Peter Lang,
curious how the old memories come back.

At the time it seemed a clash of cultures; there wanted something and couldn’t see why it wasn’t supplied a.s.a.p. The public servants weren’t interested in our difficulties, they expected us to drop everything and comply with their demands. Almost feudal, like a Baron addressing serfs.

The original demand came with a deadline, and threatened us with fines and/or imprisonment if we didn’t supply the information on time and guarantee its accuracy.

I don’t think that the question of the costs of compliance ever crossed the minds of this government or its advisors. For over 50 years the amount of paperwork they’ve demanded from industry has grown and grown. Each Department assumes their demands are reasonable and not much work (forgetting that collecting data takes far more time than filing it) and not allowing for other departments demands.

The howl from industry has been loud and clear for years, yet ignored. The burden is becoming too great,and will be resolved by either of two methods - that of the Israelites departing Egypt, or the French peasants revolting. For companies the first is in vogue.

That we might have other priorities wasn’t considered, but even then the firm was trimming staff. We were down about 40 from 4 years before, and had about 170-180 working there.
I lost contact but I know that there are now less than 50 there. Drastic cuts have been made because they are struggling to compete with overseas competitors, yet they were exporting quite large volumes when I was there.

Peter Lang
The blame for the company’s decline will be put onto the high Aussie dollar, but that isn’t the only factor.

As an example when it came to registering a new resin, the Yanks were amazed at what we had to go through. They sent off about a half a page of data, basically a trade name and composition, along with a $200 fee, and started making the resin. (This was for a resin considered non- hazardous).
One of my submissions ran to 73 pages including a copy of the label, all sent in triplicate. The fees, and I use the plural advisedly, totaled $4700. There would follow a series of queries, most of which were nit-picking e.g. “on Page 14 you refer to ingredients in 1 tonne bulk bags, but on Page 27 you refer to ingredients in bulk bags. What size are these bulk bags”. Permission to produce the resin might take 10 months to arrive.

Robert Mendelsohn (2009), Climate Change and Economic Growth
World Bank

Abstract
Grim descriptions of the long‐term consequences of climate change have given the impression that the climate impacts from greenhouse gases threaten long-term economic growth. However, the impact of climate change on the global economy is likely to be quite small over the next 50 years. Severe impacts even by the end of the century are unlikely. The greatest threat that climate change poses to long-term economic growth is from potentially excessive near-term mitigation efforts.
http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcwp060web.pdf