Mr ANDREW: The cost of running a business here in Queensland has skyrocketed. There are soaring costs in electricity, rent, fuel, interest rates, utilities, gas, wages and insurance. Over and above all of that, there are the costs to small business owners from an extraordinary ratcheting up of government interference and mounting levels of red and green tape and punitive new laws and regulations imposed on business owners, most of whom have been treading water for the last few years.
According to the report from the Business Chamber Queensland, the amount of red tape and regulation strangling businesses in Queensland has doubled over the past two years. Last year the Business Chamber Queensland reported that the median regulatory compliance cost on business jumped from $25,000 in 2021 to $50,000 in 2023—double. Business Chamber Queensland also found that one in three businesses have been forced to hire staff specifically to manage their regulatory compliance. BCQ estimated total regulatory compliance cost to Queensland businesses to be a whopping $11 billion. That is without even factoring in all the billions of taxpayers’ money that government is spending to administer the mountain of new rules and regulations it has introduced.
All that this regulatory burden has managed to do in Queensland over the past eight years is add to the cost of hiring workers; reduce competitiveness; increase the price of products and services in Queensland; distort rational resource allocation; destroy efficiency and productivity growth; and drive all of our good jobs, businesses and large chunks of the economy offshore. All over Queensland, individual communities and businesses are drowning in a sea of legislation, forms, reports, licences, permits, rules, more regulations, guidelines and policy directives. Queensland’s unchecked regulatory environment has become a self-perpetuating machine with a bureaucracy captured by special interest groups and multinationals that are the true beneficiaries of these regulations. The sheer volume of legislation and delegated legislation alone has become mind-boggling. Most of it is incomprehensible to ordinary Queenslanders.
Here in Queensland, farmers have been the No. 1 target of regulation. According to a 2022 report by the Institute of Public Affairs, since 2000 environmental bureaucratic spending in Queensland has increased over 550 per cent. That is outrageous and it is why I am calling on the Queensland government to set up an office of regulation review with the power to audit all regulatory impact statements for all new bills and delegated legislation. Any regulation which fails to provide a cost-benefit analysis or regulatory budget should then be sent back to parliament or the relevant minister to be reconsidered.