Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

These are essentially the basic work of government. Repealing legislation that no longer has any effect, that is no longer relevant and that has essentially been expired in terms of its purpose for 30, 40 or 50 years does not warrant 30 government members getting up here at 15 minutes apiece and talking about it. I guess that is why they are talking about anything else rather than these bills. Given that the government does not seem to have any other legislation at the moment, I suspect they are on orders to just fill up the time, or it is going to become very clear very quickly that the government actually does not have any agenda at all.

These kinds of bills, which essentially repeal redundant legislative instruments, are standard. In the last year of the Labor government, in 2013, the government commenced the largest and most comprehensive exercise ever undertaken to remove redundant Commonwealth legislative instruments. We removed a third of our regulatory stock where provisions were spent or otherwise redundant, and legislation passed enabling the removal of 12,000 redundant Commonwealth legislative instruments. That is more than the government aims to do in its three-year term. In spite of all of the fanfare about its repeal days and the bonfire of regulation and red tape et cetera—this amazing rhetoric—Labor did more in one year than the government is planning on doing in three. And did we make a song and dance about it at the time? Well, no, because all we were doing was removing from the statute books legislation which no longer had a purpose and had been redundant for a long, long time.

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