Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Spring 2014) Bill 2014 and related bills. That the member for Scullin does not see this as 'a real priority' is extraordinary, because that just does not reflect the feedback I have been getting from people in my electorate—businesses, organisations and others. As Tasmania's representative on the coalition's deregulation committee, I am pleased to join my colleagues in welcoming this bill which sends another very powerful message to the people of Australia.

I am proud to join this outstanding parliamentary secretary who has been doing outstanding work in this space. Often we talk about leadership and, when you fundamentally distil it, leadership is an influence relationship. It is about standing next to the big problems of most concern to our community and doing something about them. This Prime Minister, the ministers in his cabinet and this parliamentary secretary are standing next to a very big problem that I hear about every day in my community. I hear them tell me that this is indeed a real problem for our community. The combined effect of the two repeal days, the one in March and the one we are having now, represents a doubling of our promised target. We said that we would save a billion dollars each year in red and green tape. This parliamentary secretary and the Prime Minister have delivered $2.1 billion in reduced compliance costs, with 400 measures to cut red tape across all agencies. That is, quite simply, real progress on problems that have a real impact on our national productivity.

What a contrast, in just the first year of the coalition government, with the inactivity in this area from those opposite during six years of 'hard Labor' from 2008 to 2013. You will no doubt recall Prime Minister Rudd's famous one on, one off promise—that for every new regulation that came through from the bureaucracy to the polity and out into our society, he would take one regulation out. He never met that promise. Indeed, what we saw was 21,000 new regulations come in—additional regulations—at the end of Labor's six years in office.

We have heard some comments this morning about lessons in economic history. I know the member for Kooyong is an economic historian. He looks at these things very carefully and he has written quite eloquently about the fact that, in the five financial years from mid-2007 until 2012, multifactor productivity in this country declined across Australia by three per cent. This is a real priority for our country because what we are doing will lift productivity; it will reduce the input costs on business, make them invest more and create more jobs. In my state of Tasmania, which has the highest unemployment rate in the country, that is particularly important.

In my home state of Tasmania I hear this persistent message from businesses, chambers of commerce and numerous other stakeholders. It reinforces what a red-hot button issue this is. They tell me about regulation imposing delays in getting projects approved and of the doubling up that occurs. I have people in the aged-care sector tell me that each year they have to go to hundreds of hours of effort to get their annual certification from both the state and the central government—hundreds of hours of essentially the same work. I have a small engineering firm telling me about an OH&S problem. The proprietor laid a harness down in front of me that is used for working on tall buildings. To me it looked like a new harness—the D-rings were in great shape, the stitching was in great shape—but he had to replace that harness simply because of its age. He had to get it checked twice every year—usually by people associated with the union movement and who imposed a cost on checking that harness—not because it was unsafe but because the binding, stifling regulation imposed by those opposite imposed that additional cost on his business. He would rather have been using that money to invest in his business.

Fixing these things is not a stunt, as the member for Scullin and his colleagues say it is. We are doing what we should do—listening to the people in our community and taking action. It is not as if Labor was not warned about the stifling impacts of their regulatory regime. Julia Gillard's own Borthwick-Milliner review in 2012, which looked at her government's regulation impact assessment processes, said 'a widespread lack of acceptance of and commitment by ministers and agencies' was a serious impediment to their effective use. The Gillard government was warned about the impact of their regulatory regime and they would not change because what we saw, in six years of Labor, was a deeply ingrained cultural foundation of risk aversion and centralised control. Every issue was always likely to get another regulatory sprinkle from Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd. That was seen as the solution to all problems—a little bit more Julia and a little bit more Kevin.

That is not good enough today, and the Abbott government has meaningfully addressed these concerns. We are ingraining a different culture within the bureaucracy and the polity. The Prime Minister himself has taken the lead on these issues. He has made regulatory reform a criterion of success for his ministers—the bureaucrats whose pay is linked to how successful they are at taking away some of those binding coils of regulation that stifle productivity in our country.

What we are trying to achieve is unity of purpose. We are trying to get the federal government and the state governments working more closely together. I will give you two examples of where that did not occur in the past. My predecessor, in mid-2011, opened a $1 million Building the Education Revolution facility at the Ringarooma Primary School at the same time that the state education minister—a Green in the Labor cabinet—was planning to close the Ringarooma Primary School. It was a clear case of left-hand, right-hand, with the Labor-Green government in Canberra and the Labor-Green government in Hobart each not knowing what the other was doing.

Nicola Roxon, I remember, came to Tasmania when she was the health minister to announce new beds for Northern Tasmania at the same time that the state government was disinvesting in health to the point that the Launceston General Hospital was closing two wards. On the one hand, there was the federal government saying, 'Here is money for new beds' and, on the other hand, the state government was disinvesting and taking money out of the healthcare system. We have a better health minister today who will make sure, in consultation with Michael Ferguson—that outstanding health minister in Tasmania—that will never happen again.

As a courtesy to my colleagues, I will keep my remarks much shorter than I intended. There are a huge number of speakers on our side of the House, but I will end where I started by congratulating the member for Kooyong, that outstanding parliamentary secretary who is making a real difference in leading the effort to make sure that red tape does not continue to spiral out of control and we make a real difference with the regulatory regime in this country.

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