Opinion: We don’t need an army of bureaucrats to defend us from ourselves

Originally published in The Daily Telegraph, 26 November 2024

Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers plans to offer incentives of nearly a billion dollars to state governments willing to cut their red tape to improve efficiency.

That’s a bit like someone standing in front of a house fire telling their neighbour they should mow their lawn.

Over the past few years, the burden of doing business or getting almost anything done has increased exponentially. Canberra has piled on endless new rules and regulations, fuelled by a bulging public service. In fact, there are now over 365,000 bureaucrats in the ranks of the federal public service – six times more people than in our Defence Forces.

Despite this growing army of federal bureaucrats, Treasurer Chalmers is launching a new $900m ‘National Compensation Policy Fund’ to pay state governments for undertaking economic productivity measures, such as streamlining planning rules, zoning laws, and product safety standards.

A more efficient and productive economy is surely a worthy ambition. There’s little doubt that as a society, we are drowning in red tape and regulations, often for even some of the most basic transactions.

However, while Treasurer Chalmers waves hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars at the states to cut their own red tape, his Commonwealth Government, bolstered by tens of thousands more bureaucrats, continues to roll out ever more new rules and regulations across key sectors of the national economy.

In mining, for example, there’s a conga line of new rules and requirements in relation to biodiversity, industrial relations, project assessment, and compliance. In most cases these new requirements aren’t improvements to replace old rules, but new rules imposed in addition to existing arrangements.

On energy and climate policy, the many different government authorities, regulatory bodies, policy offices and market rulemakers also continue to impose a never-ending number of rules and regulations on key industry sectors, as well as a range of policy interventions, and numerous grants and subsidies for their favourites.

This maelstrom of new rules, regulations and big government interventions is the reason why Canberra is bursting at the seams with bureaucrats. According to the ABS, there’s been a whopping 26,000 more Commonwealth public servants recruited since the Albanese Government was elected.

This massive increase in public service numbers in just a few years has not come cheap either. The total wages bill for the federal public sector is now over $37 billion a year, up $4.5 billion or 23 percent or since 2022. With additional defence spending over the next few years budgeted to total around $5.7 billion, spending on our national army of bureaucrats seems to be growing at a faster rate than spending on our actual national Defence capability.

An economy reliant on an ever-expanding public sector justifying its own existence by coming up with even more rules and regulations is not sustainable. Combine this with the drag on private sector productivity caused by the increased regulatory burden, and eventually something has got to give.

Someone also has to pay for these ever-growing ranks of bureaucrats being recruited and deployed across the economy. If you are a taxpayer, that someone is you, and all the other long-suffering taxpayers of Australia once again forced to pick up the very large bill for this excessive government spending.

Stephen Galilee – CEO, NSW Minerals Council