Public service bosses will need to brief Phil Gaetjen's razor gang twice-yearly on the in-roads they've made in cutting red tape in their departments, the minister driving the Morrison government's regulation agenda has revealed.
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Minister Assisting the Prime Minister Ben Morton told the Business Chamber of Australia on Tuesday his deregulation taskforce was doing "deep dives" to find areas of government to bust bureaucratic congestion.
He flagged infrastructure as one of its first priorities, with the taskforce to unlock ways of getting major projects up quicker.
Mr Morton also said he'd recently told a Departmental Secretaries Board meeting each department would need to report back twice yearly to the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Phil Gaetjens on their progress identifying, improving and removing unnecessary regulation in their areas.
Mr Morton also doubled down on his earlier calls for businesses to do more to advocate for the Coalition's policy issues.
"Businesses need to demonstrate how what they want will help quiet Australians - and make the case that there will be shared gains for their employees as well as themselves," Mr Morton said.
He said instead of "over-reacting to activists", business had to push back on policy issues.
"The combination of red and green tape and activist pressure has meant that Australia is not the country it could be, and still could be, particularly in terms of infrastructure," Mr Morton said.
Separately, Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce told the National Press Club his business could not have done more to promote the Coalition's tax cuts and industrial relations policies.
"I hosted a press conference at one of our hangars with Scott Morrison, Mathias Cormann, with a Qantas aircraft behind it, promoting the tax cuts," Mr Joyce said.
"I was in the front page of The Australian talking about Labor's IR policies and how it was gonna take us back to the '70s. So, we are - I ... couldn't have done more in promoting those."