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

I hear from the other side that it is coming, they are making a commitment. They do that. The Cutting Red Tape website is truly amazing. They are aiming to cut $1 billion of red tape for business each year. That is a great aim. However, our COAG reforms alone cut $4 billion every year for business. But $1 billion is a nice target. On the government's Cutting Red Tape website they have a wonderful graph which shows them approaching that $1 billion. It is not a graph of what they have actually done; it is a graph of their announcements. They have announced that if they do something at some point, and clearly not today, then these achievements will be reached. They are graphing their announcements, not their deliveries. It is all spin and no substance.

We know that there is no substance to these bills, because there are no regulatory impact statements. This is a government that, in opposition in the lead-up to the election, made an enormous song and dance about how everything would have a regulatory impact statement because it was really important to look at the reduction of red tape impacting on small business. True, it is important. In fact, we used regulatory impact statements when we were in government and we were 97 per cent compliant, according to the Office of Best Practice Regulation. The current government already has some default notices for regulatory impact statements which they have not produced, even though, in January this year, they strengthened the requirement by stating that every proposal that went to cabinet for consideration would have to have a regulatory impact statement. These bills, which are the centrepiece of this great repeal day—which was their great announcement—do not even warrant regulatory impact statements. In fact, their explanatory memoranda say they are not required. It is clear why they are not required—because these bills do not actually repeal anything causing red tape burden. They repeal things that actually do nothing.

In the last few months, the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, has been saying that every time he opened a cupboard he found a spider. Now we know why: it is because he has been running around in the archives opening cupboards that have not been opened since 1905. That is what he has been spending his time doing. It is truly astonishing! No wonder he is finding spiders if he and the department is actually spending time on this. This is the sort of stuff that you do when you have nothing else to do. Cleaning out your inbox, going back over your files and throwing out the files that are 50 years old or 75 years old, is something you do when you are trying to be busy, you have nothing else to do and you want to make yourself feel good by ticking off a few numbers. There is nothing in this.

The Prime Minister said that 9,000 regulations and 1,000 acts will be repealed, but in order to reach 1,000 acts he had to go back to acts which repealed acts before 1969. There are over 1,000 acts being repealed in these bills, which repealed bills between 1901 and 1969. How astonishing! Of course, it is great that it is happening, but you want to put out a press release about this? This is the normal business of government. This is the usual business of government. We repealed 16,000 when we were in government—unlike the Howard years, by the way. The net increase in regulation under the Howard years was higher than it was under Labor. We added 21,000; we repealed 16,000. The Howard years saw a net increase in regulation that was higher by far than it was the Labor years. To walk in here and somehow try to take credit for this great repeal day, which actually only repeals bills that have not done anything for a very long time, is quite problematic.

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