Event: Press Conference at Parliament House, Canberra
Speakers: Business Council Chief Executive, Bran Black
Date: 20 August 2025
Topics: Red tape, planning approvals, productivity
E&OE
Bran Black, Chief Executive: Today is a really important day in the Productivity Roundtable. Today is focused on productivity. It’s day two, and we’ve had a number of key issues raised in that context. We’ve of course, covered off what we need to do or the approaches that can be taken in terms of regulation. We’ve looked at housing, and we’re also looking at the EPBC reforms, but I make a couple of global points.
First and foremost, we absolutely need to bear in mind that this productivity conversation is the most important thing that we can do to drive living standards. We need to improve productivity in order to make sure that Australians have higher living standards, that means securing more business investment. So, to that end, we, the Business Council, and working with almost 30 other groups across the entirety of Australia’s economy, have put forward a whole series of proposals directly relevant to the points that have been discussed today.
In terms of regulation, we’ve argued very strongly, including today in the room, for a 25 per cent target in the reduction in the cost of regulation. To our mind, that’s an absolute no-brainer. When you look at the costs, they’re quite staggering. It’s worth over $110 billion in costs to business in our economy each and every year, and we see absurd examples, for example, a plumber in Queensland needing a special approval just so they can fix a tap on the other side of the border in New South Wales, or the 36 different licences that a cafe owner needs in Victoria before they can pour their first cup of coffee.
We’ve got to start trying to find a better approach to regulation. We think by having a target, it’s a really good place to start. In terms of housing, there’s been a lot of conversation today in terms of the types of steps that we can take in order to deliver more homes for Australians, and particularly in order to help the Government deliver on its target of 1.2 million homes. But I make the point, it is really important that the Government have targets, have ambitious targets in terms of housing, but also in terms of regulation. That gives us a basis for saying this is what we’re trying to achieve.
In the case of housing, we’ve spoken about the importance of trying to harmonise those key reforms that states are already undertaking that can help make a difference.
We’ve also emphasised the importance of putting a pause on the National Construction Code, one of the most impactful things that we’ve seen today is a graphic from the Productivity Commission, which shows that the average apartment block can take seven years plus to develop. In that scenario, and accounting for three changes in the code at that time, you’re looking at a very difficult situation for home builders right around the country having to comply with all of these different changes as they go about building homes, and remembering also that many of them will be building multiple apartment blocks at any given time.
So we think it’s really important that we can put in place some type of pause to the Construction Code. We really need to just cut the delays and duplication. We must cut the delays and duplication so that we speed up processes and get homes built faster.
The final point that I make is that we spoke today so far about environmental approvals at the federal level, with the EPBC Act. There is consensus that we need to try and achieve a balance between environmental outcomes and improving business processes. There is disagreement in terms of the role of environmental regulation, and we take the view that it’s really important to have a separation between the entity that is ultimately responsible for compliance and the entity that’s ultimately responsible for approvals. Very happy to take questions.
Journalist: Is there consensus on the National Construction Code pause, or was there some disquiet at the table from ACOSS about that?
Bran: There isn’t agreement on that within the room, but I think it’s really important to remember that our role is to put forward ideas, and hopefully we can achieve a level of consensus. But I think what we’ll see tomorrow is a bit of a summing up and trying to get to an understanding of where those consensus points can be in that afternoon session.
We would continue to make the case that the evidence is very clear that with respect to the National Construction Code, we do need to give a bit of a pause for thought, if nothing else, so that home builders have the chance to catch up with the existing regulations and to try and get ahead in the critical task of delivering homes that ultimately support Australians into the ‘great Australian dream.’
Journalist: Can you clarify a bit of a pause? How long are you proposing?
Bran: I think what we need to do is review the code. So we need to take a look at whether the code is fit for purpose, and certainly for the period of that review, you’d be looking at making sure that there is no further change.
So I don’t want to put a particular time frame, but I would want to say you’ve got to make sure that these types of documents are fit for purpose, for the future, accounting for our critical need to deliver more homes.
Journalist: You spoke about harmonising the reforms that the states’ already got underway. Is that stuff, like zoning, planning systems?
