Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015 and the cognate bills, the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015 and the Statute Law Revision Bill (No. 2) Bill 2015. I join with my colleagues in commending the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister for taking on this very important job in recent times of reducing or removing unnecessary and excessive regulations across all the government portfolios and practices. I see the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, the member for Pearce, in the chamber. I know his passion for deregulation is enormous. His thirst for it is unsurmountable.

I was just listening to the previous speaker. He does not realise that the work extends to not only getting rid of existing regulations but also preventing unworkable regulations coming into the parliament. I can give you an example where I took one of the mechanical contractor associations to meet with the parliamentary secretary, and within the space of a couple of months the prospective legislation was changed to enable great savings to the members of that particular association in the construction industry, which I thank the parliamentary secretary for. I know that the association which you assisted on those matters, which brought them to your notice, is very appreciative of the work you did as well.

The parliamentary secretary has an important job because it is not just a matter of the dust being brushed off a few parliamentary acts and their being thrown in the bin if they have not been utilised in the past decade. This is a systematic weighing-up process. It is a matter of weighing up whether the regulations are necessary, duplicative or unutilised or could be amended to reduce their burden. This is not an easy process, but it is one that this coalition government committed to conduct twice a year from 2014 to 2016 to reduce the $65 billion regulatory cost that every Australian was forced to bear and cope with under the previous Labor government. To put that cost into greater perspective for my opposition colleagues so that they might finally understand how red tape can hinder businesses and families each day and every day: this $65 billion regulatory cost is 4.2 per cent of GDP.

The reason we saw this regulatory cost placed on the Australian economy was not that those opposite were implementing or reforming policy initiatives that required stringent regulatory oversight. No, they were not. The reason that every Australian was forced to waste their time filling in more paperwork or was forced to spend more time on the phone to process even the simplest applications is that those opposite have never understood the concept of best practice or domestic competitiveness, let alone the apparently elusive concept—elusive for those opposite—of global competitiveness.

Let us put aside for a second the regulatory burden that those opposite placed on every Australian. What is even more mystifying is that those opposite used all the slogans in history to say that they wanted to compete globally, but instead they implemented a pile of regulations that reduced any chance that Australian businesses had of competing on a level playing field with their international counterparts. You can see that still today with their opposition to the FTA with China. In fact, to explain this in the most basic terms, all I have to say is seven words. I can add to this that it is the anti-WA tax, the mining tax and the carbon tax.

I ask those opposite: could you have taken a bigger swing at our international competitiveness or our small businesses' ability to prosper? Why crush the hip pocket of every Australian slowly? Next time you come up with a policy, just tell us that you want to strangle productivity so that we can all throw in the towel early rather than being forced to navigate your regulatory minefield before finding out that, even if a business does comply with your excessive regulations, nobody wants to invest in it anymore. Why would they when, in the time those opposite were in government, they introduced 21,000 new regulations that every one of us had to adhere to? We heard the previous speaker saying that you just have to turn up, and you should not slap yourself on the back for just turning up for work. Well, they should not be slapping themselves on the back either for the 21,000 regulations that they introduced during their time in parliament, during those terrible six years of Labor government that we had.

As I have highlighted in this place before, what greater regulatory burden could those opposite have placed on families, on business and on industry than the productivity-strangling carbon tax, a tax that alone constituted 18 different acts and 1,100 pages of regulation and legislation? I know how fit the parliamentary secretary is, but I doubt that he would be able to carry that into the chamber on his own. He would have to use a trolley like you see the silks using, going down St Georges Terrace—one of those little trolleys.

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