Interview with Cheng Lei on Sky News

SENATOR ANDREW BRAGG

Shadow Minister for Productivity and Deregulation

Shadow Minister for Housing and Homelessness

Liberal Senator for New South Wales

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH CHENG LEI ON SKY NEWS

22 August 2025

Subjects: Productivity Roundtable, Labor’s 5,000 regulations, Labor’s plan to raise taxes

E&OE………

Cheng Lei

Let’s get some discussion on this, and welcome Shadow Productivity and Shadow Housing Minister, Andrew Bragg. Hi, Andrew, thank you for your time today. What did you make of the Productivity Roundtable? Do you think there were some breakthroughs, or are we just going to go down a series of internal reviews and not see much action?

Senator Bragg

Well, I think it was a wasted opportunity for Australia because we expected there would have been something more substantive to come out of those days in Canberra. Certainly in the housing space, the National Construction Code discussion seems to have gone nowhere. You've got Ed Husic saying that the changes he made in 2022 were very good, Clare O'Neil agrees with him, and then you've got Mr Chalmers announcing a review into them last night at his press conference, so it's very confused, I'd say, on the housing side. More broadly, though, I don't think any real headway has been made on improving our sagging international competitive position in terms of cutting away red tape or improving the tax system's efficiency.

Cheng Lei

Where would you cut red tape, Andrew?

Senator Bragg

We think there's a strong case to cut red tape in housing. We think that there's a strong case to cut it across the board on companies’ regulation, we think financial services, mining. There's just a few of the major sectors of the economy which are sagging under the weight of Labor's 5,000 new regulations and 400 new laws which cost $5 billion in new compliance costs.

Cheng Lei

Now, a few things that have come out, a few headlines are regarding NDIS and workforce skills and so on. Where do you think is the low hanging fruit?

Senator Bragg

Well, I think the starting point is that the government have introduced 5,000 new regulations in just three years, 400 new bills which cost $4.8 billion. So the starting point is, what can they eat they've already put in place? And then what are the big opportunities to cut red tape, which is harming investment and new job creation? Now, we see from all the international studies that Australia is tanking in terms of our competitive position. I would have thought that after three days, they would have had some concrete ideas. But instead, it seems that they were confused, even on the things they talked about beforehand, like on the National Construction Code.

Cheng Lei

And tax reforms? What do you think of the proposed tax reforms?

Senator Bragg

Well, I think anything that is now being proposed to happen in this Parliament, where the government has no mandate, is very troubling. The government went to the last election with a pretty thread-bare agenda. They want to seek to implement that, including their crazy idea on tax on unrealised gains, fair enough. But they don't have a mandate for anything more than that. And so, we remain open to discussion on how you can improve the efficiency of the overall system, but we don't support anything which damages the incentive to work or save, because we are already a very highly taxed country.

Cheng Lei

Thanks so much for your time, Andrew Bragg.

[Ends]

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