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With 80,000 regulations costing $110 billion a year, Australia’s businesses are suffocating under red tape. Trimming just 1% could unleash over $1 billion in fresh economic growth, according to a new report. But does Jim Chalmers have the courage?

If Treasurer Jim Chalmers genuinely wants to lift productivity, the answer is staring him in the face — cut red tape. Plain and simple.

A new report from the Business Council of Australia (BCA) makes the case crystal clear: Slashing just one percent of the regulation choking Australian businesses could deliver over $1 billion in economic growth.

Think about that. One tiny slice of the nation’s estimated $110 billion regulatory bill is enough to move the needle in a big way.

Red Tape Galore

The BCA’s 65 page Better Regulation Report lays out the scale of the problem.

Australian businesses are entangled in more than 80,000 separate regulations, and the compliance bill keeps climbing.

Back in 2014, the Commonwealth estimated 86,000 rules cost $65 billion over a decade. Today, that cost has ballooned to $110 billion. That’s not a safety net — it’s a straitjacket.

And the burden isn’t just bigger, it’s broader. Businesses now face a tangle of new compliance demands:

• Net Zero emissions targets requiring endless reporting and audits.
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion quotas that demand entire HR departments to track.
• Industrial Relations laws that expand union power without enough checks.
• Gender quotas on boards.
• ESG compliance regimes that bury firms under costly reporting frameworks.

It’s an ever growing maze of rules that often have little to do with productivity or competitiveness and everything to do with political virtue signalling.

Yet, whenever a minister spots a “problem” in the market, regulation is the first tool they reach for.

Cost benefit assessments? Often ignored. Economic realities? Brushed aside.

Instead, bureaucrats pile on more red tape, slowing business, stifling investment and making it increasingly frustrating just to earn a living without a PhD in compliance.

Cut the Red Tape!

Cutting red tape isn’t some bold, radical experiment. It’s common sense.

Productivity won’t be rescued by endless committees, glossy discussion papers or taxpayer-funded thinktanks.

It comes from letting businesses operate efficiently, innovate freely, and grow without the government breathing down their necks.

If the government is serious, now is the moment to act:

• Slash the rules that turn compliance into a full-time job.
• Free up businesses to focus on creating wealth, jobs, and opportunity.
• Simplify the tax system and reduce taxes.
• Get out of the way and let Australians get on with it.

I’ve been saying this for years. Maybe now that the Business Council of Australia is saying it too, the Treasurer will finally listen.

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Republished with thanks to Let’s Talk About It.