To many in the outside world, particularly those who haven’t visited, Australia conjures up visions of the wild west, a nation full of individualists unimpressed with constraints and fond of their freedom .
In reality, we seem to have a national talent for bureaucracy and over-regulation at all levels of government – a gift that only lawyers would appreciate – and a problem that continues despite decades of individuals and political parties railing against “the curse of red tape”.
And this issue creates real day-to-day problems, for example we have a retirement scheme, superannuation, which is apparently lauded around the world, but is almost impossible for ordinary individuals to understand or much less manage. And the same goes for taxation, aged care and social security. Much of the complexity has been built on years and years of political grandfathering – politicians constantly making exceptions.
So, using DOGE as an extreme example of “what not to do”, why don’t we actually employ experienced groups, being careful always to ensure that lawyers are in the minority, while limiting time frames and money, to take a (proverbial) machete to much of this legislation which has been built up, “guano fashion”, over the ages.
Then we can turn to are other critical weakness, and that is (non) compliance. We have all these pieces of legislation, rules and regulations, but we invariably don’t enforce them – or, we take the stupidest possible approach, which is to allow companies and industry bodies to “self-regulate”, which is code for “no regulation”.
I think the Australian population wants more compliance, ranging from road rules, to industry building standards, to consumer protection and the behaviour of our politicians.
