When politicians start to talk about addressing red tape, it’s a fair bet there’s an election coming on because it ain’t on their agenda the rest of the time.
Everybody complains about red tape – and now we have an increasing avalanche of green tape to deal with, too. (Green tape refers to rules and regulations around environmental issues – there’s so much of it now, we have had to develop a new term to describe it!)
The state government has a “Compliance Burden Review” project, whose role is to review the administrative burden for business in complying with existing regulations across state and local governments on a sector basis.
An independent study they commissioned last year delivered some astounding results. The experts concluded that the cost of compliance for Tasmanian businesses, on just three measures, exceeds $1.3 billion annually.
What does that mean to farmers? The gross value of production of agriculture, fishing and forestry in Tasmania is $1.98 billion. The total cost of red tape for those three sectors of the industry is $321.4 million a year, the highest by far of any sector in the economy.
So, where agriculture, fisheries and forestry account for 10 per cent of Tasmania’s gross state product, they carry more than 25 per cent of the total bill for compliance on just this limited suite of measures.
That figure is staggering enough as a standalone number, but even more frightening when considered that it means that one dollar in every six at the farm/fishery/forest gate is lost on regulatory costs.
Even a very basic analysis shows that this study had a narrow scope and that, by taking into account the areas that were not measured as part of the report, the actual cost could be double the reported estimate.
The federal government has a similar project underway. The Prime Minister has publicly committed to reducing the compliance burden on businesses.
The Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry warned some time ago that, nationally, green tape is jeopardising $900 billion in resources and infrastructure projects.
They gave an example of one major mainland resources project that took more than two years to get environmental approvals, involved more than 4000 meetings and presentations with interest groups and prompted a 12,000-page report. The project was approved with more than 1200 state conditions and 300 federal conditions, with a further 8000 sub-conditions.
So it is not just farmers who are complaining about the increasing administrative burden placed on them by government rules and regulations.
To try and circumvent this merry-go-round (or is it a maze?), and gather up information centrally, we surveyed our members on the amount of red tape they have to comply with. The responses left us in no doubt that they’re not happy.
Nearly 90 per cent of them rated the impact of compliance with government-imposed regulation on their business between moderate to extremely high. Eighty-three per cent said the workload had increased substantially over the past five years.
There was a strong view that many of the regulations that farmers deal with are unnecessary or do not achieve the outcome for which they are imposed, with not one saying this was not the case.
More than one in five believed there is unnecessary duplication of reporting/compliance requirements between different tiers of government or between government departments.
People understand the need for rules and regulations; people understand that farmers have a basic duty of care to ensure their activities don’t unnecessarily impact on others or on the environment.
But things are getting right out of hand when expectations are so high that farmers spend inordinate amounts of unpaid time being data collectors for government; this at a time when they can’t make a living off the land they own, maintain and pay their rates because of more and more regulatory requirements.
Every day, Tasmanian farmers deliver a reliable, consistent and sustainable supply of high-quality food and fibre products for millions of domestic and international customers. And yet, they are being hampered in efforts to seize these opportunities through a tangle of complex regulations that increase costs to industry and governments, and limit their competitiveness as individual businesses and the nation as a whole.
Challenges to maintain competitiveness on the farm are already substantial with the high Australian dollar and increased input prices driving a declining terms of trade. Tasmanian farmers face the added costs of our isolated location.
We used to hear a lot about the triple bottom line – balancing economic, social and environmental concerns. Tasmanian farmers do that on a daily basis. It is not something we see or hear about very often these days from governments.
It is about time that some balance is brought back into the impact officialdom has on farmers’ day-to-day lives.
It’s well past time governments stopped talking about doing something about red tape – and actually did something – other than surveys.
TFGA CEO Jan Davis’ Tasmanian Country column today
