Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

No, in answer to the interjection, I am going to explain what they were. Fully 4,200 of these regulations were, in fact, tariff concession orders—regulations that reduce costs for businesses and that were requested by businesses. More than 3,400 of these regulations were airworthiness directives, which address safety issues.

Are tariff concession orders requested by business the kinds of regulations that the Abbott government thinks are holding back our nation? Is that the kind of regulation that the Abbott government thinks is holding back the country? Are airworthiness directives the kinds of regulations that the Abbott government thinks are holding back our country? Is anyone from the Liberal Party seriously saying that we do not need airworthiness directives to uphold air safety standards in our country? I doubt it. It simply makes the point that, at all times, in the case of all regulation, it is necessary to examine the purpose that is being served by the regulation.

This kind of mad incantation of raw numbers gets us nowhere, because it removes attention from the purpose for which the regulations were created. The mad incantation of: 'We have repealed 1,000 acts,' or 'We have repealed 10,000 regulations,' as I have attempted to make clear in this speech, ignores the actual substance of what is being repealed. Repealing amending acts of parliament from 1901 to 1967, which was the exercise on the first repeal day, or repealing the amending acts passed by the parliament from 1967 through into the seventies achieves precisely nothing, and the Liberal Party should not boast or pretend that it, in fact, has achieved something. In fact, if we must throw around raw numbers, the all-time record year for added pages of regulation was not under either of Labor prime ministers Gillard or Rudd but in 2006, under the Liberal Prime Minister John Howard.

As I have said, Labor is happy to support measures like those in this bill. When the government proposes real, useful deregulation, we are happy to work with them. But it is hard to stand the self-congratulation, the media stunts and the misrepresentation of Labor's record which has come alongside the government's supposed deregulation bills. I commend the bill to the House.

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