Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this set of bills. It concerns a number of substantive issues but also matters of regulation that have interested me for some time, and I have been a regular contributor, as I said, to some of these debates. They have never attracted this long a speaking list in the past, but I welcome that. As a former competition and regulation lawyer, I am particularly interested in the role of statutory interpretation and how regulation operates.

But I must say that I will not take from the member for Ryan a lecture such as the one she gave in her opening remarks about good government or dysfunctional government. On this of all nights, I could go to town on her comments right now. I will leave it at, 'Get a mirror.' I could say something about how eliminating red tape has transformed into eliminating a sitting Prime Minister, but I am very happy to focus on the substance of these bills, and I acknowledge that the parliamentary secretary is at the table.

The first point I want to make in focusing on the facts of this set of bills and its real-world implications is to have a look at the brochure that the government produced last week, I believe: Sticking to our plan: backing hard-working Australians. This is their two-year progress report, and in it—this is interesting—there is a section on page 10 headed 'Reducing red tape'. It reads:

The Coalition has already cut around 11,000 pieces of regulation and legislation that will reduce paperwork costs by around $2.4 billion.

I am sure it was assumed, at the time that the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015 was introduced, that it would not take six months to come back and have the second reading, but the problem with this statement about having 'already cut 11,000 pieces or regulation or legislation' and about the amount saved being $2.4 billion—which a lot of other speakers have mentioned—is that I just find it difficult to reconcile it with the parliamentary secretary's own media release. On Wednesday, 18 March, the parliamentary secretary said:

… the measures in the Government's third Repeal Day built on the $2.1 billion in red tape reduction decisions announced by the Government in October 2014.

Here is the point:

As at the Government's third Repeal Day today, we have made decisions designed to decrease the $65 billion regulatory cost burden by $2.45 billion. To date we have implemented $1.57 billion of that $2.45 billion …

So they may have made decisions, but these actually have not been legislated yet. So, in effect, this statement that this government has in its two-year report card cannot possibly be true. It might have been true if you assumed that we would have gotten to this bill and these measures would have been implemented, but the reality is that we have not and they have not. If there is some reason why it is actually correct—perhaps they have implemented $2.45 billion—then that would be in conflict with the parliamentary secretary's own words. I just think it is important, if we are looking at the facts here, to get on the table the fact that, some six months later, we have not had $2.45 billion in regulatory savings implemented.

I want to quote again from the parliamentary secretary's statement on that day. The first key measure that he mentions in the autumn 2015 repeal day is:

We have had some of the speakers from the government side in this debate mention it as well. But I think we need to examine how this is actually operating in practice, because it affects all of our constituents. I go, for example, to an article from 11 August this year in The Sydney Morning Herald headed 'They're in denial: myGov users vent anger'. It talks about how this dysfunctional myGov system is actually having an adverse impact on people's lives. I will just quote a bit:

The Commonwealth government is "in denial" over the performance of its online service portals, with MyGov coming in for savage criticisms from frustrated users of the system.

Centrelink and Medicare clients from around Australia reacted with anger and disbelief after the giant Department of Human Services denied last week that there were any problems with MyGov.

It goes on:

Users of the system reacted with disbelief to the department's insistence last week that there were no systemic problems with MyGov.

"They are in denial," one reader wrote. "Once you login, throughout the system, there are messages saying some clients will not be able to access, some things cannot be done, full acknowledgement of massive problems … maybe the boss has not been onto the site."

And it goes on, in an article headed 'DHS herding people on to an imperfect system in myGov,' on 11 August again. This is a very interesting article from The Sydney Morning Herald. It has been written by someone who had been casually employed with the Department of Human Services who had been answering calls for the online self-services and the myGov help desk. What a ridiculous situation these people found themselves in, with a heightened level of frustration. It is important to have a look at the facts, not just the talking points that we have had from government MPs so far.

The other issue I want to go to, in a very similar vein, is the myTax website, or portal. In the Australian government annual deregulation report 2014, page 21, box 5, it says:

… efforts by the ATO that will allow myTax users to prepopulate online forms using existing government data will benefit users immediately and those same improvements will benefit users again next year, and the year after in perpetuity.

Again, let us look at the real-world impact. A Sydney Morning Herald article by Hannah Francis on 3 July this year, headed 'ATO under fire as myGov, myTax site problems prevent lodging of returns,' says:

Angry taxpayers have slammed the Australian Tax Office's poor preparation for tax time as "systems issues" continue to prevent them lodging tax returns three days into the new financial year.

The ATO apologised via Twitter for the problems which people said included the myTax and myGov sites running at a snail's pace, conking out on them just as they were about to lodge a completed return, or simply not loading at all.

