Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is something that most people seem to agree is a very good thing, so we have a range of very strong endorsements outside of this place for the agenda. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Australia's largest and most representative business organisation, strongly supports the government's initiative to cut red tape and undertake legislative repeal days. Repeal days just like this one. The basis—as the member for Perth in her very casual and low-key way noted by interjection!—of Labor's surprisingly strident opposition is essentially twofold. The first is that what is contained in this swathe of repeal legislation is just too minor to be bothered with. The Manager of Opposition Business said things such as 'so much hype over so little'. He described it as 'vacuuming the spare room that nobody walks into anyway'. Of course, this was a theme continued by the member for Isaacs, to the effect that all this does is do things that governments usually do, which is to repeal, remove or fix very, very minor problems in legislative instruments. Of course, that is part but only part of what is being done. The only other argument being offered by Labor is, to the extent that there is anything important in this, they did it anyway and did it as a matter of routine. I will address that second argument in a moment.

With regard to this notion that all that is being done is minor, it simply does not bear proper scrutiny when you actually look at what is happening here. The fact is that, yes, there are some matters which would be described as de minimis, and you have got regulatory wolves in this menagerie. You have rats and mice and you even have a few fleas. The member for Isaacs spent many minutes concentrating on the fleas, but the fact is that there are some very significant savings and changes which will help business across Australia. In the first tranche of reforms we had the incredibly substantive removal of a singularly damaging piece of duplication in the environmental sphere. Having a situation where you can have the regulatory assessment of environmental matters according to state legislation and the federal version of that legislation done at one time by one organisation will save $426.3 million a year. That falls certainly into the category of a regulatory wolf or maybe even a tiger: something that is terribly damaging and dangerous to the economy. Then in this tranche of repeals we have other very important matters. The idea now that Australian business will be able to accept products, systems and services that are approved overseas under a trusted international standard or risk assessment is going to be a very significant plus for business.

But, yes, in amongst all of this there are many other smaller, more modest changes, but the point about regulation is that it is the cumulative effect of the regulation that has to be constantly and continually tackled. We are tackling here both the big-ticket items and the composite and cumulative effects of all the minutia which in its cumulation causes immense difficulties. Labor's position seems to be this: there is no point, and we should roundly criticise the person who removes the barnacles from the hull because the things are just so small. But the point is the cumulative effect of all the things that are being done here has a reverberatory effect throughout the economy. There is also the fact that there are some very major and big-ticket items that are being removed.

I will address the second point of Labor's argument—which is completely inconsistent with their first—which is that none of this is really worth doing to any extent but, to the extent that it is, Labor did it anyway. The fact remains that there is probably one genuinely bipartisan measure that both parties have said is a good measure of the regulatory burden, and that is provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It looks at regulatory and economic burdens and failures across a range of categories in 144 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit said that, looking at 144 countries across the world, when you look at the burden for government regulation, when the Howard government finished its term in office Australia was 60th out of 144 on the burden of government regulation. After Labor's time in office we had sunk to 96th out of 144 on the burden of government regulation.

The question begs: if Labor did all this and their deregulatory agenda was so fine, so good and achieved so much with so little fanfare, why was their performance on the best possible measure so terrible? Why did we slip from 60th in the world on the regulatory burden of government to 96th over their period in government? The answer must surely be that they simply did not do enough and that their attitude and culture around these things was not strong enough. That has been very significantly repaired by this government and by the parliamentary secretary, who is doing a very fine job.

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