Business Council speech: PM cuts ‘clutter’ on IR, mining

Mining companies will be able to lodge online environmental applications and avoid a mountain of green tape under a major deregulation drive.

Australian cricket team coach Justin Langer, left, is seen with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, right, on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Mining companies will be able to lodge online environmental applications and avoid a mountain of green tape between state and federal governments under a major deregulation drive to get national projects up and running faster.

While the resources sector would be a beneficiary, with some projects currently taking more than three years to approve, the same one-stop digital application process would be open to any company undertaking a project that could otherwise become mired in bureaucracy.

In a significant economic statement on the government’s reform agenda, Scott Morrison also flagged major industrial relations reforms including injecting greater flexibility into enterprise agreements to attract more investment.

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The Prime Minister, in a speech to the Business Council of Australia in Sydney on Wednesday night, revealed the government’s four pillars of economic growth, including its $4bn infrastructure stimulus agenda and micro-economic reforms across industrial relations, regulation and skills and training.

In a move likely to ignite protest­ from environmental groups and Labor, Mr Morrison announced the government would move to a completely digitised environmental approval and application process that would cut across the bureaucratic barriers between federal agencies and state jurisdictions.

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He said it could shave between six and 18 months off the time currently­ taken for some approvals to be finalised. Companies would be able to lodge just a single application, with the data then shared through all relevant state and federal agencies­, dumping the need for projects to lodge multiple applic­ations across a range of juris­dictions.

The move to speed up approvals is outside the review already under way of the current environmental laws, and would not affect the regulations applied for envir­onmental approval.

“Environmental approval processes for major projects are overly complex, duplicative and take too long,” Mr Morrison said. “As in other areas, digital technology gives us the opportunity to make these processes faster and simpler. Our government is taking the first step towards a nationally consistent digital environmental assessment and approvals regime.

“It takes approximately 3½ years for a complex major project to navigate the state and common­wealth environmental assessment process. It’s estimated that this timeframe could be reduced­ by between six and 18 months through better use of technology.”

It would also apply to export businesses, with the government citing the case of a Tasmanian food company seeking to export goods forced to travel to Melbourne­ to collect hard-copy export permits.

One senior business leader at the BCA event described the current­ system requiring multiple lodgements across a range of agencies across jurisdictions as like operating in the “dark ages”.

The Prime Minister also foreshadowed industrial relations reforms ahead of a review.

“There is a persuasive argument that greater flexibility in the length of enterprise agreements can play an important role in attractin­g investment in major infrastru­cture, resources and energy projects,” Mr Morrison said.

“With approximately $250bn of new project capital in the investment­ pipeline — with the potential of more than 100,000 new jobs — it’s hard to deny the scope for shared gains for companie­s and workers.

“Similarly, I would hope we can make progress on reducing the system’s overall complexity. While the number of awards has reduced, it appears that they have not become simpler — indeed, many believe that they have becom­e more complex.

“The degree of administrative clutter associated with the compliance regime and the enterprise bargaining process can also detract­ from business improvements that can arise from working together for mutual benefit.”

However, he repeated his demands that the business sector would have to make the case for reform, in a warning that the government would no longer do the political heavy lifting for business.

Incoming BCA president Tim Reed agreed it needed to be the “role of business to do the bidding of business”. Mr Morrison also launched his strongest defence yet of the governmen­t’s economic agenda, describing those calling for urgent cash injections by the government to stimulate growth as “panic merchants­” who didn’t understand the economic situation.

Announcing the bringing forward of $2.8bn in infrastructure spending and $1bn in new projects would mean the government had now injected the equivalent of more than $9bn in “responsible” stimulus since being elected, includin­g the $7bn in tax cuts.