Every year, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) puts out its report “Regulation Rumble”. This year’s report, as with previous reports, placed Victoria as the worst place to do business. And again, as with previous reports, it received rather unquestioning media reportage.
By Greg Jericho
Tue 3 Nov 2026 10.28 AEDT
Photo: AAP Image/James Ross
Every year, the Business Council of Australia (BCA) puts out its report “Regulation Rumble”, which it suggests details the best states in which to do business.
This year’s report, as with previous reports, placed Victoria as the worst place to do business. And again, as with previous reports, it received rather unquestioning media reportage.
Headlines such as “Victoria ranked the worst state to do business for third year running” (the AFR), and “Victoria the worst state to do business, says Business Council” (ABC) suggest Victoria must be quite the investment pariah in Australia.
But as ever with the BCA – the report is not so much an investigation of investment, but just propaganda for lower regulations.
The report, for example, suggests that Victoria is last among the states as a place to do business because it has “uncompetitive payroll tax rates and payroll tax threshold”, “uncompetitive land tax and stamp duty rates”, and needs to improve its “level of process certainty for planning proponents including around timeframes and additional information requirements”.
At the other end of the scale, South Australia was rated as the best place to do business.
So it must be quite a shock that in the past year, business investment in Victoria grew faster than in South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the ACT.
It was actually just behind Western Australia:
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And while NSW investment looks to be soaring, the main reason in the past year that Victorian investment has not kept pace with NSW is because private sector engineering construction has fallen:
All other investment is essentially keeping pace.
The investment in new non-residential buildings (i.e. factories, offices and especially recently, data centres) in Victoria has been much stronger than in NSW:
Similarly, investment in new equipment and machinery in Victoria has grown essentially in line with that in NSW over the past 5 years:
If Victoria is a terrible place to invest, then someone really needs to tell the businesses that they shouldn’t be investing at the level they do in the state!
As is always the case with the BCA, it is best to ignore the feelpinions of an organisation devoted to increasing the profits of companies, and instead look at the data.
