Reform plans
THE Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism of Fiji is looking at reforming areas of starting or operating a business as well as areas of developments.
Minister Premila Kumar revealed this at the Fiji and New Zealand business meeting on Wednesday in Suva stating major delays were caused by the town and country planning in regards to the approval processes for construction or consent required to construct as well as for rezoning.
“So for rezoning we are getting a master plan done, the master plan should be completed by next year March or April,” she said.
This master plan would clearly demarcate the areas for commercial and industrial activity as well as to reveal for example where the new port or airport would be according to Mrs Kumar.
“Once the area is demarcated then rezoning is not required because you really know where to talk to with different structures.
“That is going to reduce a lot of time which is currently being undertaken for rezoning because rezoning segregates.”
Mrs Kumar also said there was a need to revamp the town and country planning because it looked at the approval of a number of projects which was mounting up.
“There are lots and lots of files sitting up in the office, we see that they don’t have the capacity they would not have raised technology and they are still operating under the old legislation.
“Our intention is to decentralise, we want to revamp the town and country planning and in this day and age the word town and country planning is not actually used in most of the countries.
“So you can imagine how backward we are in terms of reforming the legislation and that needs to be done.”
Another area of reform the ministry was looking into was business licensing as according to Mrs Kumar it was a very archaic way of licensing businesses which was too complicated.
“I heard many times from the private sector one small business or micro businesses have to pay the same amount as compared to big businesses.
“So we want to bring in some ideas as to how we should issue licensing then, that work has already commenced within my municipal and I am just hoping we should be able to complete this work so come January next year we can do something else in this area.
“Once we prepare our paper then you will be talking to the industry stakeholders to get the news on that.”
Another area of reform was looking into how the small and micro businesses would have to get all these various approval processes.
She said the ministry was looking at how they could reduce some of this approval processes so that people could set up their businesses.