Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Finance, Competition Policy and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

The Lands Acquisition Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 proposes to amend the Lands Acquisition Act 1989 to decrease administration regulation. These amendments are based on feedback from Commonwealth agencies and relevant stakeholders on the practical operation of the act given to the coalition government. The coalition supports any move to reduce administration and regulation, but unfortunately this is not Labor policy. This bill is identical to the Lands Acquisition Legislation Amendment Bill 2007 introduced into the Senate by the coalition but which lapsed as a result of the election. Minister Tanner has merely recycled and rewrapped coalition policy and tried to sell it as part of Labor’s policy on deregulation.

This bill does not represent the government’s plan to decrease regulation and administration. It represents yet another case of replicating by Labor and more ‘me-tooism’ by Kevin Rudd. I guess it makes sense in one way that they would want to copy the coalition, because the coalition certainly has a proven track record when it comes to reducing administration and regulations. In its recent Going for growth report, the OECD rated Australia as the most open economy in the Western world in terms of light-handed market regulation. In fact, the OECD says Australia’s economy is not only the most open for market regulation but also the best for the impact of regulation on economic behaviour, as well as having the greatest extent of private ownership and the lowest level of regulation of road freight. This testimony is a clear rejection of the government’s arguments that the coalition overregulated the economy. But there is still more to be done, and a great deal of cumbersome red tape and administration is imposed by the Labor state and territory governments.

The Business Council of Australia’s report Towards a seamless economy presents strong criticisms of COAG for their slow progress in the deregulation of the economy. These criticisms sit squarely on the shoulders of Labor state and territory governments. Reform through COAG has been slow, there is no doubt. This has clearly been caused by the state governments. All the evidence shows that, despite the reform efforts of the former coalition government, on each occasion they were blocked by the state and territory Labor governments. The coalition pushed for the removal of unnecessary regulations and taxes at the state government level, but we were blocked at many stages. For example, the unions have stopped their Labor state governments from doing any meaningful reform of occupational health and safety.

The coalition government greatly reduced the red tape burden on small business, and Australia is now ranked as having the second easiest economy in which to start up a business. Measures introduced by the coalition include: investing $49 million over four years to streamline the Australian business number, or ABN, and business name registration across Australia, including trademark searching; establishing a dedicated $50 million Regulation Reduction Incentive Fund to reduce the red tape burden imposed on small business by local government, saving small business an estimated $450 million in time and money; and the development of standard business reporting to reduce the reporting burden on small business.

For the benefit of families, the coalition took significant steps to simplify the process for paying health and social services benefits. In 1997 the then coalition government established Centrelink, a one-stop shop for managing the delivery of payments. In 2000, family allowance was reformed to reduce 12 different payments to three: family tax benefit part A to help with the cost of raising children, family tax benefit part B to provide assistance to single-income families, and the childcare benefit, otherwise known as CCB. At the same time, the addition of family assistance officers’ services to the ATO and Medicare shopfronts immediately increased family assistance access points by 246 officers around the country.

The coalition undertook changes to make it easier for customers to access and understand their entitlements and cut red tape to make it easier for them to receive their correct welfare and social security entitlements. These reforms meant the abolition of 37 forms and letters, and will have saved 22.6 million pages of paper. In addition, the coalition government developed a new childcare management system which will result in better information on child care than ever before and also reduce red tape for services.

For Labor, from what we have seen in the first few months of this government, spin and stunts matter more than substance and solutions. The government has, in just over 100 days, already begun to incur significant costs, with substantial new spending on bureaucracy at the expense of valuable programs and support adversely affecting the disadvantaged. Labor’s claim that Labor would save taxpayers money by cutting the size of the bureaucracy is undermined by its own pledge to establish a raft of new government bodies and hold a string of reviews and inquiries. At last count, Labor had announced around 100 reviews and inquiries and nearly 70 new government departments, committees and task forces. It was reported on 2 September by Seven News:

Kevin Rudd’s claims for standing for a smaller, less bureaucratic government have been blown apart by a Seven News investigation into his election promises.

… Kevin Rudd’s warned that the resource boom could come to an end. But if he becomes Prime Minister there’ll be a new boom in bureaucracy.

Certainly the evidence is on the table now that that has been the case.

State Labor governments have also burdened taxpayers with a massive growth in their bureaucracies in recent years. Since March 1996 the number of federal public servants has declined by 121,700, while the number of state public servants has increased by 201,700. Over the same time frame, the wages bill for state public servants has increased by 95 per cent, which is one reason why state debt is $42 billion and rising. Yet the government persists with the ridiculous notion that spending by coalition governments causes inflation but spending by Labor governments does not. Labor certainly has no substantive plan for Australia’s future. That is becoming more evident day by day.

As with its statements about economic conservatives, Labor certainly is all talk and no action. Only two days ago I exposed the Rudd government’s failure, and in particular the personal failure of the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, to meet its own best-practice regulation requirements. In particular, the most significant new regulation by the Rudd government, and certainly Labor’s first substantive piece of legislation, the Workplace Relations Amendment (Transition to Forward with Fairness) Bill 2008—

See this speech in context