Last Friday, while no one was looking, Julia Gillard quietly announced that the Government was planning to exempt itself from its own red tape, despite continuing to tie everyone else down with it.

Julia Gillard exempted her own Government’s responses to the Henry Tax review from scrutiny by granting another ‘Prime Ministerial exemption’ to developing and implementing a Regulatory Impact Statement.

This is not surprising from a government that talks about cutting red tape, but continues to exempt its own activities from best practice regulation.

What the Government should have done is live up to its own promises and the processes in place to examine and test new regulations and law.

These are simple, requiring departments to undertake a Regulatory Impact Statement which details the economic and social cost of proposed new laws. These processes are very important for ensuring new regulation faces proper scrutiny before being introduced.

But Julia Gillard is avoiding these processes for her “once in a generation tax reform”.

She has granted Exceptional Circumstances and applied Prime Ministers Exemption to the following proposals:

• reforming the car fringe benefit rules
• abolishing the Entrepreneurs’ Tax Offset
• expanding the definition of Geothermal Energy
• accelerated initial deduction for motor vehicles for small business
• implementing its Minerals Resource Rent Tax
• better targeting not-for-profit tax concessions, and
• introducing a statutory definition of charity

“That’s a lot of exemptions for a lot of new laws, including substantial tax changes for small business such as the abolition of the Entrepreneur’s Tax Offset,” Senator Ryan said.

The Government has previously revealed that reasons for granting exceptional circumstances are not made public and that there is no objective criteria involved in making such a decision. Rather, exemptions are granted by the Prime Minister in response to correspondence between the relevant Minister and the Prime Minister.

In other words, when Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard realised questions regarding their tax reform ideas were going to be too hard and that the forgotten small businesses and families were going to be worse off – they simply exempted themselves from critical examination and scrutiny.

“Along with the NBN legislation, which has also been granted an exemption, these reforms have gone straight into the Government’s growing ‘Don’t ask questions’ basket,” Senator Ryan said.

This just isn’t good enough.

“The small business community, who are the targets of many of these reforms, and indeed all Australians, should be annoyed that yet again the Gillard Government proposes one rule for itself, and another for everyone else,” Senator Ryan said.