Shades of Yes Minister....

I agreed with the argument, and enjoyed the irony. Running things well obviates most red tape, yes. Yet often, even in the large and well-run complex organisation mentioned, you will get rule-mongering down at the bottom of the hierarchy, where it is part of the way in which subordinates feel that they have power, and that's worth pondering on.

As for GST, I discovered that when I had to register, it forced me to reorganise the way I was doing things, and thereby made me more efficient (by not leaving everything in the tax domain to the last moment). So I give it a mild tick.

Political promises are not worth the hot air from whence they came.

The GST imposes huge compliance costs on small business as it struggles with BAS. I often wonder if small business owners recall those "Unchain My Heart" government ads for the GST with a wry smile. Howard's 'A Simpler Tax System' quickly became a 1000+ page lawyer's picnic - but what do you expect from a government run by a bunch of lawyers?

The latest is Workchoices, legislation so complicated and hard to comply with that many employers are trying to avoid it. Trumpeted as 'great for business', it's nothing of the sort. Instead, it was an idealogically driven piece of union busting that may yet fail to achieve that base aim because the legislation was over-cooked.

There is a solution and it relatively easy to do if you approach it by considering compliance as well as regulation. That is a regulation cannot be enacted unless there is a clearly defined way for a person to comply and that the way to comply is supplied as part of the regulation.

For example we can "fix" the tax system by the tax office giving us access to a computer program which has all the tax rules embedded in it. Thus compliance consists of making sure the program reflects the law and making sure your inputs to the system are correct and true and are correctly defined. If this is so then you can easily comply with any number of regulations because you do not have to understand the regulations only the implications.

For example I have been wrestling with the problem of employee options and the tax implications. How much easier it would be if - instead of trying to find, read and understand - I simply said - "we want to give employees share options in 3 years at a strike price of $x" How much tax will it cost both the company and the employee? I could then model different scenarios and come to an understanding of the legislation without having to read it.

We can implement such systems in a privacy friendly and secure way.

In summary help people comply with and understand the implications of legislation by allowing them to define their situation to the regulations and to be told what it means for them. It doesn't matter how many regulations you have if people rarely have to read them.