Red Tape Costing Queensland Small Businesses a Full-Time Wage

Small businesses across Queensland are being forced to dedicate an entire employee to managing compliance and regulatory paperwork, according to Business Chamber Queensland CEO Heidi Cooper — a cost that is slowing growth and driving investment interstate.

Speaking on 4BC, Cooper said the burden is no longer theoretical. Businesses with fewer than 20 staff are routinely telling the Chamber they need one full-time person solely to handle regulatory requirements — someone who serves no customer, makes nothing and generates no revenue.

"It's a really significant handbrake on productivity," Cooper said. "What we hear from our businesses is that it just continues to increase, and the compounding impact is growing every year."

The concern is not regulation itself, but its pace and volume. Cooper pointed to a recent period where federal industrial relations law changes overlapped with the rollout of payday superannuation reforms and adjustments to youth wage rates — each individually manageable, but together overwhelming for small operators with limited administrative capacity.

"Instead of trying to manage their business on a day-to-day basis, they're working out what the latest regulatory change is," she said. "What does it mean for their business? How do they apply it? What's the new cost?"

The conversation was sparked by broadcaster Gary's argument that Queensland is sitting on vast untapped wealth — critical minerals in the outback, fertile agricultural land, and export corridors that remain undeveloped — but that an expanding layer of state bureaucracy is preventing the private investment needed to realise it.

He proposed that technology could dramatically accelerate approvals, citing artificial intelligence as a tool capable of assessing development plans against compliance criteria within minutes rather than the months or years many projects currently wait through multiple agencies, forms and fee stages.

Cooper agreed that streamlining is overdue. "Money will always go where money's wanted," she said. "Environments that encourage investment will be the ones that thrive." She described the Chamber's "only ask once" principle — the idea that government should collect only the information genuinely required to assess risk, avoiding duplicated and excessive reporting across agencies.

Payroll tax was raised as a further deterrent, with small business owners reportedly holding back expansion specifically to avoid crossing the threshold that triggers the levy — effectively a financial penalty on job creation at the precise moment a business begins to scale.

Cooper said the Chamber has been raising these concerns with government at all levels and will continue to do so, warning that without a concerted effort to reduce the regulatory load, Queensland risks losing the investment momentum its natural advantages should be attracting.