AICD submission to Treasury 2026-27 Budget process

The Budget is a critical opportunity to address Australia's productivity and economic growth challenges and we urged the Government to maintain the momentum from the Economic Reform Roundtable and the Commission’s pillars inquiries to undertake genuine regulatory reform.

Australian organisations of all sizes and in all sectors face significant costs from federal regulatory accumulation and complexity that is detrimental to investment, innovation and organisational productivity. Further, Australia risks further limiting our global competitiveness without genuine reform, particularly as comparable countries set concrete targets to address regulatory burden.

We made the following key points:

• The Government should commit to undertake and publish an economy-wide regulatory reform agenda including a commitment to a 25 per cent reduction in regulatory costs by 2030. An ambitious target, accompanied by a regulation statement and annual review, will incentivise a fundamental rethink of existing regulations and require innovative thinking on how to reduce regulatory burden.

• The large proprietary company and associated Group 3 entity climate reporting thresholds should be adjusted to $100 million revenue/$50 million assets/100 FTE employees as soon as practical. This change will result in an estimated savings of $1.7 billion over four years across the two reporting obligations.

• Remove Group 3 entities and NFPs from within the scope of the climate disclosure regime. The cost-benefit analysis for including these entities within the mandatory reporting regime is insufficiently rigorous and the regime should be targeted at those entities that will have the largest impact upon the nations’ emissions profile.

• Greater cabinet scrutiny of new regulation proposals supported by a more rigorous impact analysis process, including the appointment of a statutory commissioner to oversee the Office of Impact Analysis.

• A systematic and more robust approach to post-implementation reviews with a focus on new policy where the expected costs and benefits of significant regulation are uncertain.

• Given the potential significant new compliance costs and unclear benefits, the outstanding Privacy Act Review recommendations should be paused pending further consideration.

• Assess opportunities for alignment, and harmonisation where possible, of standards and regulations that apply across the key care sectors of aged care, disability, health, veterans services and early childhood education and care.