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

One in; one out. So that is it? So you change 'facsimile' to 'fax' and that is one out? Goodness me, that is just astonishing!

In part 4, paragraphs 92 to 99 amend six pieces of legislation to add a space in the middle of the word 'trademark' so that it reads 'trade mark'. Again, that is of incredible benefit to small business—not! All spin and no substance. Never mind red tape, what about waste of time? There are 10 instances that a staff member managed to find where the legislative assembly of the Northern Territory was referred to as 'for the Northern Territory', and they changed it to 'of the Northern Territory', and then someone had to draft it so that it could go into this Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 1) 2014. The amount of time that has been spent on this when there is, I assume, real work to do is quite astonishing.

It is not surprising that those opposite are only speaking for five minutes, because there is not any more than that to talk about in this debate. If they thought that there was something to speak about in this debate, the other way to reduce their speaking time was to have a small number of speakers speaking fully and fulsomely on the wonderful changes that they have made in these repeal bills—1,000 bills that repeal bills which were obsolete in 1969. You had a target of 1,000 and that is how you have met it. There is not a single small business, a single person at home, a single school or preschool pupil, a single university student, a single pensioner or a single person living in an aged-care facility that will benefit at all from the repeal of 1,000 bills that repeal bills between 1902 and 1969. The hide of the government, to actually get up and brag about this, is amazing. They actually bragged about using the time of departments and the time of drafters to draft something that, quite frankly, you would only do when you did not have anything else to do. This hype about this repeal day, this hype about this removal of red tape today, is proving to be nothing more than a farce.

One of the previous speakers spoke about the horrors of duplication. They have actually found a horror of duplication in this: they found that in one of the bills there were two commas in a row, so they took one out. I have to be fair here; there is another area where they have reduced duplication—

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