Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a month without new government initiatives?
This week saw a meeting in Brisbane of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). Chaired by the Prime Minister, the meeting was attended by state premiers and treasurers.
The outcome was a galaxy of new programs designed to pick consumers' pockets and to increase our discomfort with extra red tape.
Among the new measures is a grandly named National Quality Agenda for Early Childhood Education and Care.
Basically this introduces new regulations to require increased staffing at child care centres and greater education for child carers.
These "reforms" translate into higher costs for working families for negligible benefits.
But, not to worry, "responding to stakeholder concerns", the implementation of the costly new initiative is to be phased in over two years!
Enhanced child care regulations reflect the arrogance of government in deciding for parents the childcare which best suits their family circumstances.
Naturally, to oversee the new childcare regulations, there is to be a new national bureaucracy.
Other new bureaucracies materialised from the Brisbane meeting. These include new national regulatory bodies established to administer safety regulations at sea and in rail transport as well as to combat water theft.
But education provided the most fertile ground for greater government intrusion.
We now have a new national regulator for Vocational Education and Training (VET). That initiative will increase the costs and slow the growth of private colleges that emerged to meet the increased demand for increasingly affluent Asians to study in an English language environment.
Cost increases required by the VET national regulator will be amplified by a new National Standards Council administering tougher regulations of the international student-oriented education sector.
These measures will hobble private providers of education services, neutralising their competitive edge by forcing them to incur similar costs to union-dominated government universities and TAFEs.
No government meeting would be complete without a host of new spending pandering to green activism. The Brisbane COAG was no exception.
It set up a new Green Skills Agreement to provide teaching jobs to otherwise unemployable sustainability-trained people.
Those with pseudo-sustainability skills will also find a role in yet another newly-minted bureaucracy providing advice on urban planning systems, climate change, affordability and traffic congestion.
Surprise, surprise! With all these new bureaucracies and expanded regulatory areas, our leaders could identify no controls that had become redundant or had never been useful.
The Brisbane COAG meeting did address "regulatory reform". But this only involved a shuffling of the regulatory deckchairs, with national rules for credit law and changed voting rights on food regulation.
Ministers also commissioned further reviews of regulation on directors' liability and yet another report into building regulations.
Governments are opening the regulatory throttle, notwithstanding lots of rhetoric to the contrary. While the Commonwealth has a Minister for Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, that title is merely Orwellian "newspeak", a veil for increased government intervention in our lives and businesses.
COAG needs to become a body overseeing a bonfire of regulations, rather than remain a lightning rod for increasing layers of control.
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