Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015 is a whole-of-government initiative to amend or repeal legislation across seven portfolios. The bill brings forward a range of measures to reduce the regulatory burden for businesses, families, individuals and the community sector that are not the subject of individual stand-alone bills. The bill also includes measures that repeal redundant and spent acts and provisions in commonwealth acts and complements the measures included in the Statute Law Revision Bill (No.1) 2015 and the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015. In total, this bill, the Statute Law Revision Bill (No.1) 2015 and the Amending Acts 1980 to 1989 Repeal Bill 2015 will repeal 890 commonwealth acts. Repeal of these acts helps to ensure that regulation is easily accessible, continues to deliver on policy outcomes and only remains in force for as long as necessary.

Making regulation easily accessible means that business, individuals and community organisations spend less time trawling through regulations and dealing with compliance. This is especially relevant for small business. I look back to the small business campaign Too Big to Ignore. It said:

At every level of government, regulation is suffocating small business. The costs and time involved in complying with those regulations is bad enough, and the unnecessary duplication makes it even worse. Let's cut the red tape and give small business a break.

The government continues to do exactly that with our continuous deregulation agenda. The reasons are definitive. It is very clear that small businesses do not have the same administrative resources as larger businesses. A small business with just one owner, a single operator, or perhaps a couple running a business finds that every additional compliance requirement simply adds to the challenges of trying to work in, as well as work on, their business. Every hour spent on compliance—every wasted minute—is time away from customers, time away from innovation and time away from actually operating their business.

The 2013 Productivity Commission report said:

For small business, supplying information to the regulator can be the most burdensome aspect of complying with regulation.

  …   …   …

… data requests should be the minimum necessary to allow the regulator to perform its function effectively, and, as far as possible, be tailored around data that is already collected by business.

Many of the over 12,000 small businesses in my electorate tell me repeatedly that it is the cumulative burden of local, state and federal regulations—the layer upon layer of regulation—that literally ties their hands and their profits. If they have workers, it consumes the otherwise productive time of these employees. If you have done this sort of work yourself, you will know that it is time consuming and often repetitive, and dealing with what is required by each level of government is complex. This adds to the cost of running the business and adding to the frustration of owners and employees both.

In 2013, the Productivity Commission estimated that reducing the burden of unnecessary regulation could potentially generate an additional $12 billion in gross domestic product each year. Respondents to a recent ACCI survey said that regulation prevented their businesses from growing, with some spending 11 hours a week or more on compliance. What really worried me was that over half of the businesses surveyed said that they cannot pass on the increased cost to consumers, so they have to absorb the cost of compliance themselves. For almost 30 per cent of businesses in the survey, the cost ranged from $10,000 to $50,000 a year. Frequently, depending on the type of small business, many small businesses are actually price takers, with perishable products in their supply and value chains and in their markets—for example, dairy farmers and horticultural growers. These businesses have no choice but to absorb these costs themselves. They literally cannot pass them on.

In the survey, I read that the commonwealth agencies that businesses found complicated to deal with were the ATO, the Department of Employment and the Department of Health. State regulatory agencies businesses found complicated to deal with were local government, the safety regulator and industrial relations. A simple example is that 34 per cent of the businesses in the survey were providing the same or similar information to government agencies. It is no surprise that 57 per cent of the businesses would have a reduced red-tape burden if government agencies shared information.

A recent Deloitte survey, Get out of your own way: unleashing productivity,encouraged businesses not only to calculate the costs of compliance with government regulations but also to calculate the costs and constraints of self-imposed rules—those that perhaps have been around forever in the business and never looked at independently, objectively. These are the rules that add to unproductive working hours and are also a major cost to business. One of the issues I was pleased to see covered in the survey is the very real issue of businesses managing information security. Information security is a pressing issue facing business. In the survey, 54 per cent of those who responded said that their boards understand cyber risk, but nearly 40 per cent were actually neutral on the question of how well cyber risks were being managed within their business. Deloitte said that most organisations are focused on prevention as opposed to detection, noting that currently:

The average cost of a data breach per Australian organisation is more than $2.5 million per year … and rising.

And:

Financial losses, intellectual property theft, reputational damage, fraud and legal exposure are all at risk when it comes to cyber and information security. Vigilance and resilience all need the full attention of executives and company boards.

This is yet another reason for business to be freed from red tape to be able to focus on the practical issues impacting directly on their businesses.

