Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2014) Bill 2014 and related bills. Today is the very first repeal day of the new coalition government, and there will be many more to come after it. This repeal day was something that we committed to before the last election. We are showing that we are a government of 'what we say is what we do', unlike the government of the previous six years. This government will remove $1 billion worth of red tape, each and every year. I take this opportunity to congratulate the parliamentary secretary and the Prime Minister for the cracking start they have made on this important commitment.

Life often imitates art; sometimes art imitates life. Since we have our repeal day here in the federal parliament, it is very fitting that next week is the release of the Lego Movie, which has so much innovation and creativity. That movie was done here in Australia. That movie could very well have a subtitle. That movie could be about repeal day itself. The theme in that movie is very similar to the theme that we face in Australia today. The Lego Movie starts off set in Bricksburg, whose residents mindlessly follow government regulations, instructions and orders, over and over. In the movie there is a big billboard that says, 'Conform: It's the norm'. One of the quotes I always remember from that movie was from the hero of the movie, Emmet, who says, 'How do I know what to do if there is no instruction manual?' That is the point of the repeal day.

The theme of the movie is that the ruler of Bricksburg tries to 'Kragilise' its residents—that is, spray them with a superglue that sticks them in their place so that there is no creativity and there is no innovation. The good guys in the movie are called the Master Builders—they are the free thinkers—and they engage in a fight against the evil government's robots, coincidentally, called the micromanagers. We saw this movie a few weeks ago in Parliament House. In the final scene, where the micromanagers are fighting against the free thinkers, the micromanagers fire red tape and try and control the free thinkers. I am sure when I was sitting there—there were staffers and parliamentarians—that I could hear some members of the opposition cheering for those micromanagers.

Why do we need this repeal bill? Firstly, we need to have a look our productivity, at the unmitigated mess that the previous Labor government left and that we have inherited. In the five years from mid-2007, Australia's multifactor productivity declined nearly three per cent. In 2012, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the productivity growth of 51 countries. Where did Australia come among those 51 countries? We came second-last. The only one of those 51 countries that we beat for productivity growth was Botswana. In 2013, we were a lowly 21st in the World Economic Forum Global Competitive Index. We had slipped six places in four years. Under the previous Labor government, business—and especially small business—drowned in regulation.

I know there are some on the other side who believe in concentrations of power and control of government, that they know best and that they can create regulations that can make the economy work better—but our history has shown this has failed time after time. We have the real, live experiments. We have the examples of Taiwan and Hong Kong versus communist China. We have examples of East Germany versus West Germany. We have the examples of North Korea versus South Korea. Why did those western countries succeed while the others did not? It was simply because they had less government regulation. Those economies were not strangled by red tape. The economies that failed did not have the levels of innovation, they did not have the levels of creativity, they did not have those risks-for-reward factors. That is why those economies stagnated. That is the danger that we are slipping into. We have seen it in the past six years of the previous government, with our productivity going backwards, our innovation going backwards, our small businesses going backwards. That is why this bill is important. It is the first start in winding back that regulation to let our entrepreneurs have a free hand to grow the economy and to create freedom so that we can all live prosperously.

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