Coronavirus Australia: Opportunity knocks for business boom, says competition expert

Opportunity knocks for Australia to enact micro-economic ­reform to boost economy, says competition expert.

Ian Harper urges Australia to embrace its ‘greatest opportunity’ for reform in living memory. Picture: Aaron Francis

The author of a landmark competition review has called for the number of zoning and urban planning laws to be slashed, and for road user charging to be expanded to reduce congestion, as part of a plan to turbocharge growth after the COVID-19 pandemic passes.

Ian Harper, the chairman of the 2015 competition review, said existing zoning and planning laws could frustrate builders and entrepreneurs as they tried to expand in a post-COVID world while existing road charging would see them wasting time on clogged roads.

Professor Harper urged Australia to embrace its “greatest opportunity’’ for reform in living memory. He said the nation had the chance to enact a key wave of micro-economic reforms and use the national cabinet to drive through the harmonisation of complex state and territory regulations.

He said the emergence of a collective national will to tackle longstanding reform challenges was the “silver lining” of the health and economic crisis.

He urged the government to focus on driving through smaller regulatory overhauls aimed at lifting the nation’s productivity over the longer term by streamlining planning rules across jurisdictions and the introduction of new road pricing arrangements.

“It’s not as dramatic as a JobKeeper program, or changing the corporate tax system, but these things add up, and what we have is an opportunity and a mechanism – and to be blunt, a need – to get these micro reforms done,” he told The Australian.

The plea for government to tackle micro-economic reform came as Labor and the union movement threw up road blocks to major overhauls of the tax and industrial­-relations systems, with Anthony Albanese saying Aus­tralia needed an “economy that works for people, not the other way around”.

“What we don’t need is a government that says, after this crisis is over, we’ll just let the market rip.

“What we need to make sure is, arising out of this, we don’t return to the rhetoric … of labour market deregulation, of freeing up the labour­ market, which really means driving down wages and con­ditions further.”

Scott Morrison said on Tuesday the government was “looking afresh at all of the work that has been done over the past decade” to help the country emerge from the COVID-19 crisis.

“We need to go through this process at the moment of harvesting all of these important policy options and how they can be utilised to have an effective and sustainable and strong recovery on the other side of the coronavirus,” the Prime Minister said.

“But it is not a matter of just dusting off old reports or old submissions that have been made to the government and bowling them up again … We are looking with all of these things with fresh eyes.”

Professor Harper identified possible reform opportunities in reducing the number and variety of zoning and urban planning rules across jurisdictions that frustrate builders and entrepreneurs, saying these were the “types of things that stop business expanding”.

“In order for us to recover, lots of people­ are going to be forced to change what their businesses do. And it could easily be that they run foul of the zoning rules,” he said.

“We don’t want planning and building rules developed in a pre-COVID world to restrict what’s possible in a post-COVID world.”

He also said new road pricing, for example, would help bust congestion as Australians returned to work at a time when lingering fears of infection were likely to increase the number of people driving to work, rather than taking public transport.

“The last thing we need is ­people losing hours on congested roads,” he said.

“This is the greatest opportunity we’ve had to institute a rational­ approach to road pricing.

“We need to be able to take advanta­ge of what we now know is possible.”

Employer groups are arguing that the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the need for an urgent “root and branch” review of the Fair Work Act, saying the crisis had underscored the failure of the enterprise bargaining system to promote productivity.

Australian Chamber workplace relations director Scott Barklamb said the pandemic showed the need for a review of the workplace laws, but the changes had to be capable of winning the support of the community.

“The pandemic has rapidly underscor­ed the failure of our bargaining system to promote productivity,” Mr Barklamb said.

“We need to scrutinise the ­bargaining system to make sure that it operates to encourage agreement making, rewards those who try, and not put false or ridiculously bureaucratic impediments in the way of employers and employees and what they can agree together.”

ACTU secretary Sally McManus said calls by former Business Council of Australia president Tony Shepherd and the small- business lobby to scrap the award system were shameful and dangerous, accusing them of exploiti­ng the pandemic to cut pay and conditions of workers.

“Some employer groups are trying to use the pandemic as an excuse to undermine job security and strip away fundamental workplace rights,” she said.

“It is shameful and the Morrison government should call it out.

“Calls to cut pay and rights are also dangerous as it would deepen the economic crisis and further hurt small business.

“Small business will depend on working people having money to spend — money taken from workers is also money taken from small business.”

While preliminary discussions of reform have focused on the difficul­ty of major shake-ups, Professor Harper said there was immense scope to implement myriad small-scale regulatory reforms.

He said the national cabinet could sit as a de facto ­competition council, of the sort envisaged but never implemented in his review.