At a glance:
- Small businesses feel bogged down by the constant rise in the regulatory burden.
- Most government deregulation efforts seem minor and have had little impact.
Asked to name a recent example of meaningful red tape reduction, Geelong accountant Anthony Tripolino from Tripolino Accountants thinks for several seconds before coming up with a response.
“Did you know you can do a statutory declaration through your MyID? That’s pretty nifty,” he says. “But beyond that, I haven’t personally noticed anything.”
Tripolino is not alone.
The government’s mild embrace of deregulation
To the surprise of some observers, the Albanese government last year embraced regulatory reform as a meaningful goal. Treasurer Jim Chalmers backed the idea of regulatory reform in his August 2025 “Reform Roundtable” process. And the 2024–25 Budget promised a $21.8 million small business package to ease compliance burdens. This funding included $9 million over four years for access to better tax advice and assistance, and $12.8 million to trial an expansion of the ATO independent review process to small businesses.
The announcement framed $21.8 million as a significant sum. But in a $1.9 trillion-a-year economy, it’s a .00115% drop in the ocean.
Tripolino says the biggest problem with Australian regulation is not just the volume of red tape but its constant increase.
That view accurately matches the Productivity Commission’s report Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy. Commission chair Danielle Wood released it a few days before Christmas 2025. It says small businesses, many of them sole operators or family enterprises, are juggling taxes from various levels of government, payroll and HR compliance, superannuation deadlines, shifting digital processes, and much more.
“There is an overarching sense that there are so many moving parts and flying balls that you have to try and navigate,” says Tripolino.
And across the economy, the challenges continue to multiply. Payday Super for example, starts on July 2026. For the government and many stakeholders and commentators, it is an employee protection measure. But it adds yet another lodgement cycle for already overburdened business owners.
A legacy of non-delivery
Vicki Stylianou, group executive advocacy and professional standards at the IPA, says the fundamental problem is that regulatory reforms repeatedly stall.
“There have been so many reviews and inquiries, and we’re still doing them constantly. But you have to ask, what’s really changed,” Stylianou says. “Why isn’t anything changing? Why are we so incapable of moving on and making real progress around small business deregulation? Why do we keep going around in circles?”
She points to the government’s long-running struggle to modernise business registers. “All these registers were going to go from ASIC to ATO … and it never happened,” she says.
Likewise, the tax mix remains off-limits despite repeated recommendations.
“You can’t have meaningful tax reform if you don’t include GST,” she says. “But no government has wanted to tackle GST because it’s going to cost votes.”“Why isn’t anything changing? Why are we so incapable of moving on and making real progress around small business deregulation?”
Stylianou says meaningful change will begin with an analysis of the numerous compliance reduction reviews and projects that have been launched over the last few decades, to figure out why they have failed.
“We’ll analyse what were their recommendations and find out whether they were implemented,” she says. “Or, are we just repeating the same mistakes?”
Part of today’s problem, Stylianou says, is a lack of digital innovation around government processes in Australia.
She gives a personal example of two similar tasks she carried out recently when renewing travel documents.
“In renewing my passport in Australia I had to print off the form,” she recalls. “There were so many pages … I had to go and have a physical photo taken. Then I had to physically post everything. In contrast, when applying for a UK visa, the app took my photo; the app scanned my passport. The app did everything, and straight away I had the visa.”
“Why isn’t anything changing? Why are we so incapable of moving on and making real progress around small business deregulation?”
Vicki Stylianou
Compliance distorts business behaviour
Rising complexity has real economic consequences, says Bruce Billson, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman.
When the same compliance obligations designed for larger corporations are forced upon smaller ones, he says, the resulting compliance load consumes the most valuable resource any owner of a small business could have – time.
“Too many small businesses are feeling an increasing share of their brain space is going into compliance and regulatory tasks,” Billson says. “And if they get them wrong, there’s a serious concern about what that might mean for them and their business.”
Those challenges are being reflected in trends in business. Small businesses are not employing people at rates they did in the past, for example.
“We’re at a time when the fewest number of existing, non-employing small businesses are becoming employing small businesses, since those records were collected over a decade and a half ago,” Billson says.
“We’re hearing about Coles and Woolworths underpaying retail staff in their enormous conglomerates. They’ve got deep technical and specialist expertise in workplace relations system, and they’ve still got it wrong.”
“So imagine a couple in a retail business in a suburban centre, the trepidation they must feel in employing somebody, knowing that some of the most sophisticated businesses in the country are struggling with it.”
Accountants are seeing it too
Tripolino sees parallels between the accounting profession and the experiences of his clients.
“The feeling on the ground is such that people just feel like they’re bogged in compliance, and that includes accountants,” he says.
The result is widespread fatigue and reactive rather than strategic behaviour, an environment in which genuine red tape reduction becomes even more urgent.
Extra: The Productivity Commission on ever-growing regulation
These are the key passages on regulation from the summary of the Productivity Commission’s December 2025 report Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy:
[T]he ever-growing burden of regulation puts a significant brake on productivity growth.
Businesses report spending more time on regulatory compliance, as Australia has fallen on key international measures of regulatory burdens. While regulation can make us safer, healthier and happier, too much regulation inhibits economic dynamism and resilience. We have the tools we need to regulate well, but they are not working.
The government needs a more effective counterweight to the risk aversion and incentives that have created a thicket of regulations and rules. To provide direction, accountability and policy leadership, the Australian Government should adopt a whole-of-government statement that sets out a vision for more efficient regulation, sets out immediate concrete reforms as a downpayment towards meeting a targeted $10 billion reduction in net regulatory costs by 2030, and commits to broader monitoring of regulation, through a newly created ‘annual regulatory review’.
There should be increased scrutiny of regulatory proposals from Cabinet, parliament and a newly appointed independent statutory commissioner for the Office of Impact Analysis.
Regulators and policymakers should more proactively manage regulations and better consider the trade-offs between their regulatory objectives and broader economic growth. They should be empowered to be stewards of the regulatory systems they manage and be accountable for delivering outcomes.
Learn more about how the IPA is advocating for the profession here.
