyone else. It is crippling them. That’s official.
The areas of regulation that cause farmers to burn the midnight oil filling out forms and returns are:
licences and permits to conduct business/commercial activities
employment, workplace health and safety standards;
environment licences, permits and controls.
This is the context. Tasmania’s gross state product (GSP), the value of all production, is $23.9 billion. The cost of red tape across the whole economy is put at $1.422 billion, about six per cent of GSP.
The gross value of production of agriculture, fishing and forestry (they are always grouped together) is $1.982 billion, of which agriculture accounts for $1150 million.
The total cost of red tape for those three sectors of the industry is $321.4 million a year. That figure is staggering enough as a standalone number, but it represents 16.2 per cent of the value of our production. It means that one dollar in every six at the farm/fishery/forest gate is lost on regulatory imposts, meeting the cost of compliance.
So where agriculture, fisheries and forestry account for 10 per cent of GSP, they cop 25 per cent of the total bill for compliance.
But the TFGA believes it’s actually worse than that. If you take into account areas that the survey did not measure, the cost could be double the estimate.
Farmers are not naturally bald; they just spend their lives pulling their hair out.
Here then is proof, evidence of what we have been complaining about for years. Agriculture is singled out for regulatory control yet is it the light on the hill for the Tasmanian economy and over-regulation threatens to extinguish that light.
Conclusion: get off our backs and give us a fair go.