As much as we have government members coming in here talking about time being wasted by individuals and small business, I cannot think of anything more frustrating than getting to the end of doing this whole process and then being locked out of the system. I am sure my colleague here, the member for Cunningham, would have had many similar complaints, but I have taken scores of complaints about both the myGov and the myTax portals. I could give you many more examples.

Mark Colvin reported on this in early July, and the transcript is headed, 'ATO apologises for slow running web tax filing service.' So we have all these apologies happening. The government's deregulation document, which I quoted from earlier, said that improvements would benefit users in perpetuity and that year after year it is going to keep getting better, but, as this report says:

Part of the reason for the anger, is that the ATO suffered very similar problems last year. A technical issue stopped people lodging their tax return in 2014, and the ATO apologised.

It just does not seem that they are getting any better. We can look at some of the regulation that is still having an impact on businesses. It is instructive to look at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's National red tape survey for 2015. The first point to note, on page 5, is:

Results from the 2015 survey reveal that the regulatory burden remains a pressing issue for industry. The majority of respondents believe the amount of red tape has increased over the past 12 months, affecting productivity, labour costs and business expansion.

As much as we have government members coming in here and telling us how there have been improvements, we have this survey saying that people actually feel the compliance issues have increased. The survey also investigated which Commonwealth regulatory authorities were the most complicated to deal with. It showed that the most complicated one to deal was, in fact, the Australian Taxation Office. So, as much as this government wants to talk about myGov and myTax, the ACCI's research shows that the regulatory burden has increased. On page 7, the survey says:

73%—Reported that regulatory burden increased over the past 12 months.

More than 95 per cent of respondents stated they thought the burden of regulation either increased or stayed the same over the past 12 months.

So the figure is even higher if we look at not just increased burden but the burden staying the same and not improving. As much as government members want to come in and talk about all these costs being saved and consumers benefiting as a result, on page 10 the survey says:

Over half of businesses surveyed stated that they are unable to pass on any of these costs—

that is, regulatory costs—

to their customers, leaving the cost burden of regulatory compliance firmly with the business.

I also want to touch on a specific area of regulation in the Communications portfolio. It is instructive to look at one of the issues that has been mentioned in the repeal day document on page 7. This is in the portfolio summaries, under 'Amending mobile premium services regulation'. There is a statement here that there had been a number of amendments to the code and the regulatory framework around mobile premium services and it says:

… there is a reduction in the number of occasions on which mobile telecommunications companies are required to provide consumers with information about Mobile Premium Services (MPS), such as barring options and complaint mechanisms.

The department expects this will lead to a saving of about $3.8 million in compliance costs. There is a very good reason why these compliance measures were in there, and you only have to look to the website of the regulator, the ACMA. By 2008 there had been a disproportionate number of complaints compared to the size of the MPS markets. The protections were there for a good reason. There were hard regulatory and co-regulatory rules. I quote from the regulator:

The single highest source of complaints for MPS between March 2007 and June 2009 related to customers receiving a charge for a subscription service they had not requested.

A number of problems with industry self-regulation were evident, such as a lack of transparency in the supply chain … and little incentive for content providers to comply with rules.

And here is the important point: the new safeguards—that is, the new compliance mechanisms that were put in place—worked to minimise significant detriment to customers and consumers. These measures led to a change in business practices and significantly improved compliance, resulting in a 90 per cent reduction in the number of customer complaints to the TIO. So this piece of regulation worked, resulting in a massive decrease in the number of customer complaints. In the mobile premium services market, as the ACMA rightly acknowledges, apps have taken over from SMS as the primary means of content delivery. There is broad support for retaining and even strengthening the MPS but we now have a situation where the regulation worked and technology has overtaken this now quite antiquated form of receiving mobile premium services.

In the time remaining I will touch on a couple of indicators which government speakers have sought to use to highlight somehow that their deregulatory agenda has resulted in enormous spikes in business confidence and in all other economic indicators. Let us look at some of the most recent results. Even last week we saw—and I quote from Matthew Knott in the Herald'Apprentice trainee numbers plummet as cuts and failing business confidence bites'. As the member for Cunningham well knows, despite all the rhetoric from this government and whoever might be in charge of it tomorrow morning, it is a government that has utterly failed when it comes to apprenticeships and traineeships. The number of Australians starting an apprenticeship or traineeship plummeted by 20 per cent over the past year. We look then to business confidence—to the figures that came out last week for consumer and business confidence. The ANZ consumer confidence figures, which are the current Treasurer's preferred indicator, dropped 5.8 per cent in the week ending 6 September, and the Roy Morgan business confidence survey showed business confidence at its lowest level in four years. Last week we saw unemployment remaining higher than it was at any time during the GFC. There was a small fall in unemployment to 6.2 per cent, but the unemployment rate has been at or above six per cent for 15 months now. For all the rhetoric, it is important to look at the facts. It is important to look at how these decisions are impacting on our individual constituents and the facts about the state of the economy under this government.

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