One award. 6,162 pay rates.

Imagine my delight at last night’s Australian Restaurant and Café Association (ARCA) Awards Night when the federal Minister for Small Business, Dr Anne Aly, rose to her feet and identified complexity as one of the major problems facing small business owners in the industry.

The mood in the room shifted. At last, it seemed, someone around the Albanese Cabinet table was going to talk seriously about the absurd complexity confronting restaurant and café owners, who collectively employ 1.2 million people.

“If you’re really good at running a restaurant, I want you spending more time running that restaurant. Not navigating government websites, not entering the same information again and again and again, and not dealing with rules that are more complicated than they need to be-and often don’t make a lot of sense, let’s face it,” Dr Aly said.

A good start. The excitement built. Surely this meant tackling the impossible maze of modern awards?

Sadly, alas, no.

We soon learnt that the Albanese Government’s solution to complexity is to open “consultations on how retail leasing and commercial tenancy rules can be made simpler and easier to navigate”.

Not all hope was lost. Moments later, the Minister posed the question: “Where can we cut unnecessary red tape and make it easier to do business?”

Our minds raced. Award simplification, perhaps? Cutting some of the 37 licences needed to make a coffee? Surely abandoning the proposed CGT changes affecting trusts so widely used by small businesses?

The hope returned until we learnt that the question was not a lead-in to serious reform. Instead, the answer was a new digital solutions program because, as the Minister explained, “Sometimes you just need the booking system to work and the EFTPOS terminal not to die during Saturday dinner service.”

With those items apparently at the top of the reform list, one might assume everything was humming along in the hospitality industry.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

One in 10 food-service businesses closed over the past year. ARCA’s own figures show that the combined burden of labour costs, tax settings and food-price inflation has increased by 7.5 per cent over the same period. CreditorWatch reports that the rate of food-service invoices more than 60 days overdue is twice the national average.

Research also shows that three in 10 Australians plan to cut back on dining out at restaurants and cafés. Industry margins, meanwhile, are already at an anaemic 2.8 per cent.

Against that backdrop, last night’s speech was rather like announcing a review into deckchair access on the Titanic.

Real reform to tackle complexity in the hospitality sector must begin in one place: the Hospitality Industry (General) Award.

In landmark research to be released by HR Nicholls at our upcoming 40th-anniversary dinner on 30 September, we have undertaken the enormous task of counting every pay scale, employment type, classification and rate line in Australia’s 122 modern awards-and tracking how the length of each award has grown.

The hospitality award is one of the worst offenders.

Since 2009, it has been updated 84 times and has grown by 45.3 per cent to reach 109 pages.

It contains 6,162 separate rates of pay across 32 employment categories and hundreds of subclassifications. Among employees covered by the award, that equates to a different pay rate for every 81 workers.

If you want just one example of how complex the system has become, consider this the next time you are in a restaurant or café: the waiter who carries a plate to the table is paid differently from the waiter who takes it away, while a person who does both is paid a different rate again.

Or consider the employer trying to determine which of 100 pay scales across 10 classifications applies to a full-time employee on a loaded rate working up to 40 hours from Monday to Saturday. Those 100 rates are, of course, different from the 100 loaded rates applying if that employee works up to 40 hours from Monday to Sunday.

It is difficult to imagine an employment system more complex than Australia’s. Little wonder it is regarded as the most complex in the world.

Businesses are never given awards for choosing the correct pay scale-but perhaps they should be.

Maybe that is why they are called modern awards: if you understand one, you get an award.

Minister, the next time you say, “If you’re really good at running a restaurant, I want you spending more time running that restaurant,” the next line should not be about government websites. It should be about dismantling the complexity Labor has embedded in our industrial relations system.

The full research will be released at our anniversary dinner on 30 September.