The idea that there are massive savings to be made by eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy, symbolised by “red tape”, is one with enduring appeal. If Wikipedia is to be believed, red tape itself was a 16th century response to the problem of bureaucracy, used to make important documents stand out from the mass of administrivia that even then threatened to overwhelm the system.

By the 19th century, when Dickens satirised the Circumlocution Office, “red tape” was a sufficiently familiar trope to be used without further explanation. The essayist Thomas Carlyle, whose denunciations of the modern world set the tone for millions of subsequent opinion columns and radio rants, characterised a stereotypical British prime minister as “Little other than a red-tape Talking-machine.”

Governments of all stripes have been promising to cut red tape ever since, and yet the promised savings have remained elusive. Moreover, on almost any measure the volume of regulation has grown, and the number and power of regulatory bodies has increased.

Undeterred, the Abbott government has taken the idea of cutting red tape to a new level, instituting a six-monthly “Red Tape Day” in which grand announcements are made about how many bureaucratic impositions have been removed. Not only that, but its website claims that these decisions have already saved the Australian public billions (a total of $2.45bn a year is claimed, counting actual and proposed measures).

A look at the consolidated list of deregulation initiatives announced by the government in the two most recent repeal days reveals a less encouraging picture, and helps to explain why cutting red tape is so difficult.

The Spring 2014 Repeal Day report claimed hundreds of initiatives saving a total of $1.6bn a year. The vast majority of these were what is called in US politics “packing peanuts”. The term, as explained by the West Wing, comes from the practice of filling lists of presidential pardons with first-time offenders who have received excessive sentences. The list of such recipients of clemency provides political insulation for the use of the pardon power to help political cronies who have run afoul of the law.

In the case of repeal day, the hundreds of “packing peanut” initiatives serve to hide the fact that by far the biggest initiatives are those representing political favours to business groups. The biggest is the “one-stop-shop for environmental approvals”, claimed to save $426m. This innocuous sounding phrase conceals the proposed removal of Commonwealth powers to regulate major projects, such as ports and coal mines under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The proposal, which was rejected by the Senate, would have handed these powers over to the states, who have a long record of subservience to the mining industry in particular.

The issue is here not red tape, but regulatory outcomes. The mining lobby is in favour of a “one-stop-shop” as long as it gets the approvals it wants. But if the initial regulatory decision goes against them, as happened to Rio Tinto in its attempt to expand its coal mine at Bulga, miners will appeal to the courts, and then to governments. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, currently being negotiated by the Abbott government will add another layer of bureaucracy in the form of investor-state dispute settlement procedures. Of course, these procedures are only available to mining companies, and not to their opponents.

Somewhat smaller in magnitude, but even more revealing, is the implementation of “reforms to support responsible gambling”. Unlike the one-stop-shop, this measure has the support of the Labor party, even though it represents the repeal of measures passed by the last government in 2012, and also billed as “reforms”.

The explanation is simple: the measures now being repealed were forced on Labor as part of its deal with independent Andrew Wilkie. They required a mandatory pre-commitment system under which gamblers would be required to set a limit on how much they could lose on high-stakes poker machines. Now that Wilkie’s vote is no longer needed, both sides have resumed their customary alliance with the gambling industry, and have redefined “responsible gambling” in a way that is more comfortable for them.

The repeal is claimed to save $81m a year in compliance costs, but this is trivial compared to the amounts actually at stake. Of the $20bn or so lost annually by Australian gamblers, around half comes from the 3% to 5% of the population normally classed as problem gamblers, with substantially more coming from people who spend more than they can reasonably afford. If “responsible gambling” ever became a reality, most casinos and licensed clubs would be out of business.

The other big category of “savings” comes from improvements in the design of websites, such as the Australian Taxation Office e-tax system. Such improvements are always welcome, but they scarcely amount to cutting red tape. Moreover, they have long been part of the routine operation of government, reflected in the imposition of annual efficiency dividends, first imposed by the Hawke government at the dawn of the digital age in 1987.

The simple, if unwelcome, reality is that regulation and bureaucracy are an inevitable accompaniment of modernity. Keeping records and following rules may be painful, but the alternative is chaos. The real question is not whether to regulate, but how and in whose interest.