There are now 70,000 pages that regulate the building of an Australian home. This is just one example of the explosion in red tape that has occurred this century, and one of the many that were discussed at a productivity roundtable I held in Canberra this week.
I organised a REAL productivity roundtable because the one the Government had organised was not focusing on the real issues. As I wrote last week in CQToday, the Government’s roundtable just flat out ignored the skyrocketing energy prices that are killing Australian manufacturing jobs and making everything more expensive.
After writing my column I had breakfast with the head of the Page Research Centre, Gerard Holland. We both had the same conclusions about how much the Government’s belated focus on productivity was missing the mark. So, I said why don’t we organise our own summit?
We both thought that was a good idea, but I remarked that perhaps we should have had this idea two weeks ago, not with one week until the event!
But I hit the phones in any case and called the nation’s best economists and business leaders to see if they would travel to a freezing Canberra to discuss dry, economic topics with me. I was a little surprised when almost all of them jumped at the opportunity.
I think many people share my view that the Government’s productivity roundtable this week has not been that productive. Labor’s roundtable has been closed to the public (bar some anodyne opening remarks from the PM and the Treasurer), participants have had their phones confiscated and most of the ideas that have leaked from the discussions seem a strange mix of increased taxes and regulations. It was not explained how higher taxes and more red tape would help business.
My roundtable took a different tack. We opened ourselves to the public. A video stream was available online and Sky News broadcast the first half (you can watch a replay of that on their YouTube channel).
Our discussions did not avoid difficult topics like energy, industrial relations and government spending. We dropped the gibberish that marks the speeches of politicians and business elites and just spoke in plain English. Plainly our economic performance has not been good enough and if we do not speak plainly, we will not fix things.
So, Gary Banks, the former head of the Productivity Commission, made the point that our historically low energy prices used to mask the higher costs of our industrial relations laws and other regulations. Now that our energy costs are some of the highest in the world, we are exposed to losing our jobs and industries to other countries.
Henry Ergas, a former economist at the OECD, expanded on the point that we know that energy price increases harm productivity because this is exactly what happened after the oil price shocks of the 1970s. This makes the government’s refusal to discuss the even bigger energy price increases of recent years even more perplexing.
David Pearl, a former Assistant Secretary of The Treasury, said that the rationing of emissions means the rationing of economic growth. He called for us to get out of the “straitjacket” of net zero emissions.
Aidan Morrison, from the Centre for Independent Studies, showed how even the CSIRO is now saying that coal is the cheapest form of energy. And, that if we continue on our current path, wholesale electricity prices could hit $200 per megawatt hour – about four times what they were before we started force feeding solar and wind to our grid.
Given space restrictions I will have to write another column on all the policy suggestions that came out of our roundtable to improve our economic performance. But they can be summed up that if we want a bigger Australian economy, we need a smaller Australian Government. Why should a builder need to read 70,000 pages of laws just to pour some concrete, lay some bricks and put a roof over a family’s head?
