Dealing with red tape, taxes and regulation are constant sources of frustration for any business, big or small.
Dealing with red tape, taxes and regulation are constant sources of frustration for any business, big or small.
No other issues come up with the same regularity as this trifecta, yet the problem only seems to get bigger.
With this in mind, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of WA and WA Business News have joined forces to launch a new study that is designed to drive the costs of doing business lower.
The study was motivated by frustration over high costs and inefficiency facing the state’s business sector, which increasingly has to bid for work or sell products and services against international competitors.
“We know that WA is a costly place to do business,” CCI chief executive James Pearson said.
“Higher wages as a result of labour shortages, government red tape, high rents and increasing input costs are just some of the many cost pressures faced by local employers.”
Mr Pearson said that in order to get the message through to politicians and decision makers, and persuade them to do something about it, CCI was developing a new major research paper – ‘The Cost of Doing Business’.
“CCI is pleased to be partnering with WA Business News to conduct our largest ever survey of the WA business community,” he said.
CCI will use the research to lobby federal, state and local governments on the best way to reduce business costs.
The research will focus on all major aspects of doing business, including the tax burden, the time taken to obtain approvals, the charges levied by government utilities and the cost of obtaining finance. In other words, it will extend across all three tiers of government – federal, state and local – and extend to utilities and financial institutions.
It will also focus on compliance costs, across areas like occupational safety and health, workers compensation, wage agreements, migration, planning and environmental management.
The study will build on the data that is already in the public domain.
For instance, average wages in WA have risen by 75 per cent over the past 10 years, the highest in Australia.
A recent state government inquiry estimated that there are 844 Acts and 761 statutory rules in force, amounting to approximately 63,500 pages of regulation.
Governments regularly profess a desire to cut the red tape burden, but progress is slow.
The Business Council of Australia’s most recent scorecard of red tape reform, released late last year, gave WA an overall rating of five out of 10.
The only state WA outperformed was Tasmania, which had a four-out-of-10 rating.
The consolation news for WA was that the state had lifted its rating since 2007, when it was judged the worst in the country.
“Having received the lowest assessment in the 2007 scorecard, Western Australia’s improvement on every benchmark is encouraging,” the report concluded.
Mr Pearson said the CCI was looking for hard evidence of the cost burden facing WA businesses.
Businesses are invited to go to a new website www.businesscost.com.au/survey where they can quickly and easily provide evidence of their experience.
