RED TAPE GROWING FASTER THAN ECONOMY

Article courtesy of the Courier Mail.

Australia is struggling under the burden of red tape that is growing at nearly twice the rate of the national economy, leading to urgent calls for parliament to act to cut out-of-date regulations and ban new rules from being imposed without old ones being repealed.

Using a technique called RegData, developed by George Mason University’s Mercatus Centre to use machine learning or AI to measure the actual “restrictive content” of legislation and regulations on the book, researchers at the Institute of Public Affairs found that at a federal level red tape has increased 88 per cent since 2005 and is now at record highs.

As of 2022, individuals and companies had to comply with more than 371,000 federal rules and regulations alone.

States, too, are also suffering from the burden of regulation, with NSW among the worst offenders seeing increase of 3.5 per cent in rules and regulations imposed since 2019.

Queensland, meanwhile, saw the volume of rules and regulations increase by just 2.2 per cent during this time.