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

It is really clear from listening to the Liberal Party for the last week or so that they are trying to build a story that the Liberal Party is the great deregulator and the Labor government in its day was the great regulator. I want to deal with both of those untruths now. For a start, figures—provided by the Department of Finance and Deregulation, by the way, in case you do not want to believe them—show that the net increase in legislative instruments was higher under the last two years of the Howard government than it was under the Labor government for its entire term. It was higher under Howard in 2006 and 2007 than it was under the Labor government.

I have heard the member for Mitchell. I have read his motion and thought, 'He really should have put this through fact check before he moved it—or maybe he is not very good with maths.' When you are dealing with comparisons, you are supposed to compare like with like. What the member has done here is compared one kind of legislative instrument with legislation.

The reality is quite different. The Labor government had introduced 21,000 new and amended regulations in its six years in office, as the shadow minister said, including 3,500 airworthiness directives and 4,200 instruments for tax concession orders. But it also repealed 16,000, not 100 as the member untruthfully says in his motion, but 16,000. It also embarked on a COAG reform agenda which, according to the chairman of the COAG Reform Council, the Hon. John Brumby, would result in a $6 billion increase in productivity to GDP and up to $4 billion cost savings for business each year.

We dealt with some of the appalling legacy of the Howard government. In 2007, if your business crossed state boundaries, you had to register up to six different times. Tradies and medical professionals had to register in each state. If a finance company used personal property for security, there were 23 registries and 70 acts of parliament when we came to government in 2007. We addressed all those through 31 largely completed reforms in COAG with a further eight partially concluded, which again will result in up to $4 billion cost savings for business each year. We did it the hard way.

This new lot—I find it hard not to laugh when I look at their repeal day agenda. They did the kinds of things that you do when you have nothing else to do. There are seven weeks to the budget and the government have had staff in the departments going through amending 11 different pieces of legislation to omit the word 'e-mail' and replace it with 'email'. One of the journalists refers to this as 'the war on hyphens'. This is an incredible waste of time for a government which said just a few months ago that there was an emergency and everything had to be done fast, but the government departments are spending time on this. In 16 pieces of legislation they have replaced the words 'facsimile transmission' with 'fax'. Incredibly good—small businesses all over the country will be rejoicing at this incredible reduction and red-tape! The word 'trademark' has been substituted with 'trade mark'. 'Legislative Assembly for the Northern Territory' has been substituted by 'Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory'—that is, 'of' instead of 'for'. Also, there is an omission of the phrase between 'a state or territory' and substitution of between 'a state and a territory'. Again, this is an incredible waste of the department's time.

There were also 1,001 bills—in their 8,000 or 9,000 or 10,000, on whichever day they are doing the addition—that repealed other bills before 1969. How many people in how many departments were looking for those 1,001 over how many weeks? It is the kind of thing you do when you have nothing else to do. Talking about these repeals for a week demonstrates that they have nothing else to do in this place.

In the childcare area, in order to get the numbers up for child care, in spite of the great rhetoric, they actually brought forward automatic repeals. There is a bill that actually automatically repeals—called a sunset provision—bills which are no longer relevant. They bought those bills forward in order to get the numbers up. The childcare centres all across the country will be rejoicing! There is some nasty stuff in this but essentially this is a fraud and this motion is profoundly untrue.

Debate adjourned.

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