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Agribusiness chief warns of red tape dangers
Endless compliance is undermining productivity and imposing a human cost on businesses, Countrywide Engineering’s Tom Grigg warns.
said red tape at the federal level had increased by 88 per cent, growing at a rate two-thirds greater than the overall growth in the national economy since 2005. “Compliance is a growth industry,” Mr Grigg says. “There are more people involved in compli- ance than people doing the work.” Research by George Mason University’s Mercatus Centre, near Washington DC, found that the num- ber of regulatory restrictions in Australian federal laws exceeded a third of a million, a record level. “The more time that businesses have to spend filling out forms, applying for permits, sometimes duplicated permits, the less time they have to pro- vide the key household goods and services that everyday Australians need,” IPA research fellow Saxon Davidson says. “We’ve seen the price of services and goods sky- rocket in the last 18 to 24 months and we cannot
The constant pressure to comply with endless gov- ernment rules and regulations is imposing a huge financial and human cost on the rural industry, especially local manufacturing of agricultural ma- chinery, according to a leading Wagga Wagga agri- business owner. Head of Countrywide Engineering Tom Grigg says he has watched with alarm as compliance requirements have skyrocketed in Australia in the last decade. “There’s a never-ending requirement to fill in forms and tick boxes, much of which seems un- necessary and counterproductive,” he says. “It’s made everybody overly risk-averse, which is not favourable to a dynamic workplace.” Mr Grigg points to findings by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) that the number of federal gov- ernment employees in regulatory roles had almost reached 100,000. IPA research fellow Lachlan Clark
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