Schedule 1 will repeal seven redundant acts administered in the agricultural portfolio, abolish the Australian Landcare Council and make minor consequential amendments to update references in four additional acts. It is important that we minimise the regulatory burden on our nation's farmers and food manufacturers. It is also vital that we maintain our reputation for producing high-quality, safe food that is the envy of the rest of the world and sought after by the rest of the world. This is, without question, our greatest advantage in the international food marketplace and it is how Australian families can have confidence in the quality of the food they consume. The gross value of Australia's farm production is worth an estimated $47.9 billion a year, with an export value of farm commodities of around $38 billion. What we do know—and I know it from my electorate—is that agriculture keeps so many rural and regional communities alive. And although the nation may no longer ride on the back of the sheep industry, agriculture is still the lifeblood of the bulk of the Australian landmass.

Schedule 2 will amend and repeal provisions in the acts administered in the environment portfolio, making minor technical amendments to streamline regulatory arrangements. And of course the Holy Grail of environmental management is to make good decisions about environmental approvals rapidly. We want to protect the environment and also stimulate development and the economy to create jobs and to support communities. Now, some might consider that achieving both of those in a timely manner is impossible, but that is the ideal that we should always be aiming for. Minimising red rape in environmental decision making should never put the environment itself at risk, but changes can be made that do not increase environmental risk.

Schedule 3 will make minor amendments to and repeal provisions in one act administered in the health portfolio. Health administration—as you know, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta—is always an involved and very technical exercise, and anything we can do to simplify the process should be welcomed. Health is often the most difficult of portfolios, because the entire population at all times has a vested interest in health policy. It is therefore a portfolio in which removing self-interest is all but impossible. It is also a portfolio that has an ever-increasing expectation of outcome and thereby an ever-increasing demand whilst retaining a far too commonly held belief in entitlement. That is, as a community we are demanding constantly improving health outcomes at no personal cost. And of course those selling health outcomes, whether they are drug companies, health firms or medical professionals, have ready-made supporters for ever-increasing demands on public expenditure.

It has always been quite easy for any opposition to make cheap political points when some section of the community may not be having their expectations met. In health, fixing this is no easy task. But limiting the growth of health expenditure will be vital to the economic wellbeing of Australia and thus, by default, the general wellbeing of the future populations that we are demanding pay for our health outcomes of today.

Schedule 4 will repeal redundant legislation in the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio. Schedule 5 makes minor amendments and repeals provisions in acts administered in the social services portfolio. It is always hard to enact change in social services, but for the sake of future generations this work is essential. The Intergenerational report has highlighted the growing demand for welfare in Australia. In 1961, US President John F Kennedy said, 'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' Somehow in Australia, along with the large group who need some assistance in retirement or in poor health, we still have a section who believes that our country owes us a living. Let us not as a parliament join them in asking future generations to pay for the welfare of the current one. That is what we have seen through the accumulation of debt that we saw under the previous Labor government.

Schedule 6 will repeal redundant acts and provisions in the Treasury portfolio. The greatest threat to the standard of life in Australia is the risk of our own economic complacency. The economic prosperity that Australia has enjoyed has come at a time of massive global expansion, especially in Asia. That is especially so in my home state of Western Australia, and the figures are plain. According to the World Bank, from 1995 to 2005 annual economic growth in China was running at 10 per cent. The figure for the past decade is lower but still a massive 7.7 per cent. In the same period, Australia's annual economic growth was recorded by the World Bank at two per cent and three per cent. But in the past five years, since 2008, the World Bank has recorded European Union growth at 0.5 per cent, minus 4.4 per cent, 2.1 per cent, 1.8 per cent, minus four per cent and 0.1 per cent, which says that European growth is stagnant. Countries like Greece have not seen positive growth in decades. The US has seen a return to growth, but it is still modest.

So what has driven the high growth in the 1990s and early 2000s, and how have governments basically responded to the slowing of growth? It has been by debt, as we have seen in this country with the previous Labor government. The media outlet The Economist runs a very useful debt clock on their website that I recommend members have a look at. It identifies total government gross debt globally at over US$55 trillion. A quarter of that total, $15 trillion, belongs to the US, 87 per cent of GDP, at a staggering $46,000 per American. Germany is similar; it has 85 per cent, as does Canada. Countries with bigger issues as a percentage of GDP are France, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Greece at 150 per cent.

We know that Australia's gross debt is currently listed at 27 per cent of GDP, with $425 billion in gross debt and nearly $245 billion in net debt predicted as the outcome for this financial year. But debt is manageable if you can pay it back. It is foolish in the extreme to simply compare debt levels like some schoolyard measuring game. Acceptable debt is that which you can repay, and to repay it you must have budget surpluses That is exactly what is the intent of this government. I recommend the Intergenerational report. It is a wake-up call for everyone. We are committed to reducing that debt and deficit.

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