Morrison’s red tape crusade has to mean something

If the Prime Minister is serious about saving money and cutting unnecessary expenditure, he has a steep road ahead of him, in no small part thanks to his former colleague Tony Abbott, writes Dennis Atkins.

It’s hard to work out what is more depressing in national affairs in June 2019.

Is it the fact some businesses have whined to the federal Treasury about shoppers cutting back on how much they lugged out of supermarkets because they no longer had access to free, single-use, lightweight polluting bags?

Or is it that Treasury bureaucrats turned this self-interested piece of rent-seeking into a ministerial submission on what Australian business is concerned about?

The second has got to be the more depressing, although the fact business is so mean and greedy they won’t let go of their own miserable resistance to a global trend to curb single-use plastic, whether it’s bags, straws or other goods previously regarded as convenient and easy. Seriously, is anyone of the mind that business is being brought to its knees because of this?

RELATED: Scott Morrison Trump-eting his tax plan

Could it be shoppers are actually taking fewer large reusable bags to carry home their shopping, as anyone with both eyes open can see at supermarkets throughout the community?

Yes, it could because that is primarily what is happening. People are changing their habits, showing they can adjust to change even if many in business have no idea what’s going on in the marketplaces in which they operate. You would cry if you weren’t busy laughing.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced his plans to cut red tape this week. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

This bit of regulation came to mind when listening to Prime Minister Scott Morrison deliver a post-election speech on the economy in Perth on Monday.

Morrison said the second of his three measures to “get Australians off the economic sidelines and on the field again” was to provoke “animal spirits” through removing regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to growth and activity.

This is known as cutting red tape, something former prime minister Tony Abbott said was top of his agenda in 2013 when he first came to office.

Abbott was elected on a pledge to cut $1 billion a year in business compliance costs and in office, he nominated annual “red tape repeal” days which would target 10,000 unnecessary or counter-productive regulations.

MORE FROM DENNIS ATKINS: Politicians? They don’t give a toss about us

“More than 50,000 pages will disappear from the statute books,” Abbott told parliament in 2014.

That said, the first big test of Abbott’s red tape cutting zeal was soon blocked in the Senate — repealing the carbon tax would remove more than 1000 pages of primary and subordinate legislation and remove compliance costs from over 75,000 businesses.

Also, some of the red tape being cut was more like dental floss — one set of legislative changes read like a script for Yes, Minister.

The great red tape cut is a hangover from Tony Abbott’s prime ministerial years. Picture: Brook Mitchell/Getty

Three bills removed 40 hyphens, two commas and one inverted comma, changed two full stops to semicolons and one semicolon to a full stop and inserted one full stop, one colon, one hyphen, and one comma.

Elsewhere, e-mail was altered to read “email” and facsimile changed to “fax”. Get out the champagne!

After Abbott was himself cut down by Malcolm Turnbull, deregulation was shunted into a bureaucratic backwater.

MORE FROM DENNIS ATKINS: Libs’ latest move won’t fix their woes

The “Deregulation Agenda” had been under the aegis of the Prime Minister’s Department but Turnbull moved it to the Jobs and Small Business Department, not just out of head office but also out of Cabinet.

Now, five years on we’re told the red tape cutting zeal is back in fashion although Morrison said it was always a driver of savings and reform since Abbott’s election in 2013.

“Between September 2013 and December 2016, (Abbott’s reforms) yielded red tape savings of $5.8 billion,” said Morrison.

The basis for such substantial savings claims is not known.

Morrison now wants the public service to focus on “the barriers that matter to business in getting investments and projects off the ground”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison calls this “bureaucratic congestion busting”. Picture: AAP/Dean Lewins

It’s what the Prime Minister calls “bureaucratic congestion busting”.

Morrison even has a red and bureaucratic tape cutting tsar — Western Australian MP and close personal ally, Ben Morton.

MORE FROM DENNIS ATKINS: Insanity prevails in the post-election comedown

“Rather than setting targets for departments or government agencies, we’ll be asking the wider question from the perspective of a business looking, say, to open a mine, commercialise a new biomedical innovation, or even start a home-based, family business,” said Morrison.

“By focusing on regulation from the viewpoint of business, we will identify the regulations and bureaucratic processes that impose the largest costs on key sectors of the economy and the biggest hurdles to letting those investments flow.”

It’s good, ambitious stuff but no more so than that Abbott proudly announced before and after the 2013 poll.

Morrison says he’s told the public service he’s serious about this and he wants results, not memos. We can only hope any results will go beyond the spelling of email and the facsimile.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor. [e-mail]