Bran: It is. So I think that there is a really important body of work that we could undertake with the assistance of the National Productivity Fund. Now, that’s a fund that the Treasurer put in place last year. It was intended to mirror the critical reforms undertaken in the 90s and early 2000s, the competition reforms. That was a $5 billion investment in federal funds then, which delivered about $60 billion plus to our GDP this year and every year.
What we’re saying is utilise that type of mechanism, and we have the National Productivity Fund, which is already doing this, but focus on those areas where states have already done hard yards. So one of the hardest things to do sometimes is being the first state to undertake a particular type of reform.
But by way of example, Queensland has a fantastic concierge system, helping home builders into the bureaucracy so that they don’t have to knock on so many different doors. New South Wales has an excellent approach to transparency, so that you can see how long it takes to deliver the average development within each and every council in the state. Victoria has a good approach in terms of the upzoning of developments around key transport nodes, New South Wales is the same. South Australia has a consolidated approach to planning documents, a single document, rather than, for example, New South Wales has more than 300 and in WA, they’ve got a low state significant development threshold, which means that the State Government pulls in for consideration many more projects proportionately than you see in other jurisdictions.
Our point is very simple: if you could take a suite of those things already done in one state and say, ‘let’s make this the norm across the Federation’, that would make a huge difference.
Journalist: Bran, any discussion about using artificial intelligence to sort of fast-track approval processes at all?
Bran: Yeah, there has been a bit of conversation around what that could be, but I suspect that’s probably going to come over the course of this afternoon’s conversation, as we get into the substantive discussion on AI.
Journalist: Can I ask about superannuation funds? I believe there was discussion yesterday about the performance test and the need to reform that, and there’s various views put. Does the BCA sort of support reforming the test so there can be more investment in housing and net zero projects, as long as returns aren’t compromised?
Bran: We do support taking a look at the performance test. We think anything that we can do to deliver more homes to Australia, to get more Australians into homes, is going to be a good thing. So, at least taking a look at the performance test is a good place to start. We’ve obviously had the conversations with respect to RG 97, which is the mechanism that superannuation funds have said limits their capacity to invest in Australian residential developments at the moment, and that’s also an area of focus.
But I get back to the point anything that we can do to try and facilitate more supply in Australia is a good thing. It ultimately comes back to backing in having a target. The Government has set an ambitious target. Everybody acknowledges it’s ambitious. The Government should get credit for having an ambitious target, but we need to get on with the difficult task of making sure that we can ideally hit that target, or even better, get beyond it.
Journalist: Just to that point that you made at the end of your opening remarks on splitting the EPA’s responsibility or having another body for compliance, correct me, if I missed that, is that at all a risk of creating another piece of bureaucracy for people to have to navigate? How do you justify creating a second body?
Bran: In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to go down the path of creating multiple bodies at all. The Government has committed to a new EPA. So it’s made it very clear that that’s a point that it’s taken to two elections now, and it intends to proceed in that regard. The question then is, what does this new EPA do, and that question is alive in the context of the discussion around the reforms to the Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act.
What we see is the importance of making sure that a federal EPA is effectively set up along the same lines as what you see with state-based EPAs, where they attend to compliance, but they do not attend to approval, and that’s important, because you don’t want the same entity doing both approvals and compliance. It’s not just us saying this. There is literature all over the world about the importance of making sure that there is a separation of those two functions.
And what we’re saying is not that we want, for example, the Treasury to be undertaking these types of assessments. We want a body that is charged with the responsibility of weighing up very carefully social, economic and environmental considerations and giving weight accordingly to all of them.
Journalist: Bran, there’s a push from clean energy finance to put a cap on the fuel tax credit scheme. Does the Business Council have a response to that?
Bran: Our position in terms of the fuel tax credit scheme really goes back to basic principles. At the end of the day, this is a scheme that’s intended to support those entities that are primarily using diesel fuel on private roads. That’s what this comes back to.
So it’s appropriate in those circumstances that they get a credit to the extent, as they do, that the use of diesel is on their own infrastructure and their own roads. So we would strongly encourage the continuation of the existing scheme.