SMARTFORMS: Honouring our commitment to cut red tape
At the last election I gave you my personal commitment that I would fight the excesses of bureaucracy and red tape at Holroyd City Council -- this was at a time when Holroyd had been branded the second slowest council in NSW by the Department of Planning.
Since we have implemented a development fast-track team to get the simple applications (business signage, carports, driveways etc) out of the road so that the Council spend more time chewing away at the huge backlog of existing development applications. And as much as I’d like to take the credit for it, the real kudos goes out to a Council officer by the name of Greg Raft who as Director of Environment and Planning Services has worked to turn around the culture of his department. Under Greg Raft doing business with Council has become both friendlier and more efficient.
Now is the time to build on that foundation and recommit ourselves to simplifying the maze of red tape that still exists. In today’s economic environment we need to do everything we can do to make Holroyd attractive for people to do business. In this climate the competition for investment dollars has never been so fierce.
That’s why at the last Council meeting I brought motion CCL295-09 to the floor of the Council chamber for debate. This motion will put red tape simplification and reform back on the agenda by examining how Council can use extising initiatives such as SmartForms (and their competing service providers) to help simplify the red tape process associated with doing business with Council.
One of the time-saving benefits of SmartForms is that it will automatically adjust itself to cater to an applicant who selects the box that says they’re and individual so that they don’t need to skim through all the fields which only apply to business applicants or government departments. SmartForms tailor themselves to fit the individual user instead of imposing a generic one-size-fits-nobody approach.
It also means that small-businesses will be able to do business with Council on their terms, rather than leaving their day-to-day operations to visit the Council on Council’s terms -- during their hours of operation, their queues and their time-delays.
I hope that by putting the issue of red tape on the agenda we can generate the ideas we need to cut through the bureaucracy and get Holroyd moving again.
