Commonwealth Parliament is in recess and will resume on Tuesday 13 May for the Budget.

According to satirists Clarke and Dawe, there’s no case for more regulation to deal with the current problems. Watch the video.

PS On a more serious note academics Christine Brown and Kevin Davis analyse the effect of the sub-prime epidemic on Australia in this article in Business Spectator.

Secretary to the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry’s Ian Little Memorial Lecture pays tribute to the former Secretary of the Victorian Department for Treasury and Finance for a number of reasons including his involvement with the National Competition Policy which lead to a new National Reform Agenda that embraces competition, regulatory reform and human capital streams.

Dr Henry ‘s speech discusses the 3 streams of the National Reform Agenda and their results to date in detail:

In the regulation stream, COAG committed to addressing ten priority cross-jurisdictional regulation ‘hotspots’: rail safety regulation; occupational health and safety; national trade measurement; chemicals and plastics; development assessment arrangements; building regulation; environmental assessment and approvals processes; business name, Australian Business Number and related business registration processes; personal property securities; and product safety. In these areas (and many others), jurisdictions apply quite different regulatory regimes. As a consequence, businesses operating across state borders must comply with multiple regulations…

The NRA competition stream promises further reforms in the areas of energy, transport, infrastructure regulation and planning and climate change innovation and mitigation strategies.

The area of the NRA with the greatest potential benefits for the Australian economy, and the one that Ian Little pressed the hardest, is the human capital stream. In February 2006, COAG agreed a comprehensive framework of objectives for the human capital agenda, focused on improving health, education and training outcomes and encouraging and supporting work…

The failure of the NRA to achieve more meaningful reform in the human capital stream and the disappointing pace of implementation of the substantial and worthwhile reforms endorsed two years ago in the competition and regulatory reform streams can be attributed, in large part, to funding issues.
The absence of financial incentives and effective sanctions for failing to meet agreed timeframes and milestones probably explains most of the disappointing implementation progress to date. The aversion to the logic of markets to which I referred earlier can be managed only by financial flows.

Today, however, there is cause for optimism.

Less than a month after the November 2007 federal election, the Council of Australian Governments met here in Melbourne to reinvigorate the National Reform Agenda.

Heads of government recognised they had a unique opportunity to put behind them the tensions of the past, and deliver a substantial national reform effort.

At that meeting, COAG identified seven areas for its 2008 work program: health and ageing; education and training; climate change and water; infrastructure; business regulation and competition; housing; and indigenous reform. A set of working groups, headed by Commonwealth ministers, has been established to identify reforms for COAG’s consideration, and to drive their delivery.

On Thursday 13 March 2008 in Sydney, a seminar will be held at which Ron McCallum, Professor of Law at Sydney University, former Dean of Sydney Law School and leading authority on employment law, will guide you through and provide an overview of the important parts of the new Workplace Relations legislation.

I’ll be presenting on drafting HR policies.

The seminar topics are:

• Are the changes to be made really significant or are they going to be “WorkChoices Light”?

• Is the end of AWAs going to be a big issue for you, and how are Collective Agreements changing?

• Is the dismissal of an unsatisfactory employee going to become a major (and costly) difficulty under the new employment law regime?

• What is the practical effect of some recent court cases on how you should be organising your HR procedures?

Contact Narelle Ryan at nryan@langes.com.au or (02) 9299 7577 by 11 March 2008 to register.

The Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator
Kim Carr, has announced a review of Australia’s national
innovation system.

The Review Panel will identify gaps and weaknesses in the innovation system
and develop proposals to address them. In particular, it will:

• Identify a set of principles to underpin the role and participation of the public sector in innovation.
• Develop a set of national innovation priorities to complement
  the national research priorities, ensuring the objectives of research
  programs and other innovation initiatives are complementary.
• Identify regulatory and other barriers to innovation and recommend ways to minimise these.
• Examine the scope for simplifying and reducing program
  duplication and ensuring that any support provided is well-targeted and
  easy to access.
• Consider the appropriateness, effectiveness and efficiency of
  the Research and Development (R&D) Tax Concession Scheme in
  promoting innovation and make recommendations to improve innovation
  outcomes.
• Consider ways to improve the governance of the national
  innovation system to support higher expectations of government agencies
  and industry.
• Assess the appropriateness, effectiveness and efficiency of
  the Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) Program and make recommendations
  to improve innovation outcomes.

Federal Cabinet has formally approved the establishment of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission.

The Commission will provide an interim
report on a long-term health reform plan to the Commonwealth Government
by the end of 2008, and a final plan in mid 2009.

Issues for the Commission include:

• The rapidly increasing burden of chronic disease;
• The ageing of the population;
• Rising health costs; and
• Inefficiencies exacerbated by cost shifting and the blame game.

The Commission will focus on health financing, maximising a
productive relationship between public and private sectors, and
improving rural health.