The Coalition has vowed to slash federal red tape by 25 per cent if they're elected, a move that's being widely applauded by a group of 30 industry associations. The Alliance of Industry Associations, which represents everyone from farmers and pharmacists to tradies, retailers, and big businesses, says it's strongly welcoming the commitment.
The statement, published 9 November 2026, is a joint industry lobby release, not independent analysis. The Alliance has spent over a year trying to turn its 25 per cent-by-2030 regulatory cost reduction demand into a bipartisan commitment, and this is the first time a major party has adopted that exact number.
What the $160 billion figure actually covers
That number comes from a specific piece of research: a November 2025 report by the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) and Mandala Partners, titled $160 billion and counting: The cost of Commonwealth regulatory complexity. It’s worth being precise about what it measures. This is a Commonwealth-only estimate, federal regulation, not state or local rules, which sit on top of it as a separate cost. It covers compliance costs, legal spend, board time and compliance employment, equivalent to almost six per cent of GDP, and it’s more than doubled since 2013, when AICD put the same cost at $65 billion.
There’s independent scrutiny of that figure too. The Productivity Commission’s December 2025 final report, Creating a more dynamic and resilient economy, treated the AICD/Mandala estimate as the upper end of a range, putting total federal compliance and delay costs at $115 billion to $160 billion. The figure both the Alliance and the Coalition are using is the top of an independently reviewed range, not a single settled number.
The effect lands differently across sectors. The Insurance Council of Australia puts compliance costs for its industry up to $3.5 billion a year, which it argues feeds into premiums. Separate AICD research, The Stagnant Nation, argues regulatory reform could add at least $20 billion annually to GDP over the next decade, part of a broader $101 billion economic dynamism opportunity it has identified.
The 18-month campaign behind this week’s pledge
The Alliance, convened in part by the Business Council of Australia, first called for a 25 per cent-by-2030 reductionahead of the Economic Reform Roundtable on 18 August 2025, alongside calls for faster project approvals, innovation policy and tax reform. It repeated the ask in its 2026–27 Pre-Budget Submission on 20 April 2026, attaching the $160 billion figure to the campaign for the first time.
When the Government handed down the Budget in May 2026, it brought its own number. The Budget Overview 2026–27and Budget Paper No. 1 set out $10.2 billion a year in regulatory burden reduction, including $780 million annually from financial sector reforms, projected to lift long run GDP by around $13 billion a year. The Alliance called this “positive first steps on productivity reform” at the time, while flagging the gap with its own 25 per cent target.
The research and the policy are more directly connected than the matching numbers alone suggest. AICD records show it made a submission to the Liberal Party’s Deregulation Agenda during 2026, briefing the Coalition directly using the Mandala research. Taylor’s announcement this week, delivered in a speech to Business Sydney, turns that number into a first-term election commitment, with Deputy Opposition Leader Jane Hume set to lead what Taylor called a “red tape razor gang.”
The Alliance’s $40 billion savings claim is 25 per cent of the $160 billion estimate, an advocacy calculation rather than a costed program. Neither the Alliance nor the Coalition has named which specific regulations, agencies or compliance obligations would actually go.
That leaves the Government’s $10.2 billion commitment and the Coalition’s implied $40 billion sitting side by side without being reconciled. The Government’s figure is a Budget-costed reduction already under way; the Coalition’s is a political target whose delivery mechanism is still to be designed. Trade press covering the insurance sector reported that, as of 10 November, neither side had specified which insurance rules would be cut, and that gap likely runs across most of the sectors the Alliance represents.
The Alliance also points to the UK and EU as having already committed to a 25 per cent reduction, rising to 35 per cent for small and medium businesses in the EU’s case. The release doesn’t detail the policy instruments, baselines or timeframes behind those overseas commitments, so it reads as the Alliance’s own comparison rather than a direct policy equivalence.
The statement closes with the Alliance positioning itself as a partner to whoever is in government: “The Alliance stands ready to work with all governments to deliver meaningful regulatory reform that boosts investment, creates jobs and improves living standards for all Australians.”