Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

22,000 in a year, I think, but 6,000 to 8,000 on 'the' day, the national repeal day, which we will see later this month. We have heard the Minister for Small Business say that all these regulations are tying small business in red tape and that red tape will be removed through the removal of these 6,000 or 8,000 regulations on this day.

I ran a small business and I ran a trade association for small business, so I was involved in it very closely for about 17 years of my life. Quite frankly, if only it was true that on one day in this place 8,000 pieces of regulation that impact on the operation of a small business in a negative way will be removed. That would be an extraordinary thing. Unfortunately, anybody who pays attention to this and thinks about this would know that this simply cannot be true. It is an extraordinary con on people who expect a great deal of this government and want a great deal from this government.

The figures that the government use are quite extraordinary. The claim is that, for example, Labor introduced 21,000 new and amended regulations since 2007 which have crippled business, according to the government. Let us get clear what we are talking about here. We introduced 566 pieces of legislation in the six years. What they are actually talking about is something that is quite technical, called legislative instruments, and we did: there were thousands of them. For example, there were 3,400 legislative instruments relating to airworthiness directives to enhance public safety. There were 4,200 tariff concession orders issued to the benefit of, and in response to explicit requests from, business. These are legislative instruments that attach onto the back of pieces of legislation that deal with one company here and one company there, or with one product coming into the country. They are very significant things for the businesses involved, but they are instruments that have no impact whatsoever on the vast majority of businesses or families.

There is also a whole stack of instruments that sit on the end of bills, which repeal other pieces of legislative instruments, and they last for a day. Quite frankly, you can come in here and repeal thousands of those—we repealed 4,000 in the three months from April to July 2013, for example—so they are actually easy to repeal. But to suggest that repealing things like that has any impact on red tape in small business is like saying that having us come in here and clean out our old email boxes would impact on the efficiency of small business. It is effectively repealing things which are not used, which do not matter, which have no impact, which have passed their use-by date and which are simply sitting there taking up hard drive. We understand from the rumours that departments have been told to find whatever they can to get that count up. But let us be clear about this: the vast majority of this is going to be simply the clearing out of things that are not relevant anymore, that have zero impact on small business.

Unfortunately, we are also hearing rumours that hidden in that mountain of redundant—as in no longer useful—legislative instruments, which they are calling 'regulations', will be a couple of pieces of real regulation which are actually very important. Repealing them will impact negatively on small business in a very, very serious way. They are regulations—rules, if you like—or philosophies about things that deserve serious public consultation before they are considered in this place. Frankly, it is quite deceptive of the government to try to sneak some of these things through in the middle of thousands of other pieces of regulation which are insignificant.

I am talking about two particular pieces that we are hearing about. The first is the abolition of the Australian Jobs Act. This is an incredibly important piece of legislation. It came into force only a couple of months ago and already we are hearing rumours about the Abbott government dismantling it. It was put in place to help Australian businesses develop their competitiveness and capabilities and, essentially, it requires businesses that are engaging in enormous domestic projects worth $500 million or more to consider how they would provide opportunities for local business. We introduced this act because we heard from businesses that they were being excluded from the tendering processes for the major investment projects in this country in all sorts of ways—for instance, because of the tender documents specifying Chinese specifications et cetera. They were just missing out. When we came to government there was about $55 billion in large-scale investment in the pipeline. When we lost government, there was $300 billion in the pipeline. That is $300 billion in large-scale mining projects, roads and ports and all the things that go with them, and it is incredibly important that Australian businesses, including small and medium Australian businesses, have access to that river of investment money that is going to flow through this country while we build the infrastructure that will support the mining boom.

Abolish this act and you are not just repealing red tape; you are actually repealing an opportunity to get to work for small business. This is an incredibly important piece of legislation. We have heard rumours. We have seen media reports from the seemingly strategic leaks from the other side that this will be included on 'repeal day'. We will be keeping an eye out for it as it is an extremely important piece of legislation. It is not red tape; it is a piece of legislation that is about ensuring that Australian small and medium enterprises have a foothold in what will be one of the most extraordinary building booms in this country, a building boom that has a limited life.

The benefits of having small business included in that boom are greater than the single contract, if you like. It also ensures that as a country we have the skills in this country to take on the high-tech and heavy engineering work that will be undertaken during that time. If you are looking to the future, you do not just look at what is here now; you look at what you will need in the future. If this country is going to prosper in 10, 15 and 20 years time, we cannot let the benefits of the skills base, the training and the experience that will flow through that building boom go elsewhere and not have a foothold in this country. It is incredibly short-sighted to repeal the Jobs Act. By doing so, they are not just repealing a piece of red tape, as they call it, they are actually repealing very real opportunities for small business.

The second one, which is also incredibly problematic, is the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. I know that the current government has a particular dislike, shall we say, for all things collective, and the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, because of its collective bargaining capacity, would probably be a particular target for this government. Again, we are hearing from media reports here and there that it is also in the firing line and may be hidden in the mountain of irrelevant work that we are going to do on the so-called 'national repeal day'.

This tribunal is also a Labor initiative. It deals with two aspects. It deals with road safety—the trucks on our roads, whether they are roadworthy and whether drivers are driving safely. It also deals with the viability of a small business which is the owner-driver. It is a rapidly growing sector of the economy. As full-time employed drivers are phased out, owner-drivers who own their own trucks, insure them and pay their own wages come into the sector in large numbers. It ensures that owner-operators get paid an equivalent of a fair hourly wage and a minimum amount to cover safety standards.

What happens these days is that large companies contract out the freight component, the transport component, of their business for a fixed amount. Without regulation like this that creates a base level, we are seeing rates being paid that do not allow a person to maintain and insure their truck and to drive reasonable hours. We have seen media reports on this quite a few times in the last few weeks. We are seeing drivers driving too long and we are seeing trucks on the road that are unsafe. The Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal allows truck owner-drivers to collectively bargain to set a fair rate and it ensures the payment of that fair rate. Take this away and there is no doubt that we will see an increase in the number of truck drivers driving on our roads for hours that are far too long and with standards that are unsafe—and even, in some cases, in trucks that are uninsured. Again, this is not repealing a piece of red tape: this is repealing a very serious piece of regulation which actually protects small business from an unfair power relationship with bigger business, and it protects people in the street from unsafe practices in the trucking industry. Again, that is incredibly important.

Red tape itself is a nightmare, but I would like to say that there is quite a difference between regulation and red tape. In Australia, you can get on a roller-coaster without fear that it is going to collapse. The wheels do not fall off our trucks, our balconies do not fall down, and if you buy a nut and a bolt a year apart they will manage to fit together because the threads are the same. That is regulation. Red tape is the paperwork and the process that we require people to go through to meet those regulations. That is the bit we should be focusing on, but focusing on that is hard. It actually requires you to understand the purpose of what you are trying to achieve and set about it in a meticulous way, with extensive consultation, to reduce the amount of paperwork and the process that you ask people to go through to meet it. This is an incredibly difficult task. The repeal day that pretends to do that is nothing but a con. We are going to see a lot of stuff that we repeal. It is as effective as cleaning out your inbox. Hidden in there will be some very important regulations which will reduce the safety and the viability of small business.

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